Suiyuan Shidan — Yuan Mei's Food Lists (随园食单)

Yuan Mei's Suí Yuán Shí Dān (随园食单 — "The Food Lists of Sui Yuan Garden," 1792) is the most important Chinese culinary text — a collection of recipes, techniques, and culinary philosophy from one of the Qing Dynasty's greatest literati. Yuan Mei was not a professional cook but a passionate amateur whose analytical intelligence produced the clearest articulation of Chinese culinary principles before the modern era. His text is studied in Chinese culinary schools to this day.

The Suiyuan Shidan was printed in 1792, in the last years of Yuan Mei's life, and takes its name from the Sui Garden in Nanjing where he lived in retirement after leaving official service. It is arranged as a book of rules and of dishes. Early chapters set out what the cook must know and what he must avoid, and later chapters list recipes by category: fish and shellfish, meats, vegetables, soups, rice and congee, snacks, tea and wine. Yuan Mei wrote as a scholar and a devoted eater, not as a professional cook, and the book draws its authority from long attention at the table and from the kitchens of friends whose dishes he recorded. The opening sections, the Xu Zhi or Required Knowledge and the Jie Dan or Things to Avoid, are the part of the book that cooks have kept returning to. Yuan Mei insists that each ingredient be treated according to its own nature, that the cook who would do well must first prepare and choose his materials with care, and that heat is to be judged and controlled with precision, the fire being strong for some dishes and gentle for others. He asks that seasoning be exact and that a dish taste of what it is made from. He objects to excess: too many dishes in a meal, too much oil, a cook who lavishes costly materials on a table for show, or who makes every dish taste alike. These are judgements of balance and restraint, set down with a plainness that gives them force. The recipes themselves belong to the Jiangnan table of the eighteenth century, with its river fish, its pork, its bamboo shoots and tender greens, and the cooking of Hangzhou, Suzhou, Yangzhou and Nanjing figures prominently. Yuan Mei also records dishes from other provinces and from the households of officials he had known, so the book reads as a record of what a well-travelled educated man ate in his time. Techniques are given in brief: stewing, steaming, braising, frying, smoking, pickling and drying, each described by the quality sought rather than by exact measure. The book matters because it treats cooking as a subject worthy of serious written criticism, in a tradition where scholars more often wrote of poetry and painting. It sits beside earlier works such as the Qimin Yaoshu of Jia Sixie and the Yinshan Zhengyao of Hu Sihui, but its voice is more personal and its judgements more openly stated. Fuchsia Dunlop draws on it repeatedly in her writing on Jiangnan cooking, and cooks in China and abroad continue to quote its rules on heat, seasoning and the nature of ingredients.

The taste the Suiyuan Shidan asks for is the taste of the principal ingredient itself, seasoned exactly and no further. Yuan Mei wants a fish to taste of fish and a bamboo shoot of bamboo shoot, with salt, soy sauce, wine and vinegar used to draw out that character rather than to cover it. He warns against a table where every dish tastes alike, and against too much oil and too many dishes in a single meal. Heat belongs to the same discipline: a strong fire for some dishes and a gentle one for others, judged by the quality wanted on the plate. The Jiangnan cooking of his day, with its river fish, pork, bamboo shoots and tender greens, offers the clearest setting for these rules. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Land of Fish and Rice, describes that region's cooking as one of delicacy and the natural flavour of fresh materials, which is the standard Yuan Mei sets.