Climate and China’s Dynastic Cycles

November 6th, 2016

 

Climate and China’s Dynastic Cycles

 

  1. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology

University of California, Riverside

gene@ucr.edu

www.krazykioti.com

 

Abstract

 

With climate change very much in the news, historians have sought correlations between climate change and the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties.

This contrasts with traditional explanations by Chinese historians of those eras, who explain rise and fall as the result of human decisions and actions.  Resolving these two reasonable, but inevitably partial, explanations requires looking at the ways people respond to large-scale stressors.  Climate change is indeed one source of problems that rulers and masses must consider—along with wars, diseases, population changes, and other large-scale phenomena.  Climate change does not “cause” dynastic change, but it does force people to respond in ways that may produce dynastic change.

*****

Climate change is much in the news these days.  Given the exaggeration and polarization of debate, it is no surprise to find that the role of climate change in Chinese history has come in for its share of debate (on environment in imperial times, management, see Anderson 2014a; Elvin 2004, but Elvin considerably too harsh on the traditional system; Marks 1998, 2009, 2012; Menzies 1994).

Climate change significant enough to make major differences in human affairs is now well understood.  Climate after the last Ice Age quickly became warmer than today, up to a very few degrees C, and stayed very warm from about 7000 BCE to about 3000.  For instance, in the loess plateau around 4200-3600 BCE, conditions were more than 1 degree C warmer than now, and precipitation comparable to current conditions in nearby mountains (Sun et al. 2016).  Warm climates make China wetter, because they not only make the monsoon more powerful, but they shift northward the intertropical convergence zone, meaning that the monsoon starts closer to China.  The same move takes it farther from tropical Asia, and thus is associated with droughts in southeast Asia.  China derives almost all its rain from the summer monsoon, though the cold, dry winter monsoon can pick up enough moisture over China to bring drizzling, chilling rain to the south.  Warmer weather dries up central Asia and brings warmer and thus more drying conditions to Tibet, but only western Xinjiang and the highlands of Tibet are much affected by this.

Following the cooling after 3000 BCE, conditions were rather like today, until a very sharp drying trend hit central Asia in 1500-500 BCE.  It does not seem to have affected China greatly.  (What follows is synthesized from Brooke 2014; Kidder et al. 2016; Lin et al. 2016; Wei et al. 2015; Yin et al. 2016; D. Zhang et al. 2007; P. Zhang et al. 2008; Y. Zhang et al. 2016; Zhao et al. 2016)  Then a pleasant, warm, moist period, known in the west as the Roman optimum, helped both the Roman Republic and Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire between 200 BCE and 200 CE.  This gave way to cooler conditions, and then a sharp cold and dry period from 550 to 650.  This modified to conditions much like today’s, or a bit more warm and wet, in Tang.  A weak monsoon 910-930 seems to have occurred (P. Zhang et al. 2008).  In 950 to 1300 came the Medieval Warm Period, also known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly.  It brought warmer and wetter conditions to China, but with sharp fluctuations, especially in the 11th and 12th centuries, when sudden returns to more average (i.e. colder) conditions hit China hard.  The early 12th century seems to have been especially cool.  After 1300, the Little Ice Age slowly came on, producing extremely cold, dry conditions, especially at certain times in the 1400s, 1600s, and 1700s.  This was followed by a slow warming after 1800 or 1850, which gave way after 1900 to more steady warming as human-released greenhouse gases added themselves to natural warming and eventually took over the major warming role.  (Human-caused global warming appears clearly only about 1850.  Alleged human-caused warming by rice agriculture in dynastic times is not credible.  Among other things, the allegers forgot that the rice largely replaced marshes and wetlands that already released methane.)

Otherwise, minor to substantial fluctuations in the record appear, but are largely in the category of “weather” rather than “climate.”  Also, the magnitude of these climate changes should not be overestimated; a few degrees C was the greatest amplitude.

The major confounder in studying the effect of climate change on dynastic cycling is the well-known fact that China exacerbated or even created its own problems.  Walter Mallory’s classic study China: Land of Famine (1926) stressed the role of deforestation, erosion, badly managed river dykes, wetlands drainage, and other environmental ills on China’s horrific history of droughts and floods.  Recent studies have gone on to confirm this (Elvin 2004; Marks 2012).  Shiba Yoshinobu has made this point, most recently for the Song Dynasty (McDermott and Yoshinobu 2015), which engaged in massive deforestation for iron smelting, ceramics making, and printing (pines were burned for ink), with the result that enormous and uncontrollable floods devastated the country and threatened the dynasty.  Like so many modern disasters in China and elsewhere (Muir-Wood 2016), these were not acts of God but acts of man; they do not show that dynasties fell because of climate change, they show that the environment was stressed and dynasties fell because of human mismanagement.

 

The dynasties in question are as follows:

Xia Dynasty (assumed equivalent to the Erlitou culture on the middle Yellow River): ca. 2000-ca. 1500 BCE.

Shang Dynasty: ca. 1500-ca. 1050 BCE.

Zhou Dynasty:  ca. 1050-250 BCE, the last 500 years being a time of disunion when the Zhou had control over only a tiny area; the rest of China was divided into “warring states.”

Qin Dynasty:  221-207 BCE.

Han Dynasty:  206 BCE-220 CE, with a break 9-23 CE when an affine of the royal family briefly took over after a series of child-emperors, to be overthrown in a countercoup by the Han dynasts; major rebellion ca. 180.

Time of disunion: 220-581.

Sui Dynasty: 581-618.

Tang Dynasty: 620-907.  Once again, the fall of Tang saw several weak or child emperors.  Very important rebellions in 754 and 880 almost brought down the dynasty, forcing major changes in government.

Time of disunion: 907-960.

Song Dynasty: 960-1279, interrupted by loss of the entire north, including the capital, in 1127, with capture of the Emperor; the dynasty had to re-form in the south.  It collapsed, again under very young boys, and after savage factional fighting and corrupt ministers, in the 1270s.

Liao Dynasty:  Began ca. 960 in far north, took over most of north China after 1000, fell 1126.

Jin Dynasty:  Conquered Liao in 1126, took the rest of north China from Song in 1127, fell to Mongols in 1234.

Yuan Dynasty (Mongol Empire): 1279-1368.  Last few emperors accused of alcoholism.

Ming Dynasty: 1368-1644.  Major corruption and imperial failure at the end.

Qing Dynasty: 1644-1911, with major near-fatal rebellion 1844; once again with child-emperors at the helm toward the end.

 

All the longer dynasties suffered from coups, countercoups, major rebellions, and the like, as well as constant palace intrigues and jockeying between candidates for royal succession.

This brings us to other destabilizing factors besides climate.  A dynasty is subject to several well-known problems.  First is foreign invasion.  China was so much the biggest power in the east that it rarely had to worry about that, but the medieval period saw the rise of powers—Liao, Jin, and above all the Mongols—that overwhelmed China.  This was partly due to climate, as will appear.  Second is bad luck in imperial demography.  Often an emperor died childless, or left a young child as the only heir.  Child emperors had to have regents—often mothers or grandmothers, sometimes an uncle or high court official.  The results were usually poor and often disastrous.  Other problems with palace politics included extremely powerful but corrupt officials, irresponsible or downright deranged emperors, and overly powerful generals who thought they could do a better job of running the empire.  A weak emperor following an unpopular one was a particularly fatal combination, directly responsible for the falls of Qin and Sui.

Over all this play the great cycles of resilience theory, Ibn Khaldun’s theory, and Peter Turchin’s work.  These all postulate a rising phase when a population or system grows and increases its power (the r phase of resilience theory), a high (K) phase when it consolidates control and may have a golden age, a downward (omega) phase when it loses coherence and falls apart, and a down (alpha) phase when it is depopulated, ruinous, but regrouping for the next rise.  Resilience theory does not suggest a time frame, since it is meant to apply to everything from bacteria to whales.  Ibn Khaldun (1958) saw the cycle in human dynasties playing over three or four generations, about 100 years.  Turchin (Turchin and Zefedov 2006) saw longer cycles of up[ to 200-300 years: the time frame of Chinese dynasties.  Ibn Khaldun’s theory predicts major crises; coups or rebellions that shook the dynasty profoundly happened about every 60 years within the great dynasties (Han through Qing).

The dynasties, even the short-lived ones, conform to Ibn Khaldun’s classic scenario.  A charismatic military leader, not only bold and intrepid but charismatic and generous enough to inspire genuine loyalty and affection (‘asabiyah in Ibn Khaldun’s Arabic), becomes what the Chinese call the High or Great Emperor, founding the dynasty.  He is followed by a brilliant age—often started or marked by coup and coutercoup—when the dynasty is powerful, expanding, and rich.  The economy grows through conquest, settlement of abandoned or thinly populated lands, rising production, and positive feedback loops—the more economic activity, the more production, the more crafts and trade, the more innovation and intensification.  Then follows a period in which the land is filled up and heavily populated but innovation is stalling, leading to Malthusian squeeze.  Often, previous economic activity is now demanding that costs be paid.  Deforestation and erosion lead to devastating floods.  Levees and dykes have confined the rivers too much, so they aggrade their beds with silt.  The floods make them burst their beds and drown the area, inevitably densely populated because of the ease of river access.  Overcultivation makes every dry summer a drought.  Taxes keep rising, or at best stay steady, but there is now no economic growth, so the taxes bite hard.  Discontent leads to banditry.  Neighbor states start raiding.  All this forces more and more military buildup, but there is now no conquest to provide more land and loot.  The resulting feedback loops of increasing environmental damage, increasing military spending, and increasing tax bite lead to, or at least are associated with, corruption, factional fighting, and paralysis in the high levels of government.  Collapse is by now inevitable.  What Tristram Kidder et al. say of the Han Dynasty is perfectly typical of all: the collapse of a dynasty occurs when “the disjunction between rules and resources reaches a threshold so stark that agents at all social levels stood to gain more by challenging the status quo than they did by conforming to it” (Kidder et al. 2016:86).

It is astonishing to see how perfectly the Chinese dynasties recapitulate this formula.  The Chinese knew it, too.  By the Han Dynasty they already recognized the cyclic nature of dynasties, the necessary charisma of the founder, and the inevitable degeneration of governance at the end.  Not having a worldwide perspective, they naturally saw it in terms of the morality of the individual actors, but they recognized that floods, droughts, invasions, and other catastrophes exacerbated the problems.

Our next step is to correlate climate change with dynastic events.  The prediction (mine and that of Yin et al. 2016) is that better times—warmer and wetter, with stronger monsoons—will predate or accompany the rise of dynasties, while worse times—colder and drier—will predate their fall.

The Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties are too poorly known and dated for meaningful correlations.

The rise of Qin and Han accompanies the Roman Republic/Empire Optimum.  The interregnum of 9-23 CE followed some bad years that may partially explain it (Kidder et al. 2016).  The fall of Han tracks the beginning of the end of the Roman Optimum.  This fits our prediction well.  But then the spectacular rise and Sui and Tang, and the beginning of Tang’s glory days, coincide with a sharp deterioration in climate.  Yet, not only did China rise, but the conquest by the founders of Sui and Tang came from the hardest-hit area, the northwest edge of China where it fringes into Central Asia.  The fall of Tang accompanies drought and heat associated with the very uneven beginning of the Medieval Warm Period.

The rise of Song is somewhat associated with a more strong and reliable monsoon.  The Liao, Jin, and Yuan (Mongol) Dynasties rose during the Medieval Warm Period, which made it far easier for these originally nomadic, horse-riding peoples to increase their herds and manpower, increase their food supply, and conquer outward.  There is now no question that this took place in the Mongol case (Anderson 2014b).  But the reduction of Song and its eventual fall took place in relatively cool times, which should have weakened the northern regimes in relation to Song.

However, Song was facing another problem: the devastation caused by centuries of deforestation and overgrazing.  This is a classic point, often made, and more recently extended and elaborated by Ling Zhang (2016) in a brilliant recent study drawing on earlier work by George Cressey (1955), Robert Hartwell, and others.  She focuses on the Yellow River and its steadily rising ability to produce devastating floods.  The rise of iron smelting, printing, and other industries created a huge demand for fuel, thus causing massive deforestation, even on slopes too steep to farm and therefore very susceptible to erosion.

This reminds us of the obvious fact—notably stressed by Jared Diamond in Collapse (2011)—that people create their fates and landscapes.  Climate does not act on a blank, empty world.  It acts on a world people have built, for better or worse.

Yuan took power when the Medieval Warm Period was still in its favor, but it declined as that good age gave way.  The succeeding Ming Dynasty had a horrible situation to face: running the empire during a period of unprecedented cold and dry conditions.  It succeeded astonishingly well, not losing power for centuries.  Even worse cold and drought probably hastened its fall (Brooke 2014; Parker 2013), but we are left needing to explain the long run of Ming.

Then comes the strangest thing of all.  Ming was conquered not by a powerful regime, not by internal unrest, but by the tiny Manchu state—a state that was based in China’s frigid and snowy northeast, an area that sufferend inconceivable miseries from the exacerbation of the Little Ice Age in the early 1600s.  Outside of traditional ascriptions of success to the personalities of the early Qing emperors, there is no way to explain this.  In fact, we have many writings by the Kangxi Emperor, the real architect of Qing power, and he was exactly the type of leader calculated to maximize ‘asabiyah—a brilliant, driving, single-minded man, able to be generous to allies and utterly ruthless to enemies (Spence 1974).

Similarly, the decline and fall of Qing took place during a period of steadily ameliorating climate, though it must be admitted that this warming trend both produced more floods (the monsoon strengthened) and more droughts (heat exacerbated dry weather when that occurred).

Several recent groups have attempted to synthesize these data.  Recent books by John Brooke (2014) and Geoffrey Parker (2013) marginally discuss China, largely its hard times.  These authors write as if climate directly caused events—people were mere machines, programmed to do what climate told them.  This greatly underestimates human agency.

Yin et al (2016) looked at imperial China from Qin on through Qing.  They find that social rise was associated with warming (which normally meant wetting too) 57% of the time, and decline with cooling and drying 66.6%.  (The very few warm-dry and cool-wet periods did not correlate with anything in particular, but they were exceedingly rare and short.)  This is not compelling; the first is not statistically much better than chance.  We shall have to look for other explanations here.  They gathered 1586 data points from the standard histories of China (saving me a lot of work), and parceled out even such things as particularly dynamic reign periods when China expanded its power, e.g. under Han Wu Di (140-87 BCE), who conquered neighboring areas during a relatively warm period.  They miss the fact that the warm period should have, and in fact did, benefit his enemies as much as it benefited him, forcing him to fight hard and spend the empire’s wealth.  (They also find that records of good and bad times are particularly good for Han, bad for the Tang-Song interregnum and the Song Dynasty—fitting the history of war and conquest in the latter cases.)  They find that China was peaceful 68.4% of the time, turbulent otherwise.

Chen Qiang, on the other hand, thinks drought and cold did it.  Cold was associated with more wars—a claim that does not explain the violent Medieval Warm Period or the long, peaceful Ming Dynasty.  He finds that the main correlates were age of dynasty (older ones were weaker; that is true of nomad regimes too) and drought.  This does not check with the warlike but pleasantly warm period from 220 to 581, though it does coincide with the rise of Sui and Tang.  It does not work for the Mongols.  It works for the Manchus, in that they came in during a cold dry period, but the people of the Manchu state were largely settled agriculturalists and not nomadic (in spite of frequent mistaken claims).  Warfare shows correlation with cold periods (Zhang et al. 2007).  Shortly after the start of cold periods came the falls of Northern Song, Southern Song, Yuan, and Ming, as well as the Taiping rebellions.  Early Ming was still warm—the Little Ice Age became serious in the 1400s and then made the 1600s one of the worst periods in China’s history, with (resulting?) war and chaos.

Wei et al (2015) find that climate events are related to dynastic cycles.  They provide a careful, methodologically interesting assessment of troubles, with a very full bibliography.  They use Holling’s resilience cycle.  They find a fair correlation of moist warm periods with good times, and vice versa, but note the obvious Ming exception.  They do find a major crash in post-1420 Ming, though with a fairly quick recovery.  They, like Kidder et al, focus on the Xin Dynasty interregnum in the Han Dynasty, this attaching more importance to it than do most historians.

Another approach is to look at local regions, which often had quite different climate histories from the rest of China.  Harry Lee and his colleagues looked at dry and drought-prone northwest China (Lee and Zhang 2010; Lee et al. 2015, 2016).  They found that wild fluctuations in rainfall characterized the Little Ice Age, with many droughts, but that the famously peaceful period of the middle Qing Dynasty from 1700 to 1820 saw a lack of famines and a rise in population, because of successful land management and the coming of New World crops (Lee et al. 2016).  In far northwestern China, westerlies and north winds dominated, totally decoupling that region from the rest of China and making its climate countercyclic (Y. Zhang et al. 2016).

In northeastern China, it was the Medieval Warm Period that was problematic, causing many floods, often alternating with horrific droughts in wild swings (Lee et al. 2015; L. Zhang 2016).  Ling Zhang (2016) has written a brilliant, major work about the consequences:  progressive breakdown in management of the Yellow River and other water sources and wetlands.  Her work interestingly fits with Peter Turchin’s findings on cycles; during the disintegration cycle of Northern Song, politics got more and more polarized and acerbic, and one result was failure to come up with coherent, consistent policies for the Yellow River. As Turchin says, “During the disintegrative phases…it is very difficult to generate the cooperative action needed to win a major war” (Turchin 2016:106).  That was true of Song’s war with the conquest dynasties, and it was also true of Song’s war with the Yellow River.

One could, of course, come up with contrived post-hoc explanations for the perverse rises of Sui, Tang, and Qing, and the perverse weakness of Song, but I fear there is no way to save climatic change as a really necessary or always-important driving variable.  Warming certainly helped the Mongols, at first, and cooling hurt them later.  Warming almost certainly helped Qin and Han initially and cooling hurt Han later.  Cooling days contributed to the woes of Song and Ming.  On the other hand, the rise of Sui and Tang, the rise and long continuance of Ming, and the whole course of Qing go directly contrary to predictions.  Thus we can conclude with Kidder et al. (2016) and Wei et al. (2015) that climate can help or harm, but does not make or break.  Charismatic leaders, well-trained armies, and plain luck are the direct incident causes of dynastic rises.  Weak leaders, child-emperors, rampant corruption, unstoppable invasions, and factional fighting are direct incident causes of dynastic fall.

