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Shanjia qinggong 山家清供

Sep 1, 2023 © Ulrich Theobald

Shanjia qinggong 山家清供 "Simple and pure cuisine of Master Mountain Dwelling" is a book on diet written during the Southern Song period 南宋 (1127-1279) by Lin Hong 林洪, courtesy name Longluo 龍落 or Keshan 可山 (?), style Keshan Ren 可山人 or Longfa 龍發.

Lin's book has a length of 2 juan and presents the recipes for 100 different dishes of all kinds, from beverages to vegetable-and-meet combinations (caiyao 菜肴), pastry (miandian 麵點), rice and congees (zhou 粥). The dishes make use of garden vegetables, wild vegetables, melons, pumpkins and fruits, as well as a wide range of pulse, and among the meats, domesticated and wild animals, fishes and crustacea. For each type of food, is social and historical background is briefly mentioned, and the author then goes on to describe the ingredients, preparation, and special features of the food, all written in an elegant literary style.

Quite a number of therapeutic preparations are included. For example, pine pollen (songhuafen 松花粉) and honey are used to make pine cake (songhuangbing 松黃餅), Rehmannia glutinosa, a type of broomrape (dihuang 地黃) is mixed with juice and flour to make houtou 餺飥 cakes, flat peaches (mitao 蟠桃, Prunus persica f. compressa) and rice are used to cook "peach rice" (mitao fan 蟠桃飯), yellow chrysanthemum flowers (huangjuhua 黃菊花) and rice are used to cook "golden rice" (jinfan 金飯). All of these diets have certain therapeutic effects.

The book also includes several outstanding dishes, for example, oranges filled with crab meat and then steamed (xie niang cheng 蟹釀橙), and steamed lotus buns (lianfang yubao 蓮房魚包) with mandarin fish (guiyu 鱖魚, Siniperca chuatsi) in hollowed-out tender lotus seed heads. Another example is the "broth of snow and rosy clouds" (xuexia geng 雪霞羹) made of tofu and cotton rose (furong hua 芙蓉花, Hibiscus mutabilis), or the "Three crisp tastes of a mountain family" (shanjia san cui 山家三脆) made of blanched young bamboo shoots, small mushrooms (xiao xun 小蕈) and Chinese wolfberries (gouqi 枸杞頭) with seasoning, plum-flower dumplings (meihua tangbing 梅花湯餅) made of dough pressed with the help of an iron mould into the shape of a blossom and cooked in chicken broth, or "victuals emanating rosy clouds" (bo xia gong 撥霞供), a kind of shabu-shabu (shuanrou 涮肉) made of rabbit meat, pig or lamb.

In addition to these recipes, there are also a few phrases in the book that deal with local customs of cooking, like the proverb that dishes are good as long as they taste good – predetermined recipes were not necessary.

The book is found in the series Shuofu 說郛, Yimen guangdu 夷門廣牘, Xiaoshi Shanfang congshu 小石山房叢書 and Congshu jicheng chubian 叢書集成初編.

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蜀漢 (221-263)