Yinshan Zhengyao and Hu Sihui

The Yinshan Zhengyao (飲膳正要), presented to the throne in 1330, is the work of Hu Sihui, who served at the Mongol Yuan court as an official concerned with the emperor's food and drink. It was composed in Dadu, the Yuan capital on the site of modern Beijing, and it stands among the oldest surviving Chinese works devoted to the diet of a court. Its date and its author's post are settled history, and the book is the reason the table of the Yuan palace can be described at all.

The Yinshan Zhengyao is a compilation of recipes, ingredients and rules for the imperial table, set down in the early fourteenth century for a court whose rulers came from the steppe and governed China. Its pages hold dishes built on mutton, the meat that dominated the Mongol kitchen, alongside preparations of other meats, game, grains, soups and drinks. A reader coming to it from the later Chinese kitchen finds in it a record of how northern and steppe habits met the cooking of the Chinese lands under one roof. Hu Sihui is remembered as the author who gathered this material and gave it order, and the book is the principal reason his name is carried in the history of Chinese food. The work belongs to the Chinese tradition of the dietary manual, in which a text on cooking is also a text on how food should be matched to the season and the occasion. Its title, which may be rendered as the essentials of food and drink, states that purpose. The tradition it follows counts foods as warming, cooling or nourishing, and the book sets its dishes and ingredients within that scheme; it is for the reader of the period, and for the historian, to note that the tradition counts them so, and that the court served them on that understanding. The book is therefore read today as a witness to the ideas about eating held at the Yuan court, and as a catalogue of what that court ate. For the cook and the historian, its value lies in what it preserves of the Yuan table. It shows the place of mutton and of dairy and spiced preparations in a court kitchen, and it records ingredients and combinations that mark the period as distinct from the Song cooking before it and the Ming after. Used with care, it allows a modern cook to see where later habits of the northern kitchen may have taken root, though the book itself is a court document and speaks for the palace rather than for the household of the ordinary Yuan subject. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Invitation to a Banquet, draws on the long written record of Chinese eating, and the Yinshan Zhengyao is one of the early texts that such a history of the Chinese table must reckon with.

The table the Yinshan Zhengyao describes is that of a court in which mutton held the central place, with soups, grain dishes and drinks arranged around it. The tradition behind the book counts foods as warming, cooling or nourishing, and the dishes were served on that understanding and matched to the season and the occasion. A cook reading it today meets a flavour world in which the meat of the steppe and the seasonings of the Chinese kitchen share a single menu.