So here we have several theories of dynastic rise and fall.  The Chinese saw the Mandate of Heaven—either actual heavenly decisions, or their incarnations in floods and droughts, or the result of factional fighting, dynastic politics, bad luck (childless emperors or child emperors or mad emperors), and the like.  Cycle theorists see a general trend toward rise and fall, or a more specific one driven by shifting loyalties—from the dynastic head to one’s own group or faction or to one’s own self.  Marxian and other economic and political-economic structural determinists had their own theories (not considered here for reasons of space).  Now climate change has added itself to the mix.  No doubt all these theories have their value.

In fact, climate acts indirectly.  It is one cause—along with human idiocy and incompetence, among other things—of floods, droughts, and other catastrophes.  These catastrophes put major stresses on the dynastic government.  A strong, upwardly moving government can directly address these matters with relief measures and remedies.  Also, it commands the loyalty and support of the people.  The weaker and more incompetent the government, the less it can directly address problems, and the less it can get the broad masses to help.  Weakness and incompetence of government, in turn, depends on the emperor personally, his family, his ministers, and the rest of the high elites.  If the emperor is a boy in the care of a corrupt chief minister, the empire is in trouble.  If the appalling infant mortality rates of the time leave the emperor childless, as often happened, intra-elite feuding over the succession is sure to occur, and sure to weaken the dynasty. China grew steadily more autocratic over time, which meant the emperor’s person was more a factor as time went on.

I might add a comparison with the Maya at this point.  Maya civilization grew and achieved greatness in the rather optimal climate between 500 BCE and 500 CE,  It survived with a hitch—a noticeable pause—the cold, dry period from 550 to 650.  It then collapsed in the Medieval Warm Period, which brought massive and long-lasting droughts to the area.  These droughts not only devastated agriculture, they even removed drinking water; much of the Yucatan Peninsula and Maya Lowlands is without surface water.  People had to store water, dig wells, or find caves with permanent sources.  These all proved inadequate in drought times (Gill 2000).  Also, hotter weather led to more plant diseases, and probably more human diseases as well.

Warfare was also a factor.  Some areas had already been devastated by war, and collapsed before the droughts (Demarest 2004).  Not all the Maya world collapsed, only the central portions; the northern Yucatan Peninsula and the southern highlands continued to be urbanized and civilized, while cities, literacy, and high culture disappeared in the central lowlands.  The claim that the Maya collapsed because of sheer ecological folly (Diamond 2005) and the counterclaim that they did not collapse at all (McAnany and Gallareta N. 2010) do not bear close investigation.

Mayaland would have recovered with the return of cooler, moister weather in the 1300s, but by then the trade routes had shifted to the coast.  This is certainly one reason, possibly the only really important reason, why the central lowlands never recovered.  Trade, contact, and communication had focused around the geographical center of the lowland world.  After that center collapsed, trade shifted to the coasts, and stayed there, carried by canoes.

In this case, we cannot see the micropolitics—we have no way of knowing what went on in the cities, or what people said and thought as agriculture became increasingly unsuccessful.

Many other New World societies collapsed or suffered sharp setbacks during the Medieval Warm Period, which seems to have been dry very widely.  It devastated the Four Corners, hit the Mississippi Valley, ruined much of the Andes, and generally caused woe.  One major reason was maize.  Maize is exceedingly susceptible to drought and heat.  This contrasts rather dramatically with China’s grains: millets and rice love heat, while millets, wheat and barley can handle very appreciable drought.  China was thus relatively buffered, and could produce higher populations.

Causation is a complex topic, but simple principles underlies much of it.  First, all events have multiple causes.  Second, these can be big, broad, and indirect, or very specific and immediate; the big, broad causes can act only through specific, immediate ones.  In human affairs, big, broad causes act through individual decisions added up into collective decisions.  The special cases of northwest China in the long 18th century and northeast China in the star-crossed decline of Northern Song show how different adaptations can be.  In the one case, horrible weather was mitigated by political-economic action, and people flourished.  In the other, good but fluctuating weather led to nothing but problems, because of political-economic chaos.

From this I extract a core principle for diachronic social studies:  large-scale forces act indirectly, through people.  Direct causes of social events are personal decisions, and the resulting actions.  These do not always play out as the actors intend.  All manner of constraints prevent people from doing what they want. Government and economic necessity restrict behavior, or, more often, discourage people from trying.  Sheer chance, faction fighting, and amoral individual actions that mess the system can all intervene.  But, in the end, it is human decisions and actions that make cultures and societies.  Individual actions play out in interpersonal space, which generates both short-term and long-term social structures or interaction dynamics that add up to systems that take on a life of their own.  (I am using—and here briefly summarizing—Anthony Giddens’ “structuration”; Giddens 1984, which is fairly Weberian; see also Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Latour 2005.  The basic insight is that people do things—climate doesn’t, culture doesn’t, society doesn’t—but people do things in response to climate, culture and society.)  Climate and weather are simply some of the things those individuals and systems have to take into account.

In terms of cultural evolution, we may say that people’s most basic needs and wants are genetically enough “given” to pass as a biological substrate.  From them grow desires and intentions, which lead to actions, variously constrained.  We often find that people react in comparable ways to comparable stimuli.  We often, however, find they do not—they may react in violently conflicting ways, as the Song officials did to the environmental problems of the Medieval Warm Period.  Just as biological evolution often takes very unexpected ways to adapt, so do human societies.

 

 

This post was delivered as a paper at the California Sociological Association, annual meeting, Riverside, CA, Nov. 5, 2016.  Thanks to Christopher Chase-Dunn and Hiroko Inoue for advice and help.

 

 

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Developing Mexican Food: Globalization Early On

October 24th, 2016

Developing Mexican Food:

Globalization Early On

E. N. Anderson

University of California, Riverside

 

Abstract

Mexican food today is extremely diverse, and has a complicated background.  My view is that of a Mayanist who has worked in southeast Mexico and traveled widely in the country.  Already long before Columbus, Native American foodways were spreading widely; the Maya were powerfully influenced by South American foods from chocolate to manioc.  The Spanish Colonial period brought not only Spanish foods but also Arab and African foodways, all diverse in themselves.  Modern influences have not been less complex.  This all tests current theories of “culture” and “appropriation,” and makes a world-systems approach to anthropology more useful and predictive.  Some comparative notes on folk music are added to show the extent of cultural borrowings, since they track foodways closely.

 

*

My work in Mexico has largely been with the Yucatec Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, but I have traveled all over Mexico, visiting every state and major region.  I am a food anthropologist, so I have sampled everything from ant pupae at a fine upscale restaurant in Guanajuato to wasp larvae on a remote rainforest back road in Quintana Roo.  In two years of living and traveling in Mexico, spread over 40 years of my life, the only bad meals I recall were in United States-type restaurants.

Much of what follows is sourced from K’oben, forthcoming book by Amber O’Connor and myself (2017; see also Anderson 2010).  Much is from, or in, Jeffrey Pilcher’s classic Que vivan los tamales! (1998), which is by far the best, most thorough, and most authoritative work in English on Mexican food.  There are other good histories in Spanish.

The incredible richness and variety of Mexican folk culture never ceases to amaze me, and food is not the least of its manifestations.  Mexican culture today is a product of many Native American cultures interacting with Spanish culture.  It is much more than that, however.  Three things are not often appreciated about Mexican culture.  First, Mexican Indigenous cultures were extremely varied and were constantly influencing each other.  Second, Spain in the 1500s and 1600s was itself a region of cultural mixing.  Third, Spain was by no means the only Old World country that influenced Mexico.  Mexico has had very substantial immigration from Africa, Ireland, Lebanon, Syria, Philippines, China, France, Germany, and elsewhere, to say nothing of the United States and most parts of Latin America.  All these areas contributed to foodways.

The Native American heritage is the really basic one.  Mexico still depends on the classic maize, beans, chiles, and squash.  The commonest species of these are all Mexican domesticates.  Maize (Zeo mays) was domesticated about 7000 years ago in the Balsas River drainage; geneticists have run it down to an origin in the wild teosinte grass of middle elevations in that drainage area.  At least three species of beans were domesticated in central Mexico; these are frijol beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), teparies (P. acutifolius), and scarlet runner beans (P. coccineus).  The tepary bean is famously drought-resistant and has been used in drought-prone parts of Africa as well as Mexico.  The fourth common species, the lima bean (P. lunatus), was certainly domesticated in Peru, but a different form, the sieva bean, may have been independently domesticated in Mexico.  The sieva bean is now rare and little known, but my Maya friends in Quintana Roo grow several delicious varieties that seriously need saving and propagating.

Squash also come in many species.  Pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo) were domesticated in Mexico and probably independently in what is now the southern United States.  Winter sqush (C. maxima, C. moschata), chayote (Sechium edule) and spaghetti squash (C. ficifolia) also occur; C. maxima is probably South American, but got to Mexico early.  With bottle gourd (Lagenaria vulgaris), of uncertain origin, these gave Mexican Indigenous people plenty of choices.  I should point out that the tender leaves, vine tips, and flowers of the squash are also eaten and are incredibly good as well as vitamin-rich.

Chiles also come in multiple forms.  The common, ordinary varieties of chile, from which the non-hot bell pepper was recently developed, is Capsicum annuum and is native to Mexico.  It is a small annual plant.  The Tabasco chile (C. frutescens), by contrast, is a large perennial bush.  It is known by its Maya name of maax in southern Mexico, including Tabasco.  The habanero (C. chinense), as its name shows, came from Cuba to Mexico; it is originally South American. Yet another species, the most flavorful and meaty of all and one of the hottest, is the rocoto or manzano (C. pubescens), another South American.  It somehow got from Peru to Oaxaca and around there, probably after the Spanish conquest.  There are other species of chile in South America.  It is highly interesting that so many species were separately domesticated in different areas.  The reason is not just their delightful warmth; they are also highly antibiotic and antifungal.  They may have been domesticated for medicine or for use in preserving food—chile powder or crushed chile is a good preservative.

With these four species, you can live a happy life.  Maize provides basic calories, beans provide good protein, squash and chiles provide vitamins, and chiles in particular provide incredible quantities of vitamin C and the B complex.  One problem is that maize contains phytic acid, which bonds with mineral nutrients and with niacin (vitamin B3) making them unavailable to digestion.  So the Mexican people learned very early to process maize with limewater—not from limes, but CaO made by burning calcium carbonate—thus producing nixtamal.  The lime neutralizes the phytic acid.  The limewater processing was probably originally used to tenderize the maize, but then seen to help nutrition (Katz et al. 1974). The maize needs tenderizing in the first place because soft kernels get eaten by bruchid weevils.  So weevils cause civilization: they made people select for hard corn, but then the people had to tenderize it, which made it nutritionally adequate to support cities.

These many species were only the beginning.  Mexican Indigenous people domesticated so many plants that it would take me much of this hour just to read off the names.  One triumph was the avocado, a fantastic source of oil, protein and vitamins that grows like a weed in central Mexican mountain conditions.  The poverty diet of the central Mexican people at the time of Spanish conquest was noted as tortillas and guacamole, then made of just avocado, chile, and salt.  This is a perfect diet—it has all the essentials—and I think it’s the tastiest poverty diet I ever found.  (It beats the European equivalent of stale bread and water.)  Among the hundreds of other species are amaranth, chia sage, and millets.  Amaranth, chia, and chenopod species provided seed crops that were much more nutritious than maize.  They grow easily and were essential staples to many Indigenous groups.  In addition, chocolate, sweet potatoes, and manioc came up very early from South America.  There are proto-Maya words for them—at least the last two—which means the Maya had them 5000 years ago.

Domestic animals were few.  The dog came over the Bering Straits with the humans.  It was eaten by some groups.  The turkey was domesticated in Mexico.  The muscovy duck (Cairinia moschata), native from Mexico south but domesticated in Peru, seems to have come up fairly early.  Why Mexico never domesticated mountain sheep remains a mystery.  Javalis (known in English as peccaries) are locally tamed and farmed on a small scale, but they compete with humans for food—unlike pigs, they can’t eat garbage; they have to have maize and other quality fare.  So they were not domesticated, which is sad, because they are delightful pets (at least as smart as dogs) as well as very good eating.  If I were young I’d go domesticate them.

All this was only the beginning.  The Indigenous people developed great cuisines from the many domesticated and wild foods they had.  Early Maya paintings show vast amounts of tamales, evidently baked in earth ovens, as they still often are in Mayaland.  Also shown are fish, deer, and many other animal foods.  Chocolate was an elite drink; the Maya may very well be the people who developed it as a tasty drink by learning how to ferment the seeds.  The unfermented pulp and ground seeds are very pleasant, but fermenting is necessary to bring out the actual chocolate flavor.  It is fitting that our word “cacao” is taken straight from Maya.  Around many Classic Maya cups is written a line of Maya hieroglyphics.  When I was a student, we learned that the Maya were deeply religious, and this line must have been a powerful spell or sacred prayer.  Well, we can now read Maya writing, and that line turned out to mean “This is so-and-so’s chocolate cup.”  So much for romance.

The Aztecs and other central Mexican Indigenous people spoke Nahuatl, a beautiful and expressive language.  It is not related to Maya, but is related to the Indigenous languages of southern California.  Many of our familiar food words today are “Nahuatlismos”:  Chile, tamale, chocolate, tomato, chayote, achiote, camote (sweet potato), chia, jicama, and more.  In Nahuatl, there was a three-part division of the major foods:  tamalli (tamales), tlaxcalli (tortillas), and taballi (food to eat with the tortillas, such as beans and guacamole).  Other Indigenous languages of the Mexican realm gave us abalone (California Costanoan), and many more.

The Aztecs loved good food.  One story says it all.  Fray Diego Duran compiled a history in the mid-16th century, based on Azec accounts.  They told him of a war with a city named Coyoacan, which means “coyote place.”  The Aztecs besieged it but it would not yield, and had fierce warriors.  So the Aztec monarch said: “’Let the guards take ducks, waterfowl, fish, and other creatures from the lagoon that cannot be obtained in Coyoacan.  Let them be…cooked or toasted in such a way that their rich odor and the smoke that rises from these delicacies will penetrate the city….  Old men and old women will become feeble and die of longing for the food they cannot have.’  The king’s orders were carried out: they prepared many loaves of ezcahuitli, a type of small red worm….together with ducks, fish, and frogs….” They cooked these upwind of Coyoacan, and the scent drove the people there to distraction.  They made a desperate sally, were defeated, and their city was taken (Duran 1994:92).

Other sources tell of equally mouthwatering dishes made from acociles (crustaceans), axolotls (salamanders; the name literally means “water monsters”), and other aquatic foods.  The Aztecs grew all sorts of fruit, from all over Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, and had large botanical gardens (Duran 1994:205).  Duran also tells of Motecuhzoma (“Montezuma” to moderns) feasting on game, fish, chocolate, and so on, including flesh from human sacrifices, and then ending the feast with hallucinogenic mushrooms, which put them “out of their minds and…in a worse state than if they had drunk a great quantity of wine” (Duran 1994;407; take note and stick to wine and forget those Psilocybe mushrooms).  Bernardino de Sahagun and other early chroniclers also describe Aztec food.  Sahagun describes merchants feasting on turkey, dog, tomatoes, chiles, chocolate, and occasionally human sacrifices (Sahagun 1979:48, 67, 75).  However, it is clear that very little human flesh was eaten; it was not a significant protein source.  Sahagun also went into detail on all the incredible variety of foods available in markets and elite kitchens (1979:69) and on varieties of maize, beans, and other crops (1963:279-290; see also Sahagun 1959, 1961).   They all agree that it was an incredibly rich, varied diet, even for the relatively poor.  Some of the dishes described by Sahagun are “turkey with a sauce of small chilis, tomatoes, and ground squash seeds” (patzcalmolli, what we would now in Nahuatl call mole pipian); “white fish with yellow chili…newt with yellow chili…winged ants with savory herbs; locusts with chia; maguey grubs with a sauce of small chilis…a sauce of unripened plums with white fish….tamales stuffed with amaranth greens…small tuna cactus fruit with fish eggs…” and on for many pages (Sahagun 1979:37-38).  A major aspect Indigenous Mexican cuisine is the use of insects and other invertebrates.  Over 300 kinds of insects are eaten (Ramos-Elorduy 1991, 1998; Ramos Elorduy and Pino Moreno 1989).

Drinks, besides water, consisted largely of atoles of various sorts.  Atole (Nahuatl atolli) is finely ground seed meal beaten up in water.  It was usually made from maize, but also from beans, fruit, and so on.  Pinole (pinolli) was another seed meal drink, often made from wild seeds.  Atole could be flavored with chocolate, chile, honey, and other substances (Sahagun 1961:93).  It is still common.  Pozole (pozolli) was, in those days, probably just nixtamal beaten up in water, as it still is in Maya Mexico.  That wonderful pozole you get in restaurants now, with pork and hominy and chiles and more, is probably a recent invention from west Mexico, especially Jalisco.

It is said that a true civilization has to have its alcohol, and Mexico had various types of maize beers, as well as honey mead and combinations of the two.  Central Mexico had pulque, the fermented sap of the flower stalks of agaves (Agave spp. which are not cacti).  There is some chance that they had learned to distill alcohol.  Very simple stills are found in remote areas of west Mexico.  Some Mexican ethnobotanist friends of mine argue that the stills go back to pre-Columbian times.  However, they resemble Philippine stills, and most of us think they probably came over on the Manila galleon in the early days.  Sailors early learned in the Philippines to make these simple stills, and probably brought the technology with them.  Mezcal is distilled not from pulque, but from the juice extracted by slow-cooking the flowering stem bases of agave and related plants, and then fermenting and distilling that.  Tequila is mezcal made from the blue agave (Agave tequilana), originally from the Tequila area of Jalisco, but now widely planted, to the annoyance of residents of the actual Tequila area.  Incidentally, a word of warning:  Don’t try to drive in the town of Tequila.  The old, steep, cobblestone streets are filled with drivers who have been sampling pretty freely at the many distilleries in town.

Other parts of Mexico had their own Indigenous foods.  Heavy seafood dependence along the coast of the Gulf of California lives on in Sinaloa’s incomparable seafood cuisine.  Similar pre-Columbian traditions give us excellent seafood in Campeche and Veracruz.  In northeast Mexico, the Teenek Maya—called Huastec by the Nahuatl—baked very large tamales (as some Yucatec Maya do).  These Huasteca tamales were known as zacahuil, and still exist.  In this age of Guinness records, towns vie to produce ever larger ones, and some now weigh a hundred pounds.  They are one of the few dishes in the world to be immortalized in folksong; every traditional Huastecan singer can perform “Zacahuil,” often in the wonderful folk style of the region, influenced by Scots-Irish fiddling styles learned from nearby Texas.

