Recipes from the Garden of Contentment facts for kids

Recipes from the Garden of Contentment (Chinese: 隨園食單; pinyin: Suíyuán Shídān) is a famous book about cooking and delicious food. It was written by Yuan Mei, a painter and poet from the Qing dynasty in China. The book was first published in 1792. It teaches people how to cook many Chinese dishes. It also shares Yuan Mei's ideas about good food.

The book is known by other names in English, like Food Lists of the Garden of Contentment or The Way of Eating. It was updated later by Xia Chuanzheng. The full book was not translated into English until 2018.

What's Inside the Book?

The Recipes from the Garden of Contentment shows Yuan Mei's thoughts on Chinese food. He didn't like the fancy, over-the-top meals served at big parties back then. He also thought that Manchu cooks were changing Chinese food too much.

The book has a main introduction and two chapters about food ideas. Then, it has 12 chapters filled with recipes. These recipes use all sorts of different ingredients.

• "Preface" (序)
• "Essential Knowledge" (須知單): 20 sections
• "Things to Avoid" (戒單): 14 sections
• "Seafood" (海鮮單): 9 sections
• "River Delicacies" (江鮮單): 9 sections
• "Sacrificial Animal" [pork] (特牲單): 43 sections
• "Various Animals" (雜牲單): 16 sections
• "Poultry" (羽族單): 56 sections
• "Scaled Fish" (水族有鱗單): 17 sections
• "Scaleless Fish" (水族無鱗單): 28 sections
• "Various Vegetable Dishes" (雜素菜單): 47 sections
• "Small Dishes" (小菜單): 41 sections
• "Appetizers and Dim Sum" (點心單): 55 sections
• "Rice and Congee" (飯粥單): 2 sections
• "Tea and Wine" (茶酒單): 16 sections

Yuan Mei's Food Ideas and Recipes

The book shares many recipes and shows what kinds of foods people liked in the mid-1700s. For example, there's a special recipe to make something that tastes like roe (fish eggs) from a Chinese mitten crab. This shows that people loved crab and its roe hundreds of years ago. They even tried to make fake versions when real crab wasn't available!

Here's an example recipe from the book:

Imitation Crab: Boil two yellow croaker and remove their bones. Add to the fish four raw salted eggs. Break the eggs up without mixing them into the fish, and fry everything quickly with oil. To the mixture add chicken broth, let boil, and then stir in the salted egg until the mixture is even. Finish the dish with shiitake, green onions, ginger juice, and wine. Serve with liberal amounts of vinegar.

—Yuan Mei, Way of the Eating (1792), "River Delicacies"

Later Updates to the Book

More than 50 years after Yuan Mei's book came out, a person named Xia Chuanzheng (夏傳曾) added notes and extra content to it. He published his version as the Recipes from the Garden of Contentment, Extended and Rectified.

Xia Chuanzheng added two new chapters:

• "Sweeteners and colourants" (糖色單)
• "Condiments" (作料單)

He also added many notes to the original text. These notes linked the food to Chinese history and philosophy. They also talked about how certain foods might help your health, based on traditional Chinese medicine. Xia even corrected some mistakes from the first book and added funny stories about the foods.

Modern English Translation

In 2018, a new version of the book was published. It had both Chinese and English text. This translation was done by Sean J. S. Chen. It's a large book with many notes, pictures, and a list of food terms. In 2019, it was released again as a softer cover book called The Way of Eating. This translation started as an online project from 2013 to 2017.

See also

In Spanish: Suiyuan shidan para niños