A final Native American influence came from the Antilles, but it appeared mostly with the Spanish.  Outside of habanero peppers, the Spanish introduced few if any foods from the Antilles, but they brought several words from the Arawak language there: maize for corn, yuca for manioc, and a few others.  Our word “barbecue” comes from Arawak barbacoa, the frame on which meat was smoked for preserving it.  Hammock, tobacco, and cigar are also Arawak.

The Spanish were amazed at the productive maize fields.  They had read in the Bible about grain that returned a hundredfold on seed; they had never seen such a thing—Spanish wheat in the middle ages returned about three or four for one.  So when they saw maize literally returning a hundredfold, they were duly impressed.  Their diet back home had often been limited to bread, olives, wine, and cheese; now they could have game, fish, vegetables, spices, everything.  They soon began bringing the best New World foods back home.

Merchants in Spain tried hard to keep wheat, almonds, olives, wine, and other specialties from being produced in Mexico.  Wheat soon got away from them, since it grows extremely well in northern Mexico and in the Bajío (the high, beautiful center of Mexico).  In northwest Mexico, the Indigenous people either died out or mounted heroic resistance to the Spanish.  The Seri and Yaqui resistance movements against genocide stand as some of the most amazingly heroic stories in the entire history of humanity.  Maize was thus hard to get, so wheat became the staple.  In these areas the wheat tortilla—which, unlike the maize one, requires shortening—became staple food.

Olives, grapes, and almonds were hard to grow in central and south Mexico, and remained Spanish monopolies for a long time.  The main contribution of the Old World, in most of Mexico, was domestic livestock.  This proved a very mixed blessing.  It provided cheap and abundant meat and cheese, but the flocks multiplied, overran Indigenous cultivation, ate crops, caused horrific erosion, led to massive deforestation, and generally ruined much of the landscape, causing untold misery and environmental damage that is still getting worse all the time (Melville 1997; Painter and Durham 1995).  Those who deplore Native America’s lack of domestic livestock (e.g. Diamond 1997) need to explain why enormously reducing the food production and potential of Mexico is somehow a good thing.

Bread and domestic-animal meat soon became core parts of the Mexican diet, and grapes in the dried form of raisins became rather common.  Olives, almonds, capers, wine, and so on remained luxuries for the Spanish rich.  However, the real excitement came when converted Jews and Muslims were sent to Mexico.  The Spanish spent 800 years fighitng the Moors—Muslims of Arab and Berber ancestry—for control of Spain.  (“Moor” and “Morocco” both derive from Arabic maghrib, “sunset” or “far west,” because the area in question is the farthest west of the Arab lands.)  The Moors had developed an exceedingly elaborate and sophisticated cuisine.  They had also introduced oranges, sugar, dates, rice, and many other foods to Spain (Watson 2008).  The Romans had begun introducing spices, but the Moors really popularized them, especially the Arabic signature mix of cumin, coriander, black pepper, and (often) cinnamon.  Sesame seeds are also a Moorish item.  Also Moorish are the limes that are now so totally basic to Mexican food, and the bitter oranges that partially replace limes in Yucatan.

The Spanish finally conquered the last Moorish stronghold in 1492.  Yes, the date is significant, because it was the loot from conquest that financed Columbus, and the luxury of having finished the Reconquista that made possible a new conquest on a far larger scale.  But after the conquest the conquered Muslims and Jews persisted in rebelling, since they were subject to appalling oppression, brutality, and exploitation.  They were forced to become nominally Christian, but many held out in secret.  Those that would not convert were killed or forced to flee, finding refuge in Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.  Even conversos were not trusted, and vast numbers of them were sent to Mexico to get rid of them.  Here they were often sent to the more isolated areas, at first Puebla (it was isolated then!) and later New Mexico, where Moorish culture persisted until very recently.  Some years ago I noted a classic Mesopotamian Arab recipe in a traditional New Mexican cookbook by Cleofas Jaramillo (1981).  Gary Nabhan, an authority on these connections, found that the Jaramillo family did indeed have a Moorish converso background (Nabhan 2014).  As so often, foodways are mirrored in musical styles; New Mexico is a living museum of Moorish songs, even today after many centuries.  Older Hispanic singing styles are pure Moorish, and all the Hispanic traditions of the southwest are at least somewhat influenced, however indirectly, by that part of the heritage (see Robb 1980, but writing in the mid-20th century Robb did not realize the extent of Moorish influence in New Mexico, which was established largely in the 1980-2010 period).

One product of this was classic Puebla cooking.  The famous mole poblano is the perfect fusion of Aztec and Moorish haute cuisine.  It is basically a Moorish chicken dish fused with an Aztec turkey dish.  From the Moorish side we get the spices, sesame seeds, onions, and basic overall technique.  From the Aztec side we get the chocolate, tomato, and chile.  Stuffed chiles and stuffed squash simply classic Moorish stuffed vegetable dishes that use Mexican instead of Near Eastern vegetables.  They have gone home to Spain; you find them especially in Estremadura, the source of a large percentage of the original conquistadores and settlers.  Countless other Mexican dishes, including essentially all the ways of cooking lamb and mutton, are Moorish.

Another interesting Moorish dish is migas, basically stale bread soaked in broth, the tharid of Arab cuisine.  This is commoner in Spain than in Mexico, but it has found a home in Tepito, a rough working-class area of Mexico City.  The people there took to making cheap migas by salvaging bones from butchers and restaurants and cooking them into stock, then making migas with stale bread and tortillas.  With the inevitable Mexican (and especially Chilango) pride in making do, this got idealized as a marker of the tough, resourceful Tepitan, and thus called “vita-migas,” from vitaminas, Spanish for “vitamins” (Hernández 2009; he cites a wonderful Tepito saying that cannot be repeated in polite company but is all the better a life guide for that).

Another important derivative of Spanish and Moorish culture fusing with Native American culture was the belief that certain foods are heating to the body while others are cooling and still others are neutral.  Heating foods include high-calorie and spicy ones; cooling foods are low-calorie, often green vegetables, and tend to seem cool to the touch; neutral foods are basic starch staples.  This idea comes largely from ancient Greek medicine, but was developed largely by the Arab and Persian doctors in the early medieval period.  In Mexico it fused with similar Indigenous ideas.  One interesting and still locally important Indigenous idea is that wild areas, being cooler and moister than the hot sunny villages and fields, are cooling to the body and to foods produced there, while people and foods in the hot, dusty villages become hot.  Either way, chiles, strong alcohol, and fried foods are heating; green vegetables are cooling; tortillas and rice are neutral.  Many of you have encountered this belief.  It is fossilized in the English language in the term “to catch a cold.”  Within my lifetime, Americans almost all believed that colds came from experiencing cooling foods or from getting a chill or from similar cooling influences, not from catching a virus.  This is only one of many Mexican and New World beliefs that come from fusion of Spanish and Indigenous worldviews (or ontologies, as anthropologists say).

The Spanish favorite animal was the pig.  This stems from Celtic and Roman traditions.  The pig also found a happy home in Puebla, to the point where I heard there a bit of lousy poetry:  “Cuatro cosas come el Poblano:  Cerdo, cochinito, puerco, y marrano.”  “Pueblans eat four things: hog, pig, pork and boar.”  Notably exaggerated, but too good to leave out of this talk.

Anyway, the Spanish became the world’s master sausage makers (along with the Portuguese and Italians), and they introduced a pretty full range of it to the New World, where it thrives best in rather dry highland areas like Mexico City and the Altos de Chiapas.

Another influence at this time was African.  The Spanish imported an all too large number of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and its coasts and shores, because the Native Americans died out from disease and overwork.  The entire Antilles were virtually depopulated within 50 years.  The biggest reasons included smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever, to which the Africans had some resistance.  The dreadful toll of disease hit Mexico more slowly and with less horrific effect, but by 1700 the Indigenous population had been reduced 90 to 95%, locally to 100%, and replaced in large party by people of African origin.   Unlike the situation in the United States and in Brazil, Africans did not enormously influence the actual dishes, but they introduced a range of foods: black-eyed peas, yams, okra, African rice, watermelons, and many more.  They made important foods out of the Native American peanut and sweet potato (both South American but introduced to Mexico before Columbus), which resemble African indigenous foods.  The most African-influenced regions are the area around Veracruz and the Costa Chica of Guerrero, both of which preserve highly African-influenced musical styles, including the amazing Jarocho music of Veracruz.  (“Jarocho,” originally a “racial” term for mixed African-Indigenous-Spanish locals, has become a general term of pride for Veracruzanos.)  Both areas preserve some minor but interesting African foodways, including a fondness for fried foods.             Meanwhile, the Manila Galleon kept Mexico in constant touch with the Philippines.  The galleon ran every year, going east on the trade winds in the tropics, then coming back on the westerlies, taking something like a great circle route through the north Pacific.  It coasted California on this run, and occasionally paused briefly.  It ran to Acapulco, which thus was influenced by Filipino culture.  Everything from distilling (see above) to the local names of some dishes (including black beans mixed with rice) came thus to Acapulco.  Chinese immigrants occasionally appeared.

Thus by the 18th century, Mexican food was, quite literally, a total melting pot.  Moving away from food a minute, we can learn from the story of Santiago de Murcia.  He was a musician to the Queen of Spain at the start of the 1700s, playing French and Spanish guitar music, but she died, and the new queen liked only Italian music.  So Santiago went to Mexico to seek his fortune, and there became fascinated with the local folk music, setting down many Native American and African dances (O’Dette 1998).  The African dances included the world’s first recorded cumbias (or “cumbas’)—predating the 1990s cumbia boom by 250 years.  All these were getting more and more Spanish-influenced, and vice versa.  Spain and Mexico were musical melting pots as well as literal ones.

The 19th century brought yet more influences.  The French arrived and briefly conquered Mexico before being expelled again (part of the process being the actually inconclusive battle celebrated on Cinco de Mayo—not a holiday in Mexico, which is much more concerned with its actual independence day, Sept. 16).  Even before French rule, the prestige of French food had influenced Mexico.  With French rule, it took the urban areas by storm, and the elites consumed little else for years.  French bread influenced the Mexican bolillo and other wheat flour items.  French cakes and pastries, French ways with meat and fish, French menus, and French table manners were general (Pilcher 1998).  Meanwhile, other European influences accumulated; beer, more German and United States-style than French or Spanish, slowly replaced pulque and other home brews as the alcoholic drink of choice, and now Mexico is one of the world’s major brewers and consumers of that beverage.  Otherwise, heavy German and Irish immigration in the 19th century has had surprisingly little obvious influence, but it certainly colors Mexican food and consumption habits.

After the French were expelled, but mostly in the 20th century, Indigenous Mexican food slowly came back into style.  However, in the meantime, another huge influence had appeared.  Chinese immigrants flooded into Mexico in the late 19th century, brought in as cheap labor on railroads, in mines, in new agribusiness plantations, and so on.  They formed local Chinatowns, where typical foods of the poorer rural parts of coastal Guangdong Province were found: chop suey, chow mein, egg fuyong, noodle soups, white rice, soy sauce, pickled vegetables, preserved eggs and fish, Chinese sausage, and stir-fried dishes using small bits of boneless chicken or pork stir-fried with vegetables cut into small cubes.  My generation remembers this well from California Chinatowns as well as from Chinatowns in Mexicali, Mexico City, and elsewhere.  The Chinatown in Mexicali, now about gone, was a fascinating time machine when I was young; you could visit it and go back to the early 1900s.  The Chinese had been brought in as laborers on the new fields created with large-scale irrigation, or had come as tradespeople and urban workers, and had remained fairly conservative in foods and other ways.  Chinese food is now widespread in Mexico, and has slowly diversified, so one can now find Sichuan food and other non-Cantonese specialties in the bigger cities.  One Chinese introduction that has become widely known in ordinary Mexican society are the little salted plums or apricots called saladitos in Mexican Spanish.

A bigger influence was a renewed burst of Arab food borrowing.  This was due to the sudden tide of repression that swept the previously tolerant Turkish Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The empire was dying, and looking for ways to shore up power; also, German advisors counseled more firm and culturally homogenizing policies.  The results included savage repression and local massacres of Christian Arabs and full-scale genocide of Armenians.  Today we think of Arabs as Muslims, but in 1900 about 10% were Christian, with a huge concentration in Syria (then including Lebanon) and Palestine.  Thousands of them fled to Latin America, especially if they were Catholic—whether Roman rite or Syrian rite.  They introduced the foods of their home region.  Possibly the most widely known now is the semita (Arabic simit), a ring-shaped bread covered with sesame seeds.  It is widely sold in Mexico as a street vendor snack.  Another food that caught on was kibi, ground meat and bulgur wheat combined in a pointed-ended meatball and fried.  These have now become a “traditional Maya” food, having spread from the Merida city market area.  A new boom in stuffed vegetables was also apparent.  Baklava, raw onions, Greek-type salads, and other foods became known.  Perhaps most interesting was the new form of tacos al pastor.  Previously probably just made with meat hung up to roast over a fire (the carne al pastor of old-time cookbooks), this now became the Greek- and Turkish-style gyro:  meat is sliced, marinated, and impaled on a vertical spit; bits are shaved off from the turning mass of meat and wrapped in a soft tortilla.  Many cities had Arab restaurants.  Merida used to have a range of incredibly wonderful Lebanese-style restaurants, ranging from very cheap to very expensive and luxurious, but I think only one is left now.  Gary Nabhan, who is Lebanese-American, has been increasingly involved in documenting Arab foods in New World folk traditions (Nabhan 2014).  Another huge influence came from the Arab immigrants starting supermarkets.  The two major Mexican supermarket chains, Chedraui and San Francisco de Asís, were both started by Christian Arab immigrants from the old Turkish Empire.  Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, is also descended from Arab immigrants.

Smaller groups of immigrants had more local influence.  The extent to which Mexico is a melting pot, like the United States, is not always appreciated.  Huge numbers of Irish and large numbers of Germans went to Mexico in the 19th century.  The Irish left little trace, but the Germans included many Mennonites, from the German-Dutch border country, speaking a different language somewhere between German and Dutch.  They set up farming colonies in remote areas, and often live by selling cheese, including a high-fat white cheese that has come to be known as menonita.  Another fascinating group was made up of mascogos, descended from escaped African-American enslaved persons from Texas, who maintained a strikingly traditional lifestyle in remote parts of north Mexico well into the 20th century, combining Mexican rural foods with African and African-American foods like soski bread and tetapun, a Mexicanized spelling of ‘tater pone—sweet potato pie (del Moral and Siller 2000).  More generally, southern US cooking influenced other parts of Mexico.  Yucatan state, especially Merida, is fond of strictly southern-US-style pecan pies and cheese pies, called pie de nuez and pie de queso respectively; this leads to some puns, since pai is Maya for “skunk.”

 

As of 1900, and even 1950, village Mexico was still Indigenous as far as foodways went.  Maize, beans, squash and chiles remained the staples.  Tortillas, tamales, tacos, moles, and other pre—Colombian dishes were the norm.  Pulque and tepache or tiswin (homemade beers) were the alcoholic drinks.  All sorts of domestic and wild greens were eaten, under the old Nahuatl name of quelites (Nahuatl quilitl).  Most of them are very healthful, and they have been studied in detail by ethnobotanists recently.  An interesting case is verdolagas (purslane in English; Portulaca oleracea).  It is a domesticated crop with selected varieties in central Mexico, an enthusiastically consumed weed in the rest of Mexico, and a mere weed—pulled out when seen—in the United States.  Several other crops show this pattern of being appreciated in Mexico but ignored elsewhere.  Mexican culture is much more appreciative of the plant world than are many others.  A large percentage of our favorite domestic flowers were domesticated by Indigenous Mexicans, from marigolds and dahlias to zinnias and cosmos.

Many foodways are extremely health-promoting; many foods have medicinal values, and many herbal medicines have come from Mexico.  The most dramatic finding was the birth control pill, which was developed from wild yams used in local medicine.  The story of how the pill was developed, and how Mexico lost out on the financial bonanza, has been told in a superb book, Jungle Laboratories by Gabriela Soto Laveaga (2010).  Since then, Mexico has been very careful about letting anyone patent its plant medicines—far too careful, from a humanitarian point of view, since it will not allow much research.

 

My own experiences with Mexican food have been largely in Maya lands of southeastern Mexico.  I have done food ethnography in Yucatan and Quintana Roo, and fairly extensively in Tabasco, Campeche, and Chiapas.  They are culturally very different indeed from the Nahuatl-dominated center.  Tortillas are now basic, but they are a fairly recent introduction, probably becoming staple food within the last few centuries.  Before that, the Maya ate tamales, pit-roasted meats, and large maize breads baked in the pit oven (pib).  Also baked in the pit oven are whole pigs, cochinita pibil.  Many soups and stews were made.  They also ate manioc, sweet potatoes, and other root crops.  They eat an enormous range of tropical fruits and vegetables.  I piublished a long article on my work (Anderson 2010) and self-published a book of recipes (Anderson 2008, recipes available online at www.krazykioti.com under the title “Mayaland Cuisine”), and I am currently finishing up a book with food ethnographer Amber O’Connor on Maya foodways (O’Connor and Anderson 2017).

Maya food also includes a range of ceremonial dishes for the many ceremonies to worship and thank spirits and gods for rain, harvests, game, and other blessings.  These would traditionally be based on the sacred maize, and include squash seed meal.  Humans were made of maize by the gods, and then animated by blood that the gods shed to give life to the maze dough.  The squash seed meal symbolizes the blood (at least to some traditional ritualists).  Turkey was the traditional meat; chicken is now used.  One set of stews made of turkey and maize (with vegtetables and chiles) is colored according to the four directions.  North is considered to associated with white, and the stew is colored with white maize flour.  South is yellow, colored with yellow maize and with a little achiote.  East is red, colored with more achiote.  West is black, and is colored with burned chiles.  The chiles are toasted black and then ground.  The center is green, the color of vegetation and life, symbolized on the traditional altars by green leaves rather than food.  Homemade cigarettes of native tobacco are also offered to the deities.  Many deities have been equated with Catholic saints, and in particular the all-important Maize God was early equated with Jesus.

Maya food was probably always influenced from central Mexico, but after the Spanish conquest there was more influence, including Nahuatl dishes like chilmole and pipian as well as tortillas.  Later, the usual Caribbean and Arab influences found their way in.

 

The 20th and 21st centuries have seen the floodgates open, in so far as they were not open already.  Most obvious has been the spectacular increase in Italian restaurants, especially since about 1960.  Pizza joints, spaghetti houses, sub sandwich spots, and more upscale Italian restaurants are now as common in Mexico as in the US.  The quality of food at these places is generally very low, I am sorry to say, but they provide cheap, quick, easy-to-eat meals for hurried working-class and middle-class people.

The United States has inevitably had an enormous influence, much of it highly negative from the point of view of health and food quality.   Mass production of low-nutrient breads and snack foods came early, and has only increased over the years.  Soft drinks are the most universal borrowing.  Coca-cola® is so universal that the Mexican idiom for utter remoteness is “where even the Coca truck doesn’t go.”  United States food companies have bought many Mexican ones.  United States soybeans, maize, and other bulk crops flood the market. NAFTA ensured that protected, heavily subsidized US agribusiness could flood the Mexican markets; less subsidized, the Mexican producers cannot compete.  This has ruined many dairy, maize, and bean farms.  More recently, United States chains, from McDonald’s to Pizza Hut, have become universal; even US pseudo-Mexican-food chains like Taco Bell are widespread, especially in tourist areas.

Not all the influence is bad (though finding the exceptions takes searching).  United States innovations in agricultural production have been largely beneficial to farmers, though with important recent problems.  US investment, especially in agricultural research and development, has often been valuable and sometimes decisive.  US culinary trends have spilled over into Mexico, leading to renewed interest in traditional, regional, and folk dishes and ingredients, and renewed interest in freshness and quality of ingredients.  Returning migrants to el norte, as well as tourists and other visitors, have made sure that any new styles in New York or Los Angeles or other centers are quickly tried out in Mexico

Meanwhile, not only has Mexican food continued to be popular in the United States, but also Mexicans have become the backbone of the US restaurant industry.  Fans of Anthony Bourdain will know that even in New York the kitchen staffs of fancy French restaurants are heavily immigrant Mexican (see e.g. Bourdain 2000).   There is a Chinese type of noodle that is stretched by swinging it out like a skipping rope, which really develops the gluten and makes a very chewy noodle.  The technique is incredibly difficult to master, but I have seen it done in Los Angeles by a Mexican cook.  Zacatecas in particular is the source for a slarge percentage of Los Angeles’ greatest chefs.

A food event worth major attention is the development of high-yield varieties of wheat and other grains at CIMMYT, the international research center in Texcoco, now celebrating its 50th birthday.  This center was set up by the Mexican government and Rockefeller Foundation, later getting help from various governments and foundations during the 1960s, when food shortages were common and world famine loomed.  Crash programs of research at CIMMYT and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines produced high-yield, easy-to-grow grains that saved the world.  Other centers dealing with other crops have arisen since.  The resulting “Green Revolution” has had a bad reputation with scholars, because it tended to encourage overuse of pesticides and fertilizers, but that need not happen.  Recent varieties use much less chemical input.  About the only downside, really, is that the new wheats don’t taste as good as the old ones.  We used to stock up on bolillos when we went to Mexico, back when I was young, because the wheat (and therefore the bolillos) was so much better tasting than wheat in the US.  No longer.  It would be easy to breed back the taste into modern wheats, but no one seems to care.

CIMMYT did not make dramatic breakthroughs with maize, for the very good reason that the Mexican people had bred such incredibly tough, diverse, and high-yielding maizes that there was little they could do.  (I have this on direct authority from former CIMMYT personnel I have interviewed, notably Edgar Niederhouser, to whom thanks.)  In any case, the great success of CIMMYT was the high-yield, short-straw wheats developed by Norman Borlaug and his team; he won the Nobel Prize for this.  These wheats have the additional advantage of growing well in Mexico’s hot climate, unlike most high-yield wheats.  They totally revolutionized wheat-raising not only in Mexico, but in India and Pakistan.  Borlaug, in his Nobel Prize speech in 1970, warned that he and his colleagues had only bought the world some time to get population growth under control:  “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.” (Nobel Peace Prize speech, as quoted by Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2009, “Transgressing Planetary Boundaries,” Scientific American, Dec., p. 36.)

Alas, the world did not listen, and now is food-short again.  Worse, agricultural research has been run down and often left to pesticide companies (Pardey 2016).  The traditional, hardy, disease-resistant varieties and species of crops and animals are rapidly going extinct, though CIMMYT and other centers are desperately trying to save at least the seeds.  Recent GMO crops and other highly disruptive influences are coming into Mexico.  Mexico has banned GMO maize, but it has come via returning migrants to the US, and is now not uncommon.  This presents a huge danger to traditional varieties.  They could be genetically swamped by hybridization.  Some hybrids of wild and local maize with GMO varieties have turned up, but fortunately farmers have become more careful, and this is no longer being reported (information from my colleagues and students, especially Norman Ellstrand).  GMO’s also require more (and more, and more) chemical and mechanical inputs, thus getting increasingly out of range of local less affluent farmers, who are driven off the farm.  The ironic result of these new, very inferior “improved” crops is rural decline and the abandonment of millions of acres that were fertile and productive until recently. Once abaindoned, they do not even return to wilderness.  In fact, they often erode away, leaving a moonscape.  Or they become cattle range, increasing erosion and biological degradation as well as rural inequality.

Fortunately, Mexican farmers are tough and independent people, and this process of rural decline has not progressed so far as it has in many areas of the world.  Many parts of Mexico, including Quintana Roo where I do research, are strongholds of independent small farming by local families.  These and other traditional Indigenous farmers are very skill-intensive, and we really need to document the skills and knowledge before they are lost to modernization.

Even so, Mexico’s curse since the Spanish introduced giant estates has been huge-scale farms, either cattle ranches or agribusinesses, with landless laborers reduced to starvation wages and horrible living conditions.  This plantation-style agriculture came to Spain with the Romans.  It was later imposed by the Spanish on the Moors.  Then the Spanish from heavily Moorish parts of Spain used the same institutions to reduce the Indigenous population to serfdom.  This large-scale, landlord-dominated type of agriculture is increasingly a curse to rural Mexico, and now many of the plantations are owned by giant international agribusiness firms.  Dvera Saxton here can tell you more about it; she is one of the leading experts on this problem.

Today, unless there is a new effort comparable to CIMMYT’s, but dedicated to saving small farms and traditional varieties and to farming without deadly chemicals, you will probably all live to see mass starvation worldwide. 

All too predictably, another main event of the 21st century has been the swamping of Mexico by fast-food chains and giant food corporations.  Most are US-based, of course.  Even the iconic Bimbo bakery company has been taken over.

The result of this is horribly predictable.  Besides cutting the pleasure of eating, it has the more tangible and measurable effect of sending diabetes and other diet-related disease rates to unprecedented heights.  Native Americans are particularly susceptible genetically to diabetes and metabolic syndrome (see e.g. SIGMA Type 2 Diabetes Consortium 2014), but anyone would succumb to the mix of bleached white flour, refined white sugar, and soybean oil that is now the standard diet in much of Mexico.  Sugar in commercial soft drinks is now actually the main source of calories for Mexican children.  Worldwide, diabetes rates are soaring, and 422 million people now have this condition (Sonnenburg and Bāckhed 2016).

Traditional diets are protective.  In Mexico, nopales (cactus pads from Platyopuntia spp.) are known to reduce blood sugar and inflammation and alleviate diabetes, and buds of Cecropia spp. appear to, also.  Many other folk remedies are used, with varying effectiveness.  Certainly several Maya people I know have sent their diabetes into remission by using traditional remedies.  Diet is the best cure, though.  Refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, are notorious risk factotrs, but so is soybean oil, because the body quickly converts much of it into prostaglandins, which are inflammatory.  Obesity also causes diabetes directly, through inflammatory mechanisms.  It would be hard to imagine a better diet than the traditional Mexican one of whole grains, wild greens, seed atoles, nopales, avocados, fruit, beans, vegetables, and some lean meat and fish.  Unfortunately, contemporary supply chains and food marketing venues are set up to maximize the marketing of comida chatarra—“junk food.”  It would be perfectly easy to develop supply and marketing chains that would do the opposite; all it would take is going back to the old open markets, still flourishing in many areas.  (Don’t miss the one in Oaxaca.  It’s worth a special trip to the city.)

 

Mexican food may be especially complex and diverse in its origins, but it is fairly typical of food systems worldwide.  No food system developed without massive borrowing from others.  Borrowing goes on all the time.  No food system remains static for more than a generation or two.  Foods fall out of favor, come in from outside, get modified, get substituted.  Fads rise and decline.  The idea of stable, long-continued folkways is nonsense.  Mexico has had some astonishingly long-running food traditions, notably the ever-wonderful tortilla and its frequent accompaniment of boiled beans and chile sauce.  However, little else remains unchanged.

Even after 150 years of cultural anthropology, many people believe that “cultures” and “ethnicities” are steel-walled spheres that are completely independent of each other and do not affect each other except through aggression.  No.  Culture and ethnicity are abstract concepts that cover a realty of constantly shifting, changing practices.  People constantly borrow, negotiate and renegotiate (Bourdieu 1977), and decide to change.

This puts in a rather ironic light the recent protests against “white men,” meaning Anglo-American yanquis, cooking Mexican food.  I occuasionally have nightmares of trying to sort out the mess if we carried this principle to its logical conclusion.  Only Nahuatl speakers would be allowed to make tortillas.  Only Maya would be allowed to make chocolate.  And so on….

There is a huge difference between normal cultural borrowing and actual offensive appropriation.  If cultural appropriation is deliberately insulting (like stereotypic caricatures) or is outright ripoff for profit, it is as bad as any other insult or ripoff.  If it is done more creditable reasons, it’s not only normal, it’s inevitable and necessary.  Think if Norman Borlaug had refused to share those wheat varieties—as, in fact, modern seed companies do refuse to share theirs, insisting on purchase at very high profit rates.  Instead, the wheat was made freely available worldwide, saving tens of millions of lives.  Mexico today has thousands of species and varieties of useful plants and animals.  They could revolutionize farming worldwide.  We need to be able to get them into circulation and feed the world.  But abuse by giant firms and outdated, poorly formulated patent laws make this impossible at the present time.  Reform is seriously needed.

When Western medical researchers were looking for quinine in the forests of the Amazon Basin, they explained they needed it as a cure for malaria, a disease from the Old World.  One local assistant commented:  “God put the fever in Europe and the quinine in America in order to teadch us the solidarty that should prevail among all the peoples of the earth.”  (Quoted Whitaker 1954:58).  Whether God did it or it happened naturally, the point is made.  We all need each other’s knowledge.  We all need each other’s foods and foodways.  We all need each other.

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a talk given at California State University-Fresno, Oct. 19, 2016.  Thanks to Jen Banh and Dvera Saxton for initially seeking me out to give this talk.  Thanks to my coworkers in Mexico, especially Felix Medina Tzuc and Aurora Dzib Xihum de Cen, as well as colleagues and students too numerous to mention.

 

Anderson, E. N.  2008.  Mayaland Cuisine: The Food of Maya Mexico.  Self-published.

—  2010.  “Food and Feasting in the Zona Maya of Quintana Roo.”  In John Staller and Michael Carrasco (eds.), Pre-Columbian Foodways:  Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica.  New York:  Springer.  Pp. 441-465.

 

Bourdain, Anthony.  2000 .  Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  New York: Ecco/HarperCollins.

 

Bourdieu, Pierre.  1977.  Outline of a Theory of Practice.  Tr. Richard Nice.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Del Moral, Paulina, and Alicia Siller V.  2000.  Recetario Mascogo de Coahuila.  Mexico City: Conaculta.

 

Diamond, Jared.  1997.  Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  New York:  W. W. Norton.

 

Duran, Fray Diego.  1994.  The History of the Indies of New Spain.  Tr. Doris Heyden [Spanish orig. ca. 1570].  Norman, OK:  University of Oklahoma Press.

 

Hernández, Alfonso.  2009.  “The Vita-migas of Tepito.”  Tr. Laura Roush.  Ethnology 47:89-93.

 

Jaramillo, Cleofas M.  1981.  The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes.  Orig. 1942.  Santa Fe: Ancient City Press.

 

Katz, S. H.; M. L. Hediger; L. A. Valleroy.  1974.  “Traditional Maize Processing Techniques in the New World.”  Sci 148:765-773.

Melville, Elinor G. K.  1997.  A Plague of Sheep:  Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Nabhan, Gary.  2014.  Cumin, Camels and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

O’Connor, Amber, and E. N. Anderson.  2017.  K’oben.  Lanahm, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

 

O’Dette, Paul.  1998.  Jácaras!  18th Century Spanish Baroque Guitar Miusic of Santiago de Murcia.  (Liner notes to CD recording.)  Harmonia Mundi (recording company).

 

Pardey, Philip G.  2016.  “Agricultural R&D Is on the Move.”  Nature 537:301-303.

 

Painter, Michael, and William Durham (eds.).  1995.  The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America.  Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan.

Pilcher, Jeffrey.  1998.  Que vivan los tamales!  Food and the Making of Mexican Identity.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

 

Ramos-Elorduy, Julieta.  1998.  Creepy Dcrawly Cuisine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects.  Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.

 

Ramos Elorduy de Conconi, Julieta.  1991.  Los insectos como fuente de proteínas en el futuro.  Mexico: Limusa.

 

Ramos Elorduy de Conconi, Julieta, and José Manuel Pino Moreno.  1989.  Los insectos comestibles en el Mexico antiguo.  Mexico: AGT Editor.

 

Robb, John Donald.  1980.  Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self-Portrait of a People.  Norman, OK:  University of Oklahoma Press.

 

Sahagun, Bernardino de.  1959.  Florentine Codex.  Book 9: The Merchants. Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

—  1961.  Florentine Codex. Book 10: The People.  Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

—  1963.  Florentine Codex.  Book 11: Earthly Things.  Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

—  1979.  Florentine Codex.  Book 8:  Kings and Lords.  Tr. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. [Spanish-Nahuatl orig. ca. 1570.]  Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press.

 

SIGMA Type 2 Diabetes Consortium.  2014.  “Sequence Variants in SLC16A11 Are a Common Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Mexico.”  Nature 506:97-101.

 

Sonnenburg, Justin L., and Fredrik Bāckhed.  2016.  “Diet-microbiota Interactions as Moderators of Human Metabolism.”  Nature 535:56-64.

Soto Laveaga, Gabriela.  2010.  Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 

Watson, Andrew.  2008.  Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World:  The Diffusion of Crops and Techniques, 700-1100. 2nd edn.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Whitaker, A.  1954.  The Western Hemisphere Idea.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Mayaland Cuisine: Campeche, Chiapas and Tabasco

October 10th, 2016

CAMPECHE

 

Recados, sauces, and minor snacks and market foods in Campeche are generally the same as in Yucatan, so refer to recipes in the previous chapter.

 

 

SEAFOOD

 

Black Rice Soup (a “dry soup”)

 

1/2 lb. rice

1 oz. lard or vegetable oil

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 quarts stock from cooking black beans (one could use the liquid from a few cans of black beans)

2 serrano chiles or other good green chiles

4 epazote leaves or a small branch of epazote

Salt to taste

 

Soak the rice; drain; fry in the lard or oil.  Add the garlic, onion and chiles (chopped), the bean stock, the epazote and the salt.  Cook over a very low flame.

Alternative method (not traditional but good): fry the onion and garlic first, then add the rice.  This requires more lard or oil.

This can be made with seafood—crab meat, shrimp, squid—in which case one can leave out the black bean liquid.

Compare the similar recipe in the Yucatan chapter.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:24)

 

 

Bricklayer’s Dogfish (cazón de albañil)

 

1 roast dogfish

3 sprigs epazote

Salt

4 tomatoes

1 onion

2 xkatik chiles

Oil for frying

 

Boil the dogfish with the epazote.  Bone and shred.  Fry up the shreds with the vegetables (chopped).  Add the stock in which the dogfish was cooked–enough to make a sauce rather than a soup.

I admit I included this dish only because the name is irresistible.  Still, it’s great if you use a more palatable fish.  Actually, it is a version of a common Caribbean dish using salt cod (presoaked and washed to remove the salt), and I recommend cod—salted or not—for it.

 

 

Campeche Caviare

 

Roes from one esmedregal, a large mackerel-like fish with very good, large roe sacs

1 tbsp. oregano

8 garlic cloves, mashed

1/2 tsp. ground pepper

Salt to taste

2 onions

1 head of garlic

4 large tomatoes

1/2 cup olive oil

 

Boil the roes with some oregano, garlic and salt.  Chill.  Peel the membrane off the roes.  Roast the onion, garlic head, and tomatoes, blend them, and fry them in the olive oil.  Season.  Add the roes and boil 15-20 minutes.

Fish roes are widely used in mixed seafood dishes in eastern Mexico.

 

 

Fried Flaked Dogfish

If you are not into the cult of cazón, try this with any firm white-fleshed fish, such as cod.  It is then really excellent.

 

2 lb. fresh dogfish, in pieces

1 tbsp. salt

1/2 green onion

Epazote

Lime

1 lb. tomatoes

1 chile habanero

1/2 regular onion

oil

 

Cook the dogfish in water to cover, with the salt, green onion and epazote.

Bone and skin the dogfish.  Rinse and break up into small pieces.  Season with the lime, and with more salt and epazote.

Roast the tomatoes, chile and onion.  Blend up.  Fry this salsa in oil.

Add the dogfish to the salsa and fry till this sauce thickens.

 

 

Dogfish Bread (pan de cazón)

This universal Campeche delicacy is even more an acquired taste than its main ingredient.  I present a recipe purely for ethnographic interest.

 

2 lb. roasted dogfish

1 tbsp. salt

Epazote to taste

½ -1 lb. lard

1/2 onion

2 lb. tomatoes

About 1 cup refried black beans (boil the beans; mash; fry in lard)

Tortillas

4 habaneros

½ c bitter orange or lime juice

 

Wash and cut up the dogfish.  Boil with salt for thirty minutes, adding some epazote.  Remove skin and bones and fry.

Stir-fry the onion and the rest of the epazote, chopped, in lard.  Add the tomatoes, cut up, and the pieces of dogfish.

Cover and cook for fifteen minutes.  Retire from the flame.  Break up the fish into flakes and mix all ingredients thoroughly.

Heat the tortillas and the beans.  Moisten the tortillas in the dogfish sauce.  Cover with a layer of beans.  Cover this with the dogfish mix.  Then add another layer (tortilla, beans, sauce).  Keep building, by layers, as much as desired.  (About six layers is typical.)  Serve with the salsa.

Make habanero salsa:  chop up the habaneros, preferably with some onion or garlic, and marinate in the citrus juice.

Variants abound, but the basic model above is pretty standard.

This is more or less the national dish of Campeche.  If it is made (as it usually is) with the dogfish that has been sitting in the marketplace for a while, outsiders may find it reminiscent of school-cafeteria tuna casserole.

 

 

Esmedregal in Orange Juice

Esmedregal is a term for various large fish with firm white flesh.  Anything from albacore to red snapper works well for this one.

 

2 lb. esmedregal fillets, or other firm, juicy, white-fleshed fish

Parsley, 1 bunch

Garlic, 2-3 cloves

Oregano, about 1 tsp dried

Cumin seeds

Black pepper

Salt

1 cup bitter orange juice

1 cup olive oil

1/2 white onion

1 sweet chile

1 lb. tomatoes, sliced

1 hot chile

Juice of two sweet oranges

 

Cut the fish in small pieces.  Wash in water with a bit of lime juice added.

Blend the herbs and spices into a paste with the bitter orange juice (see substitutions in introduction).  Marinate the fish in half of this, for an hour or so.

Fry lightly.

Separately fry the vegetables, cut up.  Add the fish.  Cook, adding the rest of the herb paste, and finally the sweet orange juice.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:36)

 

 

Fish casserole

 

2 lb. white, firm-fleshed fish

Juice of 2 limes

1/2 cup oil

1 onion, in thin slices

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1/4 lb. bell pepper, chopped

1 lb. tomato, blended

2 peppercorns, crushed

1 tsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tbsp. fresh oregano (dried oregano can be substituted, in which case use less, about 1 tsp.)

1 tbsp. parsley, chopped

1 tsp. nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Wash the fish, cut in medium-sized pieces, and marinate in the lime juice for 15 minutes.  Heat the oil.  Fry in it the onion and garlic.  Then add the bell pepper, blended tomato, pepper, cumin seeds, oregano, nutmeg, parsley and salt.  When this has cooked a short time, add the fish and cook till done.

 

 

Fish Makum

A classic favorite, also very popular in Yucatan.

Cherry Hamman explains:  “The words mak, ‘to close’ and kum ‘cooking pot,’ explain the title of this ancient hearthrite.”  (Hamman 1998:251; her recipe is for a meat makum, also an excellent dish).

 

6 garlic cloves

2 roasted onions

1/2 tbsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tsp. or more of oregano

1 tbsp. achiote paste

5 cloves

8 black peppercorns

1/2 cup vinegar

1/2 cup oil

Juice of 2 limes

Salt to taste

Oil for oiling the dish

1 banana leaf

2 lb. fish fillets (snapper, pompano or the like)

3 tomatoes, sliced

4 whole güero chiles (medium-sized, hot, yellow chiles) or comparable chiles

1 red bell pepper or 1-2 fresh red chiles, roasted, peeled and sliced

 

Blend the garlic, one of the onions, and the cumin seeds, oregano, achiotes, cloves, and peppercorns.  Mix with the vinegar, some oil, and the salt and lime juice.  Alternatively, you can just use a cube of red recado dissolved in lime or bitter orange juice.

Oil a casserole dish and line with the banana leaf.  Put on some of the sauce (above), then the fish, then the rest of the sauce, well rubbed onto all the fish.

Decorate with the tomatoes and the other onion, sliced; the whole chiles; and the strips of bell peppers or chiles.

Bend the banana leaf around to cover all.  Bake, or cook over slow fire, till done.

Parsley or cilantro for garnish is allowed.

Serve with white rice and black beans.

Variant: Nutmeg (pinch) and bay leaves are sometimes added.  More tomatoes can be used.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:34 on the basis of a good deal of field experience)

 

 

Pampano in Escabeche

Pampano is a medium-sized, roundish fish with firm white flesh and a very delicate flavor.  Red snapper would work (but the real thing is better). I  can even imagine doing this dish with trout.

 

1 grilled or fried pampano

1 large onion

1 carrot

1 jalapeno pepper

2 bay leaves

1 tsp. cumin seeds

Few black peppercorns

1/2 cup vinegar

Salt and other spices to taste

Oil

 

Chop and fry the onion.  Add the other vegetables and spices.  Cook briefly (a few minutes).  Pour this sauce over the pampano.

 

 

Pampano in Green Sauce

The medieval Arab-Andalusian green sauce appears yet again.  This is a particularly good form of it.

 

2 lb. pampano fillets

Lime

1 bunch parsley

1 bunch cilantro

1 green chile (xkatik preferable)

Black pepper

Oregano to taste (about 1 tsp.)

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

Salt

Vinegar to taste (a small amount)

6 cloves garlic

Lard for frying

1 small onion

2 tomatoes

2 mild yellow chiles

 

Wash the fish and rub with lime.

Blend the parsley, cilantro, green chile, oregano, pepper, cumin seeds, salt, vinegar and garlic.

Marinate the fish in this sauce.

Fry all in lard (or oil).  One way to do this is to put the fish in, then cover with the sauce.  Another way is to fry the sauce first, then put the fish in (this works only with quite thin fish, or fillets).

Then add the onion and tomatoes, chopped, and the chiles, chopped or whole.  When all has fried somewhat, add water and cook till sauce is thick.

Variants:  One can dispense with either the parsley or the cilantro, or even the green chile, and use instead hojasanta leaves, or tomatillos (green husk-tomatoes).  In fact, any combination of green, flavorful herbs is good.

 

 

Pampano Pohchuk

 

1 pampano, ca. 1 lb.

1 tbsp. achiote paste

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

24 garlic cloves

2 tbsp. olive oil

 

Stuffing:

Oil, for frying

1 lb. cooked small shrimp

1 lb. chopped octopus

3 garlic cloves

2 chopped tomatoes

2 laurel leaves

Salt and pepper

Banana leaves

 

Wash the fish and marinate for two hours in a marinade of the achiote, pepper, oregano, cumin seeds, garlic and olive oil (plus enough water to make a thin paste).

For the stuffing, stir-fry the onion, chopped.  Add the shrimp and octopus.  Then add the rest and boil briefly.

Stuff the fish with this.  Wrap all in banana leaves, put in a casserole dish and bake in a moderate oven for 25 minutes.

The stuffing can be varied according to what is available; stuffing without any seafood at all is not unknown.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:33

 

 

Panuchos, Campeche style

 

2 lb. masa

4 oz. flour

Salt to taste

1 lb. cooked black beans

1 lb. fried dogfish (see above in introduction to section)

1 onion, quartered

2 bitter oranges

Habanero chile, to taste

 

Mix the masa, flour and salt with enough water to make a dough.  Make small tortillas (two for each panucho).  For a panucho, cover one tortilla with beans, one with shark meat, put them together (beans and fish inside), and seal around the edges.  Fry (either deep fat or in a bit of oil in skillet).

Chop the onion and habanero and mix into the juice of the bitter oranges.  Eat as topping for the panuchos.

 

 

Seafood Rice

 

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 tomato

1 lb. rice

2 bay leaves

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Mixed seafood: shrimps, clams or other shellfish, cut-up octopus, and bits of fish

Fish stock

2 oz. peas

Oil

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Chop the onion and garlic.  Fry in a bit of oil.  Add the tomato, chopped.  Add the rice and herbs.  Fry till rice begins to stick.  Add the seafood.  Then add enough fish stock to cover all to a depth of 1/2 to 3/4″.  Add peas and cook.

Chopped peppers can be added too.  In fact, almost anything can be added.  This dish naturally calls for improvisation and substitution.  You can use any odd bits of seafood available.  Important is to achieve a contrast of textures, such as that produced by fish, clams, and octopus bits.

 

 

Seafood Salad

 

Shrimp, conch, octopus, bits of fish, shredded carrot, chopped onion, cilantro, sliced cucumber, sliced tomato, sliced avocado, salt, and pepper, in lime juice.

 

Basically a glorified fish cocktail.  As with the foregoing, the critical thing is to achieve a contrast of textures as well as tastes.

 

 

Snook in Mole Sauce

The snook is a large silver fish of warm Caribbean and Atlantic waters.  It has white flesh and a unique, rich taste that can become addictive.  A snook cooked this way is truly unique and unsurpassed, but, lacking a snook, you can use any white-fleshed fish.  Relatively firm, oily ones work best.

 

1 snook, ca. 3 lb.

Salt

4 tbsp. lard

8 ancho chiles (dried)

2 cups water

1/2 lb. cooked potatoes, cut up

Sprig of epazote

 

Clean the fish.  Rub with lard.  Roast on a grill.

Soak the chiles to rehydrate them.  Then blend and fry in lard.  Add salt to taste.

Add in the water, the fish (cut in pieces), and the potatoes and epazote.  Cook till flavors blend.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001a:37)

 

 

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Pork Loin with Black-eyed Peas

A rather striking recipe with a distinctly Cuban flavor.  I suspect Campeche’s long, close trade connections with Cuba are behind this dish somewhere.

 

2 garlic cloves

10 black peppercorns

1 onion

1 tbsp. achiote seeds

1/2 lb. tomato, chopped

10 sprigs epazote

1 1/2 lb. pork loin, cut in small pieces

1 quart water

Salt to taste

3/4 lb. black-eyed peas

2 lb. masa

1 habanero chile, green (unripe)

1/3 lb. lard, melted

1 banana leaf

 

Grind the spices.  Miix with the tomato, epazote and meat.  Make a soup with the water and salt, and cook till meat is done.  Cook the peas separately.

Mix the chile (cut up) and the lard into the masa.  Add the meat stew and the beans.  Cook till it forms a solid paste.  Grease a baking dish and line with banana leaf.  Add in the paste and bake at 350o till golden.

 

 

Tamales, Campeche feast style

 

4 lb. masa

4 quarts water

Salt to taste

3/4 lb. lard

3 sprigs of epazote

10 banana leaves

 

Filling:

1 lb. jowl of pork (or other relatively firm, meaty cut)

1 1/2 lb. pork loin

1 chicken

Salt to taste

8 cloves garlic, roasted

10 black peppercorns

1/4 tsp. cumin seeds

1 tsp. achiote seeds

1 quart broth

1 1/2 lb. tomato, chopped

6 leaves or sprigs of epazote, chopped

 

Mix the masa with water.  Add salt, lard and epazote (chopped).  Simmer, stirring constantly, till thick.  Turn off flame and let stand 15 minutes.

Cook the meats in the stock, cut into small pieces, and add salt and garlic.  Grind the peppercorns, cumin seeds and achiote seeds.  Add to the stock.  Mix in the chopped meat and boil again till reduced.  Add the tomato and epazote.  Retire from the flame when cooked fairly dry.

Toast lightly the banana leaves and cut in quarters.  (Of course, you can always use foil, kitchen paper, or corn husks.)  Cover with a layer of masa dough.  Put on a chunk of stuffing and roll up.  Steam for half an hour.

 

 

 

VEGETABLES
Black Rice Soup (a “dry soup”)

 

1/2 lb. rice

1 oz. lard or vegetable oil

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 quarts stock from cooking black beans (one could use the liquid from a few cans of black beans)

2 serrano chiles

4 epazote leaves

Salt to taste

 

Soak the rice; drain; fry in the lard or oil.  Add the garlic, onion and chiles (chopped), the bean stock, the epazote and the salt.  Cook over a very low flame.

Alternative method: fry the onion and garlic first, then add the rice.  This requires more lard or oil.

This can be made with seafood—crab meat, shrimp, squid—in which case one can leave out the black bean liquid.  Chopped tomatoes, various herbs, and other vegetation can all be used.

Compare the similar recipe in the Yucatan chapter.

 

 

Campeche Salad

 

1/2 lb. chickpeas, cooked

1/2 lb. green beans

3 carrots

2 turnips

3 potatoes

2 tomatoes, chopped

1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 cup vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil the carrots and turnips.  Boil the potatoes separately.  Do not overcook–they should be firm.  Cool.  Chop and mix with the tomato and seasonings.

A very standard restaurant dish, and thus subject to infinite variation.  It is possible to add cooked rice to this.  It is also possible to add almost anything else interesting; corn kernels are particularly welcome.  The creative cook will want to experiment with herbs, chiles, and even flaked fish (this salad often accompanies fish, and there seems no reason not to add some fish in).

 

 

Vegetables in Marinade

 

 

1 cauliflower

1/2 lb. green beans

4 summer squash

4 carrots

1 red onion

4 small potatoes

Jalapeno chile (optional)

2 tbsp. olive oil

Vinegar

Herbs

Oregano, salt, and pepper to taste

 

Cut up the vegetables.  Blanch them by putting in boiling water, turning it off and leaving for 15 minutes (i.e., till the vegetables soften a bit but do not actually cook).  Wash them and put in vinegar to cover.  Add in the other ingredients and marinate at least 12 hours.

The herbs would typically be powdered thyme, marjoram and perhaps others.  One can easily use fresh herbs instead.  Be creative.  The irrepressible will no doubt want to add a habanero.

Cooked sea foods, especially shellfish and octopus, can be added.

 

 

 

DESSERTS
Preserved ciricotes

The ciricote is the small fruit of a tree (Cordia sebestina) also noted for its incredibly beautiful wood.  The value of the wood leads to cutting many a ciricote tree, and the fruit is correspondingly rare.  Tough and even woody, like small quinces, ciricotes have to be cooked.

 

4 lb. ciricotes

Juice of 4 limes

1 lb. sugar

2 quarts water

3 fig leaves

 

Cook the ciricotes.  If tough, use some baking soda–or, to be really traditional, ashes–to tenderize and sweeten.

When the ciricotes are cool, peel and put in water and lime juice.  Wash, soak and drain.

Make a syrup with the sugar, water and a bit more lime juice. Add the ciricotes and fig leaves, and boil half an hour.  Bottle.

Campeche is famous for its fruit preserves and liqueurs.  This recipe will have to stand for all of them.  The recipe is standard, except for the fig leaves, which are used only when their tenderizing and thickening action is desirable, as with the tough ciricote.

Ciricote wood is yellow and brown, with a richly figured grain.  There is a great future for this tree.  If the better varieties were propagated, they could produce fruit until the tree was mature; the tree could then be harvested for its wood.

 

 

 

CHIAPAS

 

An important plant in Chiapas is chipilín (Crotalaria longirostrata), an alfalfa-like plant grown for its edible, mild-flavored leaves.  Alfalfa sprouts make a reasonable (though not terribly close) substitute.  One could even use pea tendrils (available at Asian markets).  These are similar in texture and flavor, though not looking much like chipilín, and are in fact often used in Chiapas.

Arrayán leaves are called for in several recipes; the arrayan is a bush endemic to the area.  The name means “myrtle” in Spanish, but the Chiapas arrayan is not much like a Spanish myrtle.  Bay leaves make a good substitute.  Another useful flavoring herb is avocado leaf.  I have seen a kettle of chile and beef simmering with a whole branch of avocado leaves thrust in. Mexican mountain avocado leaves have a wonderful spicy taste.  Closely related to bay leaves, they have a similar flavor and culinary use, but must be used fresh rather than dried–hence their absence from markets.  In the United States, most California avocados have spicy-flavored leaves, but Florida and Gulf Coast avocadoes are derived from Caribbean ancestry with virtually tasteless leaves.  If you don’t live near a Californian or Mexican avocado orchard, use bay leaves.  Conversely, if you do have access to such avocado leaves, try them in the following recipes.

 

 

 

TAMALES AND RELATIVES

 

Green Corn Tamales

 

20 ears of green corn

1 1/2 lb. sugar

1 lb. butter

2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

 

Shuck the ears, but be careful not to damage the shucks.  Grind the corn.  Beat in the other ingredients.  Wash the corn shucks, trim off the tips, and make tamales–two tablespoons of mix per leaf of shuck.  Steam for 45 minutes.

The corn in question would be regular eating corn: firmer and less sweet than United States sweet corn.  If using sweet corn, cut down the sugar considerably, and the butter somewhat.

 

 

 

Green Corn Tamales, II

 

18 ears of sweet corn

1/2 lb. cream (get Mexican-style sour cream if you can find it)

8 eggs

1/2 lb. butter

Sugar to taste

Cinnamon

Mexican white cheese

Salt to taste

 

Make as above.

A common variant saves you from so much cholesterol: leave out the eggs and butter, cut down on the cinnamon, and use fairly soft cheese.  This produces, basically, a cheese tamale.

Both forms are common market fare, and excellent.

 

 

 

Rice Tamales

 

2 lb. rice

1 lb. butter

1 lb. sugar

1 quart water

2 tsp. baking powder

Corn leaves

 

Cook the rice.  Dry it out and grind it.  Beat the butter until creaemy.  Beat in the rice powder and baking powder.  When it is thoroughly beaten up, add a bit of warm water, and then beat in the sugar.  Meanwhile, soak the corn leaves to soften.

Put two or three tablespoonfuls of mixture on each corn leaf, wrap, and steam 3/4 hour.

 

 

Tamales with Saffron

 

4 lb. masa

2 lb. lard

2 lb. chicken meat, shredded

1 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

15 highland Chiapas chiles (or less, or even more, to taste)

2 pieces of French bread, toasted (optional)

6 garlic cloves, chopped

1 onion, chopped

2 lb. tomatoes, chopped very fine

20 saffron threads

1/2 tsp. ground clove

Almonds, plums and/or pimento strips (optional)

Salt to taste

Banana leaves

 

Grind all the spices (together with the toasted bread, if wanted).  Fry the onion and garlic in a few ounces of the lard; take out and discard if you want.  In the oil, fry the tomatoes, then add the spices and cook down to a sauce.  Add in the chicken.  Some sugar can be added if desired.

Mix the masa with the rest of the lard.  Add the salt.  Anoint the leaves with this.  If wanted, add to each tamale an almond, a plum, and/or a pimento strip.  Then add the sauce and cook as usual.

 

 

Tamales with Hojasanta (hojasanta is generally called “mumu” or “momo” in Chiapas)

 

2 lb. masa

1 lb. lard

1 lb. beans, cooked, mashed and fried

20 small highland chiles–seeded, fried and ground

2 tbsp. dried shrimps, ground

2 tbsp. ground squash seeds (sikil)

30 hojasanta leaves

6 bunches of maize leaves

Salt to taste

 

Mix the masa with the lard and salt.  Mix the beans, shrimp, squash seed meal and chiles.  Soak the corn leaves.  Make tamales on the hojasanta leaves, wrap up, and wrap these in turn in the corn leaves.  Steam half an hour.

A variant recipe uses far more squash seeds–two cups.  This makes a much richer tamale.  Suit yourself.

 

 

Vegetable Tamales

 

4 lb. masa

2 chicken breasts, shredded

3 carrots

3 summer squash

2 lb. tomatoes

1/2 cup chickpeas (cooked)

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 tsp. pepper

2 tsp. baking powder

2 lb. lard

Salt to taste

Corn leaves

 

Mix the lard, baking powder and salt with the masa.  Fr the garlic and onion, cut up, then add the other vegetables, all chopped finely.  Then add the meat and spices.  Then make and cook tamales in the usual way, steaming for an hour.

 

 

 

 

SOUPS

 

 

Bread Soup

A thoroughly Spanish recipe, but too popular in Chiapas to leave out.

 

6 sweet rolls (any kind of Chiapan-style sweet bread: rolls with a little sugar and shortening)

4 French rolls

2 carrots

Handful of green beans

6 baby summer squash

2 hard-boiled eggs

1/4 cup cooked chickpeas

1/2 onion

2 tomatoes

1 sprig thyme

sprig oregano

4 tbsp. lard

2 quarts chicken stock

2 plantains, sliced (and fried if you want)

3 oz. raisins

3 tbsp. sugar

A few threads of saffron, and/or a cinnamon stick

A few peppercorns

Salt to taste

 

Cut the breads into small slices and toast.  Cut up and cook the vegetables separately.  Grease a saucepan.  Alternate slices of bread with cooked vegetables; scatter in the herbs and raisins.  The last layer should be bread, with slices of egg on top to decorate.  Then pour on the stock and cook just enough to make the whole dish piping hot.

The stock should be just enough to cover the bread and be more or less absorbed by it.  This is one of those “soups” in which the spoon will often stand up by itself.  It is interesting in that it is the only soup I know from south Mexico that resembles the migas (crumbled bread) dry-soups so extremely common and important in southern Spain.  These migas are yet another class of dishes with a Moorish heritage; they are related to the tharid of Arabic cooking.

Variants exist with other spicing; with parsley, mint, or epazote; with wine; with different vegetable mixes; etc.  Creativity is the watchword.

 

 

Chipilín Soup

What would Chiapas do without chipilín?  It’s a vital source of vitamins and minerals in the diet.  A simpler form (without the dumplings) of this superb soup is particularly popular–more or less a daily food.

 

2 quarts water

1 green or maturing onion with stem

1 green chile such as xkatik

Grains from two ears of sweet corn

1 large bunch young, tender chipilín

1 lb. masa

3 oz. lard

1/2 lb. fresh Mexican white cheese, crumbled

2 avocadoes

2 limes

 

Cut up the vegetables and put in the water.

Mix the masa, lard, and salt.

Make dumplings of this, stuffed with the cheese.  Add to the soup.  Boil all, quickly.

Serve with slices of avocado, more cheese, and lime wedges.

 

 

Cream of Chipilín Soup

A basic soup in south Mexico.  Many great minds have expended noble energies in creating variants, some of which are listed below.

 

2 cups chipilín leaves

1 tbsp. butter

4 very young, tender summer squash

Grains from 4 ears of sweet corn

1/2 cup cream

1/2 quart boiled milk

1 small onion, cut in quarters

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Start the soup by cooking the leaves in water.

Meanwhile, fry in butter the onion (chopped).  Take out when golden.  Put the cut-up summer squash and fresh corn into the oil and fry quickly.

Add in the milk, pepper and salt.  Cook a minute or less.

Turn off the flame, and add the cream, stirring constantly.

The really traditional, indigenous form of this soup leaves out the butter and milk.  Fry the onion in oil or lard.  Use corn meal, or toasted corn meal (atole), instead of milk.  In this case, mix the corn meal into the water first. Then add the leaves, and proceed otherwise as above.  Add some white cheese, crumbled or in chunks.

Variant:  The fresh corn is left out when not in season.

Variant (upscale):  To the basic soup, add maize dumplings.  Cook.  Near the end, add white Mexican cheese squares.  Serve with a dollop of Mexican sour cream poured in.  Variant of the variant:  put the cheese in the dumplings—i.e., make a half-inch-thick ball of corn meal with a bit of cheese in the center.

Variant, or closely related soup (“squashvine soup”):  Add the tender tips of squash vines–butternut squash is a good pick for this.  The tendrils at the end, plus the very smallest leaves (under an inch wide), are used.  Reduce the chipilín accordingly, or eliminate it altogether and just use squashvine tips.  Good, garden-fresh, tender squashvine tips are among the most delightful of all vegetables.

 

 

Covered Rice

A “soup” although the rice absorbs all the liquid.  Such dishes are sopas secas, “dry soups,” in Spanish.  This is not oxymoronic; no one expects sopas to be soups in the English sense.

This is a rather elaborate restaurant dish.

 

1/2 lb. rice

1 chicken breast, shredded

4 eggs: two raw, two hardboiled

2 large chorizos, sliced and fried

1 onion

1 tomato

3 large summer squash

33 carrots

1 can chickpeas

1 tbsp. flour

1/2 stick butter

3 oz. sugar

1 1/2 oz. capers

Almonds

Raisins

Saffron

Oil or lard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Like Chinese fried rice, this dish is better with leftover rice–cook the rice well in advance.

Cook the rice with the saffron and, by preference, some of the raisins, almonds and capers.  Chop the vegetables and cook briefly with salt.  Take out and fry with the chicken.  Butter a casserole dish.  Layer rice with almonds, raisins, capers, slices of hard-boiled egg, and chorizo slices.  Then top with the vegetables and chicken, then a last layer of rice.

Separately, beat the whites of the other two eggs till they form peaks.  Add the yolks, flour and sugar.  Cover the casserole with this and bake till all is thoroughly heated.

Naturally, simpler variants or relatives exist, grading downward into rice refried with vegetables and whatever bits of meat are available.

 

 

Dried Shrimp Soup

In contrast to the preceding, this is a typical household recipe.

 

2 lb. large dried shrimp

4 chilpotle chiles

3 guijillo chiles

1 1/2 lb. tomatoes

onion

2 carrots (optional)

2 potatoes (optional)

2 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

Water

 

Soak the shrimps in hot water, shell, and clean.  Boil the shells for stock; strain.  Add the shrimp to this–a total of 1 1/2 quarts water–with the chiles (seeded), garlic and onions.

Roast the tomatoes and grind.  Add to the soup, along with vegetables as desired.

Variant:  add a small can of pimento strips and grind these with the tomatoes.

 

 

Flower and Shoot Soup

 

2/3 lb. squash flowers

1/3 lb. tender tips of squash vines

2 ears sweet corn

2 large summer squash

1 tomato

1 serrano chile

1 quart water

Oil or lard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cut the grains off the corn ears.  Separately, blend the tomato with the chile and fry the paste.  Add the water, then the squash (cut up in thin slices), then the rest of the ingredients.  Cook till vegetables just begin to soften.

It would be hard to imagine a more refreshing summer soup.  For an even lower-calorie variant, don’t fry the tomato.

Young pea tendrils are also popular in Chiapas, and are even better than squash vine-tips.  They should be stir-fried or steamed.

 

 

Green Rice (another and particularly good “dry soup”)

 

1 cup rice

4 poblano chiles

2 cooked eggs

1 piece (size according to taste) of onion

1 sprig of parsley, and/or any other green herbs, such as cilantro or chipilín

1/3 lb. lard or oil

2 cups milk

2 cups water

2 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

 

Wash the rice and dry in the sun.  Seed the chiles.  Toast them and wrap in plastic or towel, then peel them.  Grind them in the milk.  In the lard, fry the rice.  When it begins to color, add the onion and garlic, chopped.  When these are transparent, add water, parsley, and salt; cover and boil.  When it begins to boil, turn down flame to a very low simmer.  Add the milk-chile mix toward the end and simmer till it is absorbed.  Decorate with slices of cooked eggs.

A more folk variant leaves out the milk and eggs.

 

 

Juliana Soup

 

2 quarts chicken stock

1 chayote

3 summer squash

2 carrots

3 potatoes

Slice of cabbage, or few leaves of kale

1/2 cup cooked chickpeas

1 threads saffron (optional)

6 French rolls, sliced

Oil, if wanted

Salt to taste

 

Chop the vegetables finely and put to boil.  Fry or toast the bread slices and put in bowl.  Serve the soup over these.

A local version of standard French or Spanish vegetable soup.  Kale and mustard greens are at least as typical of Chiapas as cabbage; try it with them.  Naturally, this is another dish of a basically “open city” sort, and any seasonal vegetable can be used.

 

 

Shuti Soup

“Shuti” is an Indian name for large river snails, popular in Chiapas.  This soup is included mainly for ethnographic interest, but it would be good with more or less any seafood.

 

“Shuti

1/2 lb. tomato

2 quarts water

1 onion

1 hojasanta leaf

l/2 lb. toasted squash seeds

2 ancho chiles, seeded and soaked

 

Quickly cook and trim the snail.  Cook all for 15 minutes.”

(translated from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:17)

 

 

Soup to Raise the Dead (Caldo Levanta-muertos)

 

1 tongue (veal or beef; whole tongue, untrimmed)

1 brain (ditto)

1 oxtail

1 chicken

3 large tomatoes

1 large onion

1 head garlic

1 large sprig thyme

1 large sprig oregano

Achiote

Small highland chiles

Salt to taste

Water

 

Boil and skin the tongue.  Cook the brains briefly with salt.  Cut up the chicken and boil.  Separately, fry the achiote, then add in the tomato, onion, garlic, thyme and oregano (the vegetables being chopped).  Add these into the pot with the brains; then add the meat, cut up.  Cook till done.  Fry the chiles and blend; add at the last minute.

This may or may not raise the dead, but at the worst it will do as well as anything else for the purpose.  It is the sort of thing people love to recommend for a cold or a hangover; I think this is the source of the name.

 

 

Squash-flower Soup

 

1/2 cup cream

1/2 lb. squash flowers (trimmed of stems)

8 summer squash

4 poblano chiles

2 sweet corn ears

1 tbsp. chopped onion

1 tbsp. epazote, cut up

1 quart boiled bilk

1/2 stick butter

Salt to taste

 

Fry the onion in the butter.  Cut the flowers into 3-4 pieces each and add.  Seed, roast and peel the chiles; cut up and add.  Then add the grains from the corn ears; then the squash, cut up.  Stir-fry all.  Season and cover.  Boil for a few minutes, then add the milk and the epazote and simmer briefly.  Finally add the cream.

 

 

Sweet Corn Soup

 

8 cobs sweet corn

3 tomatoes

1 1/2 oz. butter

1 onion

1/2 tsp. pepper

Salt to taste

Water

 

Cut the corn off the cobs.  Blend up some of the grains and add to some water.  Blend up the tomato and fry in the butter with the rest of the corn, the pepper and the onion (chopped).  Combine all and cook very briefly.

 

 

Tapachula Soup

Tapachula, the market city of far southeast Chiapas, has its own cuisine.

 

1 lb. squash flowers

2 tbsp. lard

1 onion

Grains from 2 ears sweet corn

2 quarts milk

2 oz. butter

2 tbsp. flour

1/2 cup cream

2 summer squash

3 tbsp. flour

2 eggs

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Wash the flowers and remove stems.  Cut up and fry in lard.  Separately fry the onion (cut up).  Add the corn.  Add half the milk and combine all the above.

Blend all.  Add the rest of the milk.

Fry the flour in butter.  Mix in some milk (i.e., make a standard white sauce).  Season with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, separately, cook the squash; cut up; fry quickly.  Then dip these slices in a flour-egg batter and deep-fry.

Put the cream in a soup tureen.  Pour in the soup.  Add the fried squash and serve immediately.

 

 

Tortilla Soup

A Chiapan variant of a universal Mexican staple.

 

1/2 cup cream

18 tortillas, toasted and cut into wedges

2 oz. grated Mexican white cheese

1 tomato

1 small chile (fresh, or, if dried, seeded and soaked)

3 cups chicken stock

Sprig of mint

2 garlic cloves

Pinch of black pepper

Salt to taste

 

Peel the tomato (after immersing in boiling water for a minute to make this possible) and blend up with the chile and garlic.  Combine this with the other ingredients and bring to boil.

Here, too, anything and everything goes.  Leaving out the cream; adding some of the chicken meat; using other herbs; adding more vegetables–No two soups need be alike.

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Asado

 

2 lb. meat (pork or lamb, preferably)

4 ancho chiles

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. pepper

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

2 bay leaves

2 arrayán leaves (a local Chiapas plant, rather similar to bay, so just use more bay leaves if you are not near a Chiapas market)

1 tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. vinegar

1 oz. lard

Salt to taste

 

Seed the chiles and fry.  Blend up.  Separately, grind the garlic, thyme, and oregano.  Cut up the meat and fry it in the lard.  When it is half done, add the other ingredients and cook another 20 minutes.

Variants on this theme involve marinating beef or pork steaks in the recado and cooking them in a pan, etc.

 

 

Chanfaina

Chiapas version of a classic Iberian dish.

 

2 lb. sheep tripe and/or assorted variety meats of sheep or goat

Piece of sheep’s liver

2 tomatoes or 1/3 lb. tomatillos

1 ancho chile

1 small French roll, toasted

1 sprig parsley

1/2 tsp. achiote

1/2 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Wash the tripe and cool with salt.  Separately, blend the tomatoes, chile (soaked and seeded), toast, liver, pepper and cinamon.  Fry the achiote and then add in the blended vegetables.  Then add the tripes and parsley, all cut up.  Boil.

 

 

Chanfaina a la Chiapa de Corzo

Chiapa de Corzo is an old, tranquil market town in central Chiapas.

 

1 1/2 lb. beef variety meats: liver, heart, tripes, kidneys

1 tomato

1 onion

Sprig of thyme

2 cinnamon sticks

2 cloves

2 black peppercorns

1 tbsp. breadcrumbs

1/2 cup liver paste (homemade; cook and grind the liver)

2 tbsp. achiote

Lard

2 tbsp. vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Cook the beef parts in salted water.  Take out the meat; save the stock. Cut up the meat.

Chop the tomato and onion and fry in lard.  Add the cut-up meat and stir-fry.  Then add the stock from the meat.  Dissolve the ground liver and breadcrumbs in some of the stock.  Add the vinegar, achiote, and spices.   Combine all and cook ten minutes.

 

 

Chojen Salad

A common Highland Maya dish with a Maya name.

 

1/2 lb. cold roast beef

1 onion

2 tomatoes

3 bunches of radishes, cut up

Juice of 2 limes or bitter oranges

Green chiles

Salt to tasste

 

Cut up all ingredients finely.  Mix.

A standard variant uses a beef stomach, cooked, cooled, and cut up.  This may not be to the taste of all readers.  Like the Yucatan counterpart, this dish used to be made with deer meat.

 

 

Cocido

 

1 lb. beef, cooked and cut up

1 lb. pork ribs, ditto

1 lb. pork back meat, ditto

1 lb. beef brisket, ditto

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 bunch cilantro

11 tsp. achiote

Longaniza, sliced

3 chayotes

Handful of green beans

6 small potatoes

4 carrots, cut up

1 small cabbage, cut up in chunks

2 corn ears in chunks

1 quince, cut up and cored

3 small sour apples, whole

6 peaches (fairly hard ones)

1 plantain

6 summer squash

Water

Salt to taste

 

Put in a large pot enough water.  Add salt, onion, garlic and tomato.  Separately, fry the achiote; throw out the seeds and add the oil to the pot.  Then add the meats and vegetables.  Simmer for about half and hour.

 

 

Cold Pork Leg

Another of the cold meat dishes so popular for lunch in Chiapas.

 

1 pork leg

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

2 bay leaves

2 arrayan leaves (or 2 more bay leaves)

2 limes

Water

Salt to taste

 

Spice mix:

2 ancho chiles

1 tomato

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

2 bay leaves

2 arrayan (or bay) leaves

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. sugar

1/2 tsp. pepper

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Marinate the leg in the lime juice with water and salt for 3 hours.  Then take out of this liquid and boil in water to which the herbs are added.

Meanwhile, seed and fry the chiles.  Blend with the other ingredients (except the leaves).  Fry the resulting mix quickly, adding the whole leaves.

Cover the leg with this, bake half an hour, chill, and serve sliced.

Variant: Make more recado, slash the leg, and rub the extra recado into the slashes.  This is less authentic but spicier.

 

 

Grilled Ham

 

1 smoked ham (Virginia ham will do)

5 onions

4 heads garlic

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

6 laurel leaves

5 arrayan leaves

1/2 lb. brown sugar

1 large piece of pineapple

1 stalk of fennel (finocchio)

7 quarts or more of water

 

Boil the ham for two hours or more with all the ingredients except the sugar.  Cool and skin it.  Slice.  Sprinkle the slices with sugar and grill them.

 

 

Fiambres

 

Fiambres just means “cold cuts” in Spanish.

 

1 veal tongue

1 chicken

8 pig’s feet (that is, 8 feet, not the feet of 8 pigs)

1 lettuce head

6 tomatoes

6 onions

3 avocados

8 radishes

2 oranges

3 tbsp. vinegar

1/2 cup oil

Salt to taste

 

Boil the meats.  Make a salad with the lettuce (cut up), tomatoes (in strips), onions, oil and vinegar.  Cut up the meats and mix into the salad.  Garnish with radishes, orange slices and wedges of avocado.

It is good to make this in two parts: first mix the meat and dressing, then leave it to marinate for a few hours, then add the vegetables just before serving.

As the name suggests, you can really use any cold boiled meat for this.

 

 

Mixed Meats with Beans

Variant of the pork-and-beans dish (probably of Celtic ancestry) known everywhere in the Hispanic/Iberian world.

 

2 lb. black beans

6 oz. salted meat

6 oz. chicharron (fried pork rinds)

6 oz. longaniza sausage

6 oz. pork short ribs

1 onion

1 head garlic

Pickled serrano chiles

Salt to taste

 

Wash and soak beans.  Cook with garlic and onion.  After half and hour, take them off the fire and add in the meats.  Cook another half hour.  Add the chiles and cook ten minutes.

We recommend that the salt meat be soaked and drained first, and the sausage fried to get rid of excess oil.

 

 

Mole Chiapas Style

A local variant of the Mexican staple.

 

1/2 lb. mulato chiles (dried)

1/2 lb. ancho chiles (dried)

Oil

Chicken or turkey boiled with an onion; save the stock

1 plantain

3 oz. raisins

5 oz. sesame seeds, toasted

3 pieces of sweet bread, toasted or fried

1 tortilla, toasted or fried

1/4 onion, cut up and fried

2 lb. tomatoes, cut up and fried

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Seed and fry the chiles.  Soak in the stock.

Fry the onion, then the tomato.

Blend the chiles and stock; separately, the onion and tomato; then the other ingredients, all in the stock.

Cook till the mix thickens.  Pour over the fowl.

Variants: cinnamon and garlic can be added to good advantage.  Other spices are possible but less traditional.  (Chocolate is not used in Chiapas moles.)

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:44)

 

 

Ninguijuti

Interesting for the indigenous name, from Zoque.

 

1 lb. pork chops

1 lb. pork loin meat

2 tbsp. lard

2 tomatoes

3 garlic cloves

Hot chile to taste

2 tbsp. achiote paste

Juice of 2 limes

3/4 cup masa

Salt to taste

 

Cut up the meat, removing bones.  Cook in a little water till getting done.  Then fry in lard.

Blend the tomato, garlic, chile and achiote.  Add to the meat.  Add the stock, beating in the masa and lime juice.  Cook briefly.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:45

 

Picadillo

 

1/2 lb. beef

1/2 lb. pork leg

3 potatoes

1 tomato

1 chayote

2 carrots

2 ears of sweet corn

4 oz. string beans

1 quince

Large sprig of mint

1 lb. cabbage

1 tsp. achiote

3 garlic cloves

1 quart water

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Cut the meat up finely.  Chop the onion and garlic.  Fry in oil in the saucepan.  Add the tomato, finely chopped.  Then add the water, salt and achiote.  (If you use the grains, not the paste, fry separately and take the seds out.)  When it begins boiling, add the meat, then the quince, then the vegetables–the sweet corn last, toward the end.  Finally add the leaves from the mint, just before serving.

 

 

Pork and Sausage with Scarlet Runner Beans

Another variant on the pork-and-beans dish.  See above, Mixed Meats with Beans.

 

2 lb. scarlet runner beans (or any dried bean)

2 ancho chiles

1 slice of bread

1 tomato

2 chorizos

1/2 lb. short ribs of pork, cut up

1/2 lb. longaniza sausage

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Salt to taste

 

Wash, soak and cook the beans till tender (if dry, they will take a couple of hours or more).  Seed and fry the chiles.  Grind the bread and fry it up with the cut-up sausages and meat.  Combine all and simmer.  Arrayán or bay leaves make a very good addition.

Pretty much the same thing is made with lentils, which take much less time to cook and thus can be cooked with the meat.

 

 

Pork Leg

 

1 bone-in pork leg (3 to 5 lb.)

1 onion

1 bunch parsley

2 chorizo sausages

2 garlic cloves

3 oz. ham

3 oz. butter

3 large tomatoes

Juice of 5 oranges

1 tsp. pepper

1 cup water

Salt to taste

 

Rub the leg with butter, salt and pepper, and the juice of the oranges.  Marinate in the orange juice overnight.

Bone the leg and stuff the resulting hollow:

Chop the ham, onion, parsley, chorizos and one tomato finely. Fry all.  Drain thoroughly and stuff into the pork leg.

Add the water and the other two tomatoes, blended up, to the marinade.  Bake the pork in this, basting occasionally.  Serve decorated with lettuce leaves and other garnishes.

 

 

 

Puchero with Chaya

 

2 lb. pork chops

1/4 lb. rice

Oil

6 peppercorns

Sprig of thyme

3 tomatoes

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

1 large bunch chaya leaves

 

Cook the chops in 2 quarts of water with the onion and one garlic clove.  Separately, roast and peel the tomatoes, and blend with another garlic clove.

Fry to color a strip on onion and the last garlic clove.  Add the rice, fry golden, and add in the tomatoes.  Add the spices.  Precook the chaya if it is tough.

Cook quickly, add 3/4 cup water, and then the pork and chaya.  Cook til rice is done.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:28)

 

 

Siguamut

An indigenous dish, originally made with game.  Also known as “siguamonte.”  Any meat with bone in can be used.

 

2 lb. meat

1 tomato

1 onion

6 small potatoes

3 carrots

2 garlic cloves

1 tsp. achiote

1 sprig epazote

10 small highland chiles

2 tbsp. oil

Salt to taste

 

Cut up the meat and roast it.  Then cook in salted water for an hour if using  venison–otherwise, omit or reduce this step.  Fry the achiote; then, in the oil, the garlic, onion, and tomato, all chopped.  Add all to a baking dish with potatoes, carrots (cut up), chiles (toasted and ground), the epazote and the salt.  Cook 15-20 minutes.

Variants exist; any game can be used, and the vegetables can be adapted as you wish.

 

 

Stuffed Chiles

 

1 lb. pork

10 poblano chiles

2 small onions

5 tomatoes

1 carrot

2 summer squash

1 1/2 oz flour

Few raisins

4 eggs, separated

1 tsp. pepper

4 garlic cloves

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Seed the chiles, fry, leave in a towel for a while, and peel.

Cook the meat with the garlic, onion and tomato.  Cool and cut up.  Fry the onion and tomato.  Cut up the other vegetables and add in, along with the meat, raisins and seasoning.

Cut up the rest of the tomatoes, onion, garlic and herbs.  Fry and blend.

Stuff the chiles; powder with flour.   Beat the whites of the eggs to peaks.  Add in the yolks and a tablespoon of flour.  Cover the chiles with this and fry in hot oil, then add the sauce and simmer.

 

 

Stuffed Onions

 

6 oz. cooked pork leg

3 large onions

2 oz. flour

3 tomatoes

3 eggs, separated

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

1/2 tsp. pepper

2 garlic cloves

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Cook the onions with salt for 15 minutes (or less).  Take out and carefully remove centers.  Chop these.

Cook the pork and chop finely.  Fry with the onion centers, one garlic clove (mashed) and one tomato (chopped).

Beat the egg whites to peaks. Add in the yolks and flour.  Cap the onions with this and fry them in a good deal of oil.  Set on paper towels to blot up excess oil.

Meanwhile, roast, peel, chop and fry the other tomatoes, with the other garlic clove and the herbs.  Blend all.

Put the stuffed onions into this sauce and simmer 10-15 minutes.

 

 

Stuffed Pork Loin

One of the most popular dishes, existing in countless variants.

 

1 pork loin

1/2 lb. ground pork

1/2 lb. ground beef

2 eggs

4 summer squash

1 strip of pineapple

4 carrots

1 oz. lard

2 lb. tomato

3 oranges

1 head of lettuce

2 tbsp. chopped parsley

3 pickled jalapeno chiles

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. pepper

Salt to taste

 

Open out and flatten the loin.

Mix the salt, pepper, garlic (crushed), ground meat, orange juice and beaten eggs.  Cover the flattened loin with the ground meat.  Put on this slices of the vegetables; then roll up the loin in such a manner that every slice of the final roll will be slightly different. Tie it into a log shape, with the stuffing in the center.

Fry it, adding the tomato (roasted and blended), pepper, parsley, juice of one orange, and salt.  Cover and simmer for an hour.

Chill.  Serve cold, adorned with its sauce and with lettuce leaves and jalapenos.

Variants are mostly in regard to the vegetables used in the stuffing and the manner of their display.  For instance, they can be cut into long thin strips, such that they go all the way through the loin, making each slice the same.  Of course, various herbs and seasonings are used to create other variations.

Also, one can oven-roast the loin instead of frying and then simmering.  This isn’t quite as good, but may be necessary if the loin is very large.

 

 

Tasajo

A Chiapa de Corzo dish, traditional in festivals.

 

2 lb. tasajo

2 heaping tbsp. rice, soaked

1/4 cup achiote

1/3 lb. squash seeds, toasted and ground (sikil)

2 tomatoes

1/4 onion

4 oz. lard

 

Cook the meat a long time in a lot of water.

Then grind the rice with the achiote, in water, for a thick sauce.

Blend the tomato and onion.  Fry in lard.  Add the rice and achiote.  Then stir in the sikil, dissolved in stock.  Cook, stirring.

Serve as sauce on the meat.  (Or—untraditional—cut up the meat and finish cooking in the sauce.)

 

Tzotzil Radish Salad

 

Radishes

Freshly made chicharrones (fried pork rinds) in 1″ squares

Cut up equal amounts of the above.

Season with chopped mint and parsley, and enough lime juice to thoroughly wet all.

 

 

 

POULTRY AND RABBIT

 

Chicken in the Pot

A relatively Spanish-style dish.

 

1 chicken

4 potatoes

4 chayotes

1/2 cup olives, optional (very Spanish, but I prefer without)

3 tomatoes, cut up

1 onion, cut up

1/2 tsp. ground thyme

1/2 tsp. ground oregano

3 cloves

3 peppercorns

2 bay leaves

2 arrayan leaves (or two more bay leaves)

1 tbsp. ground cinnamon

1 pinch saffron

Salt to taste

1 Spanish canned pimento, cut up, or some pimento strips (optional)

1 cup cooked chickpeas (optional)

1 cup vinegar

1 cup white wine

 

Cut up the chicken.  Peel and slice the vegetables.  Combine all except the pimento and chickpeas.  Cover the pot and cook in the oven.  Adorn with the pimento and chickpeas at the end.

(Conaculta Oceano 2000a:40)

 

 

Chicken with Chorizo

 

1 chicken

4 chorizos

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1/2 lb. potatoes

1 quart chicken stock

Oil

Salt to taste

 

Chop and fry the garlic and onion.  Add the chorizo meat (taken out of the skins).  Drain.  Fry well, then add the stock.

Cut the chicken into pieces.  Add to the stock with the potatoes and cook all.

 

 

Pressed Turkey

Otherwise known as “stuffed turkey.”  Another passionate favorite.

 

1 turkey (8-10 lb.)

3 lb. ground pork

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. pepper

1 small can of chopped pimento

3-4 oz. almonds, finely chopped

1/4 cup vinegar

1 cup sweet wine

1 green onion with stem, cut up

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

1 head of garlic

Salt to taste

 

Cook and bone the turkey.  Wash and rub with salt and pepper.

To the ground meat, add the other ingredients, except the herbs.  Mix well.  Stuff the turkey and sew it up.  Cook in a large pot with the herbs and salt.  Take out and press by wrapping it in a towel and leaving a heavy object on it; leave all night in the refrigerator to chill, thus weighted down.  Serve cold, sliced, with lettuce leaves and radish for garnish, and red sauce.

 

 

Rabbit a la Zihuamonte

 

1 rabbit

2 potatoes

5 cloves

2 green chiles

3 tbsp. oil

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 ancho chile

1/4 cup masa

Sprig of epazote

6 peppercorns

 

Cut up the rabbit.  Bake till golden.  Then put in a pot with water.  Add the potatoes, cloves and green chiles.

Cut up and fry the garlic and onion.  When colored, add the tomato and the rabbit.  Fry separately the dried chiles (seeded and ground).  Add some of the stock, thickened with the masa.  Stir.  Add the epazote and peppercorns.  Then add to the rabbit.

This dish is perfectly good made with chicken.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000a:38)

 

 

 

Charcuterie

 

If you are totally compulsive, here’s how to smoke meat Chiapas style: Build a box about 5′ square with a grill at the bottom.  Suspend hams and sausages within.  Put hot charcoal on the grill and cover with damp sawdust of pine and/or oak.  Leave till the meats take on the color of old gold.  This is a minimalist description.  I haven’t tried it.  Only someone who knows the tricks of the trade should make the attempt.  Naturally, the charcutiers have more elaborate equipment.

 

 

Chorizo

 

4 lb. pork leg

6 ancho chiles

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

2 tsp. pepper

1 head of garlic, peeled and mashed

Small cup vinegar

Salt to taste (a good deal is necessary)

Sausage skins

 

Grind the meat fine.  Seed and soak the chiles; blend and add.   Add the herbs and garlic, all ground, and the salt and vinegar.  Stuff the sausage skins thoroughly, making sure there are no air pockets or loosely filled places.  Dry or smoke the sausages.

As usual, you can just fry up the mix instead of making sausages with it.

 

 

Longaniza

 

4 lb. pork

3 heads garlic

2 tbsp. pepper

2 large tomatoes

Salt to taste (a good deal is necessary)

Sausage skins

 

Separate lean and fat pieces of pork.  Chop up.  Peel and mash the garlic; chop the tomatoes fine.  Mix all and stuff the sausage skins, making sure they are thoroughly stuffed (no air pockets or loose places).  Dry or smoke.

 

 

Moronga

 

2 quarts blood

1 large onion

2 tomatoes

1 piece of pork fat, ground

1/2 cut cooked rice

Fresh chile, to taste

Mint leaves

Salt to taste (a good deal is necessary)

Sausage skins

 

Heat the blood.  When thoroughly hot, add the other ingredients, all chopped fine or ground.  Stuff the sausage skins.  Boil the sausages half an hour.  Dry (best done in slow oven).  Even without drying, they will keep, refrigerated, for a long time.  Do not store unrefrigerated (even if dried).

 

 

Simple Paté

 

1/2 lb. liver

1/2 lb. pork

1/2 lb. beef

2 chicken breasts

1/2 cup milk

2 eggs

1 bread roll

4 oz. lard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook and grind the meats.  Fry the bread in the butter and soak in the milk; grind up.  Beat the eggs.  Mix all the ingredients and put into a greased mold that can be fitted into a bain-marie arrangement (easily jury-rigged with a couple of nesting saucepans).  Cover and simmer till cooked solid.  Chill, unmold, and serve sliced.

 

 

 

VEGETABLES
 

Baked Chayote

 

Scoop out the meat of a cooked chayote.  Mash with sugar, cinnamon, allspice and raisins.  Return to own shell.

 

 

Chiles in Escabeche

The same basic recipe is wonderful for wild mushrooms and other vegetables.  For these others (and even for the chiles, if you prefer), leave out the ginger and perhaps the cloves and cinnamon, and add more aromatic herbs and leaves.

 

2 lb. serrano chiles

1 quart vinegar

1 onion, cut up

1 oz. salt

10 cloves

1 stick cinnamon

10 peppercorns

Sprig of thyme

Sprig of oregano

Small piece of ginger

5 garlic cloves

4 bay leaves

5 tbsp. olive oil, preferably extra virgin (though that is rare indeed in Chiapas)

 

Wash the chiles and pierce them with a fork.  Boil the vinegar with the spices, adding the chiles when the liquid begins to boil.  Cook till they are olive-colored.

Fry the onion, garlic and bay leaves in the oil.

Put this in a jar and add the chiles and vinegar.

If this is to be sealed and stored, sterilize as with any canned vegetables; but it’s a great deal easier to leave it in the refrigerator.  Covered, it keeps indefinitely.

 

 

Scarlet Runner Beans

“Botil” to the Tzotzil Maya, for whom these beans are an important food.  These are large, mottled beans with a distinctive flavor.  Ordinary beans or dried limas can be substituted.  Use large beans that cook up soft but not mushy.

 

1 lb. scarlet runner beans

1 onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves

2 tbsp. flour

10 highland Chiapas chiles

5 tbsp. oil

Salt to taste

 

Wash the beans and soak overnight.  Cook for an hour.  Separately, fry the garlic and onion.  Separately (again), fry the chiles, adding the flour slowly.  Then combine all with the beans and simmer 15 minutes.

Any good dried chile will do.  The highland ones are small and hot, so adjust quantities (one really big New Mexico chile can equal to ten highland ones) and hotness.

 

 

Vegetables in Escabeche

 

1/2 lb. fresh chiles

1/2 lb. carrots

1/2 lb. summer squash

1/2 lb. onions

1 cauliflower

Sprig of thyme

Sprig oregano

4 bay leaves (or 2 bay leaves and 2 arrayan leaves)

1 quart vinegar

1 cup water

1 tbsp. sugar

5 tbsp. olive oil

15 black peppercorns

5 cloves garlic

Salt to taste

 

Cut the garlic and onion into strips and fry.  Cut up the other vegetables.  When the garlic and onion are fried golden, add the vinegar and herbs.  When this begins to boil, add the other vegetables.  Cook briefly; stop when vegetables are still firm.

This dish can be eaten as is, or kept to marinate.

Any mix of vegetables can be used.  Wild mushrooms are marinated the same way, and it is perfectly good for cultivated mushrooms as well.

 

 

White Beans

A nice vegetarian dish.

 

1 lb. white beans

1 ancho chile

1 small French bread roll

2 tomatoes

1 onion

3-5 serrano chiles, canned or fresh

1 small head of garlic

12 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. ground oregano

1/2 tsp. ground thyme

Oil and salt as needed

 

Wash beans and soak overnight.  Cook with the garlic and onion for 45 minutes.  Break up the bread and fry it with the chile (seeded and soaked), the onion and the tomato.  Add these to the beans, then add the spices.  Cook 15 minutes more.

 

 

Wild Mushrooms

 

2 lb. wild mushrooms

1/2 onion

2 lb. tomato

2 bell peppers

1 jalapeno chile, seeded

1 plantain, peeled and cut up

Lard

2 hojasanta leaves

Salt to taste

 

Wash the mushrooms and take off tough or spoiled parts.  Chop the ingredients.  Mix with lard and salt.

Lightly toast a banana leaf and lay the other ingredients on it.  Wrap all in a sheet of aluminum foil and steam 45 minutes.

The original recipe specified the local cusuche mushroom, but any flavorful mushroom does fine.  One can also leave out the plantain.

(based on Conaculta Oceano 2000a:49)

 

 

DESSERTS

 

Fruit Cheese

Peaches, apples, quinces, guavas and other fruit are preserved thus.  See Guava Paste recipe in Yucatan section.

 

Cut up, peel, core or seed and bring to boil.

Put in a colander and leave overnight.

Weigh the pulp.  Mix in sugar, equal to 2/3 of the weight.  (Use the remaining juice, strained out, for making jelly–or just drink it.)

Cook down, stirring constantly, till it begins to separate from the sides of the pot.  (Do this is a Teflon pot with a wooden spoon, unless you want  a fearful mess.)  Turn out into a pan, plate or dish, and cool till solid.

 

 

Sandy Cookies a la Chiapas

 

1 lb. flour

3/4 lb. sugar

3/4 lb. butter

6 eggs

1/4 cup lime juice

1 tbsp. lime zest

11/4 cup milk

1/2 tbsp. baking soda

 

Cream the butter, mixing in the sugar and then the flour.  Beat in the eggs, one by one.  After this, add the lime juice and zest, and, finally, the baking soda dissolved in the milk.

Butter a cookie dish or a mold and bake till golden.  This recipe is for little cakes made in molds, but is fine for cookies.

 

 

 

DRINKS

 

The favorite local drink is raw rum, known as aguardiente (“burning water”) in Spanish, and in Highland Maya as pox, which means “medicine.”  (As in Yucatec, x is pronounced sh.)  It has the color and taste of water and the kick of a team of Chiapas mules.  Alcoholism is a problem, so some of the Maya communities have been shifting from pox to cola drinks for ceremonial occasions.  A myth has been duly elaborated that cola has magic powers.  This has led to a new political tension: competition between suppliers of rival cola brands.

One of the great delights of San Cristobal is the punch, locally pronounced bonche, sold piping hot around the cathedral in the evening.  It dispels the mountain cold.  It consists of fruit cooked in water with spices, with pox added to taste.   Bonche may be basically hot pox with a bit of fruit, or a whole lavish fruit cocktail with just a splash of hot pox, or anything in between.

A mescal is made around Comitan from the local agaves; it is something of an acquired taste, being reminiscent of soap.

 

 

Anisette

 

1 quart aguardiente (vodka will do)

1 lb. sugar

1 oz. anise seeds

Heaping tbsp. fennel seeds

Ten drops of anise essence

1 tsp. nutmeg

 

Mix and leave three days (more if you want it stronger, but it gets bitter).  Strain and rebottle.

This makes a traditionally sweet, syrupy product.  There is no reason not to cut the sugar way down, to make it bearable to those with a less sweet tooth.

 

All of Chiapas’ many wonderful fruits are made into liqueurs by similar methods.  Take any fruit, macerate a bit if necessary, and steep in rum or vodka for a few days with a lot of sugar.

 

 

Bonche de Piña

 

1 pineapple

1/2 lb. sugar

1 stick cinnamon

1 piece ginger

10 allspice berries

2 1/2 quarts water

 

Mash the pineapple with water.  Add the other ingredients and cook.

Lace well with pox (or equivalent–any sort of rum is great).  Serve hot.

It is traditional to crumble up panque–pound-cake–into this, but the result is possibly a bit much for most non-Chiapans.

 

 

Bonche de Frutas

This is the fitting end of a Chiapan meal!  There is nothing like warming up with bonche on a cold, drizzly night in front of the Cathedral in San Cristobal.

 

As above, but instead of pineapple, use finely cut up fresh apple, guava, pear, and perhaps a peach; also prunes, raisins, and bits of sugarcane.

The fruits and spices vary a lot.  A cinnamon stick and some apple, guava and prunes are basic.

 

 

Chocolate with Egg

 

2 lb. cacao beans

2 lb. sugar

2 egg yolks

1 tbsp. ground cinnamon

 

Toast the beans on a comal till golden.  Take off the skins.  Grind in a metate with the sugar and cinnamon.  When finely ground, add the yolks, mix well, form into cakes and store.

If you aren’t cooking with a comal over an open fire, oven-roast the beans and grind them fine in a food processor (blenders don’t work for this).

Many people add finely ground almonds along with, or instead of, the yolks.

 

 

Sour atole

A Maya ritual drink.

 

2 lb. maize

1/2 lb. sugar

8 cloves

Cinnamon to taste

Water

 

Soak maize in water for three days, enough to produce some souring.  Then drain, grind, and mix with 3 quarts water.  Add the spices and cook, stirring constantly, till the atole thickens.

 

 

Tascalate

 

This is the traditional chocolate drink of south Mexico.  It is my personal favorite way to absorb chocolate.

 

Mix toasted corn meal, chocolate, achiote paste, and chile powder or cinnamon, to taste, in water.  Drink hot or cold.

This can be sweetened with honey or sugar, but traditionalists (among whom I number myself) prefer it with only the sweetness of the toasted corn meal.  Usually, the chile is used in the unsweetened version, the cinnamon in the sweetened.

 

Local pozole (maize drink) is made with chocolate and is similar.  (Pozole in the southeast is usually just cornmeal and water–not a rich stew as it is in north and west Mexico.)

 

 

TABASCO

 

 

BASICS

 

Pozol or “Chorote”

The staple food of much of Tabasco.  This recipe is given here for ethnographic interest, since few readers will be likely to prepare it.

 

2 lb. dried corn kernels

1/2 lb. cacao seeds, toasted and peeled

 

Cook the corn with lime (calcium oxide, not the citrus fruit) for a few minutes.  Try a grain to see if it peels easily by rubbing in the hands.  If not, continue cooking.  If so, take the corn and wash it several times, then return to flame and simmer.  This corn is known in most of Mexico as “nixtamal” (a Nahuatl word) but in Tabasco as “chegua.”

Grind the chegua.  Grind the chocolate very fine.  Add both to water.  Strain, using the strainer to beat the mix at the same time to make it foam up.  Cook, stirring constantly.  This can be flavored with achiote, vanilla, and the like.  Various tree flowers are used in Tabasco and neighboring regions.  In Tabasco and Chiapas there are flowers that create a marvelous foam when beaten with the chocolate.

 

 

Tostones de Platano

 

Boil plantains, mash, add some flour to hold together.  Let stand 20 minutes.  Flatten into potato-chip-thin cakes and deep-fry.

This makes a great appetizer, used like tortilla chips to spoon up dips.

 

 

Totopos

 

A large corn cake.  Shape masa into a cake a foot across and a finger thick, and grill.  This is a staple food.

 

 

 

TAMALES AND RELATIVES

 

Chaya Dumpling Soup

 

1/2 lb. chaya leaves

2 oz. bacon

1 small onion

1 egg (or 2 egg whites, if watching cholesterol)

1 small bread rolls or 2 slices bread, soaked in milk or water

Grated cheese

1 tbsp tomato paste

Oil

Parsley, and other herbs as desired (thyme and oregano recommended)

Stock (chicken or meat)

Salt and pepper to taste

1 1/2 cups cooked rice

 

Chop the chaya and the onion.  Save some of the onion.  Fry the rest, with the chaya, till soft.

Grind up the bacon, bread, herbs, and the rest of the onion.  Mix with the egg, cheese, tomato paste and chaya-onion mix.  Season and form into balls.

Set the soup stock to boil.  Add the rice and chaya balls.  Warm up.  Or, even better to my taste, you can serve the soup over the rice.

Simpler, commoner variant:  just mix the chaya-onion mix with nixtamal or bread crumbs to make the dumplings.

 

 

Chipilín Tamales (simple folk form)

 

2 lb. masa

1 bunch chipilín

1/2 lb. lard

Salt

Banana leaves

 

Prepare the masa as in the other recipes.  Wash, chop and mix in the chipilín leaves.  Proceed as in other recipes, cooking the masa-chipilín mix first (stirring constantly), then making tamales and steaming them for an hour.

 

 

Chipilín Tamales (festive form)

 

1 lb. masa

1/2 lb. chipilín leaves

1/4 lb. lard

Banana leaves (or functional equivalent)

1 lb. pork

2 tomatoes

1 bunch chives

1 small onion

 

Cook the pork in a little water, chop, and fry with the tomato, chives and onions, finely chopped.

Take the pork stock, stir in the masa, chipilín leaves and lard, with salt to taste.  Cook over low heat.  When thick, stir in the fried ingredients.

Wrap pieces of this mixture in banana leaves.  Steam ca. 20 min.

Serve with tomato sauce.

 

 

Garfish Tacos

 

1 roast garfish (or 1-2 lb. cod, baked till not quite done)

1/2 lb. tomatoes

1/2 lb. onions

Lime or bitter orange, cilantro and tabasco chile to taste.

Tortillas

 

Flake the fish and fry with the chopped tomato and onion.  Frying here means stir-frying or sautéing, not battering and deep-frying as for the Baja California fish tacos that have recently become popular in the United States.

Make tacos, adding the other ingredients to taste.  (The above are the Tabasco traditional add-ins, but of course you can add whatever you find necessary in a fish taco.)

 

 

Garfish Tamales, I

 

1 small roast garfish (2 lb.; or substitute 2 pounds of cod or similar fish)

1 onion

Vinegar

1/2 lb. tomatoes

1 chile güero (a hot yellow fresh chile), or other hot chile, chopped

1 large sprig of epazote

Salt to taste

4 1/2 lb. masa

2 lb. lard

3 bunches of banana leaves (or substitute)

Oil for frying

 

To roast a gar in the true Tabasco manner, pass a stick through the mouth and out the cleaning slit, and roast over a fire.  Failing that, grill or bake.

Flake the fish.

Chop the onion; marinate in the vinegar.  Add the tomato, flaked fish, chile, and epazote sprig.  Season with salt and leave to marinate.

Mix the lard (melted) into the masa.  Add enough water to make a rather thin paste.

Cook this, stirring constantly, until a drop of it put on a banana leaf holds together and flows down the leaf.

Make small tamales: spread a tablespoon of masa on a leaf, add a tablespoon of the fish mix, roll up, tie or fold to seal.  (If lazy, make bigger tamales.)

Steam the tamales for an hour.

 

 

Garfish Tamales, II

 

1 medium-sized garfish

1 lb. tomatoes

2 bell peppers

2 green onions or bunches of chives

1/2 tsp. oregano

2 lb. masa

1/2 lb. lard

2 tbsp. achiote paste

Salt and pepper to taste

Leaves for wrapping

Tabasco chiles (if you can stand them; mild chiles if you can’t)

 

Roast the garfish over charcoal or wood fire.  Skin and bone it.  Chop up a tomato, a bell pepper, and some of the green onion or chives.  Mix the salt, pepper, 1 tbsp. achiote and oregano with this.  Fry all, then add the fish and fry till all is integrated.

Mix the masa with lard and the rest of the achiote, and some salt and soup stock, till it makes a soft, smooth paste.

Carefully add in the fish mixture.  Wrap.

Steam for about two hours.

Make a salsa by chopping together the rest of the tomato, onion, bell pepper, and green onion and the Tabasco chiles.

 

 

Pork mone

Mone is a type of steamed meatball.  This one is traditional in wakes for the dead in the area of Torno Largo.

 

1 lb. ground or well-chopped pork

1 large tomato

1 small onion

1 mild chile

2 hojasanta leaves

Banana leaf

Salt to taste

Lard and water for cooking

 

Cut up the vegetables and one hojasanta leaf.  Mix with the meat and a little lard.

Lay out the other hojasanta leaf on the banana leaf.  Spread the mixture on it, roll up, and tie.

Put in water and simmer for an hour and a half.

Serve with roasted plantains.

Variants can be made using beef, variety meats, etc.

(Several other mone recipes are in Conaculta Oceano 2001c:18.)

 

 

Tamales in the Pot

 

1 lb. pork chops

1 chicken

1 tortilla

3 chiles

3 cloves garlic

4 tomatoes

1 onion

8 or 9 leaves epazote

Oregano, cumin seeds and achiote to taste

3 lb. masa

1 lb. lard

1 bell pepper

6 Tabasco peppers

1/2 lb. pepitas (pumpkin seeds)

Salt

 

Cut the meat into 10 portions.  Boil, putting in the pork first, later the chicken, till almost done.

Brown the tortilla.  Seed and roast the chiles and soak in hot water.  Cut up the garlic, two tomatoes, and half an onion and fry them with the seasonings.  Add the tortilla and chiles and blend, using some of the broth.

Cook the meats a bit more in this soup.

Mix the masa with the rest of the broth, the lard, and some salt.  Cook, stirring constantly.

Roast and peel the bell pepper, roast the rest of the onion, toast the Tabasco peppers, and blend with the rest of the tomatoes, for a salsa.

Toast and grind the pepitas, i.e. make sikil.

Take ten small pots.  Put in each a banana leaf.  Add a bit of the masa.  Put on this the meat mixture.

Bake for 20 minutes.

To serve, turn out on a plate, remove the leaf, and cover with the sauce and ground seeds.

 

 

 

SOUPS

 

Cowboys’ Stew

This uses the dried and salted beef of Tabasco, which cowboys carry for rations while riding the range.  The hot, humid climate depletes the body’s salt in short order, hence the need for extremely salty food.

 

2 lb. tasajo (dried salt beef, like jerky but saltier and a bit moister)

2 plantains

1/4 small winter squash

10 chaya leaves

1 mild green chile

1/4 onion

1 tomato

Parsley, chives, salt to taste

 

Boil the meat till tender.

Add the plantain (peeled and cut up), the squash (in pieces) and the chaya leaves (separately, and in that order, letting them cook a bit before adding the next item).

Roast the chile, onion and tomato.  Peel.

When all is cooked, add the chile, onion, tomato, parsley and chives.  Cook very briefly.

Those not riding the Tabasco range will want to soak the salt out of the meat first–or just substitute fresh meat.

 

 

Fish Soup with Hojasanta, I

 

In rich fish stock, cook a chunk of snook belly meat with one hojasanta leaf.

Tomatoes and Tabasco parsley make good additions.

 

 

Fish Soup with Hojasanta, II

“Mojarra” can be used for this, but it’s better with belly meat or steak of snook.  Any good firm white-fleshed fish will do.

 

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

1 xkatik chile

3 lb. white fish (whole, or fillet with bone and skin)

4 tender hojasanta leaves

6 black peppercorns

Oregano, salt and oil to taste (the oil is optional)

 

Chop very fine, or blend, the tomato and peppers.  Fry for sofrito.  Add water, the fish and hojasanta leaves and the other ingredients.  Boil till fish is just done.

 

 

Fish Soup with Hojasanta, III

Ingredients as above, plus one more tomato and an onion

 

Chop and fry the tomatoes, onion and peppers.  Put with fish in 3 cups water.  Add the spices.  Cut up the leaves and add.

 

This is especially recommended as a truly incomparable and extremely simple dish.  Almost any fish will do; a mixture of seafood is wonderful.  This is a recipe in which hojasanta can be readily replaced by finocchio, in which case you have something similar to Italo-Californian cioppino.

 

 

Fish Stew

 

2 lb. whole fish

3 cloves garlic

1 laurel leaf

3 carrots

3 small summer squash, preferably Mexican gray sq uash

1 tomato

6 small potatoes

1 chayote

1 small head cabbage

1 medium-sized onion

1 bunch cilantro

4 or more chaya leaves

2 small ears sweet corn

Salt to taste

Oil

 

Fillet the fish.  Make a stock by cooking the heads and bones for 20 minutes in water, with salt to taste.  Strain.

Chop the garlic and fry in 2 tablespoons oil.  Mash the tomato (in a blender or the like) and add.

Add in the vegetables, cut into chunks except for the potatoes, which should be whole and unskinned.  Cook till getting soft.

Add the fish fillets; cook for ten more minutes.  Mix in the mashed garlic and tomato.

Serve with white rice.  On the side, serve chopped green chiles, cilantro and onion.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:22)

 

 

Garfish soup

 

l large garfish

1 bitter orange

2 plantains

1 tomato

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

Oregano, cilantro, achiote, salt and oil to taste

 

Scrub the fish with the bitter orange, squeezing the juice out as you do so.

Set the plantains (peeled and chunked) to boil.  When almost done, add the fish, the tomato (cut up and fried in the oil), and the other ingredients.  Simmer till fish is done.

 

 

Plantain Soup

 

3 plantains

1 tbsp. vinegar

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

2 green onions (scallions)

10 peppercorns

Lard or oil

Salt

Chicken stock

1 small ranch cheese (a fresh, white, rather dry and salty cheese.  Look for queso ranchero at a Hispanic market, or substitute feta)

 

Boil the plantains and mash.

Blend the vinegar, tomato, bell pepper, and onions, and fry.  Grind the peppercorns and add in.

Mix in the plantain and salt.  Fry the paste again.

Mix in a bit of chicken stock to make a thick creamy texture.

Cut up the cheese and top the soup with it.

Variant: By using a vegetable stock, this becomes one of the few really good vegetarian dishes in the Tabasco file.

 

 

Seafood Soup

 

1/2 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

1/2 head garlic

1/2 lb. snook

1/2 lb. crabs in shell

1/2 lb. raw shrimp

1/2 lb. clams

1 tsp. oregano

1 1/2 quarts water

2 bay leaves (or more)

5 tbsp. olive oil

5 white peppercorns

Few capers and green olives

 

Blend the tomato, onion and garlic. Fry in the oil.

Add the water and boil.

Add the sea food and seasonings.  Cook till done.

When cooked, add in the capers and olives.

Serve hot with quartered limes on the side.

(It would be possible to shell the shrimp and crab first and make a stock with the shells.)

 

 

Shrimp Soup

 

In stock made by boiling many shrimps and shrimp shells, etc., cook shrimp, bits of chile, summer squash, and herbs (parsley, Tabasco parsley, cilantro, others to taste).

 

 

Snook Stew

 

4 large steaks of snook

4 garlic cloves

Oil or lard as necessary

1 small onion

1 bell pepper

1 tomato

2 hardboiled eggs (optional)

2 leaves of Tabasco parsley

1 tbsp. vinegar

Croutons (made from 8 slices of bread, cut up, toasted; optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil a quart and a half of water.  Add the fish; cook for five minutes, take it out, remove bones and skin.

Cut up, and fry, the garlic, onion, bell pepper, and tomato.

Add these to the water and boil.  Return the fish and seasonings to same and cook five more minutes.  Slice the eggs, add, cook five more minutes.  Serve with the croutons.

 

 

Soup for the Bridegroom

 

The Moors brought pilaf to Spain.  In Spanish it became known as a “sopa seca,” literally “dry soup.”  This is a Mexican development of the recipe.  The Moorish flavor–chicken with clove, cinnamon, pepper and so on–has been supplemented by characteristic Tabasco ingredients.

 

1 lb. rice

Breast meat, and (if you want) liver and gizzard, from 1 chicken

1 large tomato, cut up

1 bell pepper, cut up

3 garlic cloves, crushed

1 tbsp. cilantro, cut up

1 tbsp. Tabasco parsley, cut up fine

1 clove

10 peppercorns

1 stick cinnamon

1 sprig oregano (or 1 tsp.)

1 tbsp. achiote paste

1 tbsp. vinegar

Stock

Lard or oil

Salt to taste

 

Wash and soak the rice.

Boil the other ingredients and chop fine.

Fry all with the soaked (but uncooked) rice.  Add stock, to 1″ above the level of the rice mix.  Simmer till rice is done.

 

 

 

SEAFOOD

 

 

Bobo

“Choco” dialect for “catfish.”

 

1 large catfish

1 lime

2 leaves of hojasanta

4 leaves chaya

3 shallots

1 tomato

3 Tabasco chiles

1 garlic clove

Salt

Leaves of banana or the like, to wrap

 

Clean the catfish.  Rub with salt and lime.  Put on the hojasanta leaves.  Chop finely the chaya.  Blend the garlic, shallots, tomato and chiles.  Wrap all in the hojasanta leaves, rub with some lard, and wrap in the banana leaves.  Bake in moderate oven (350-375o) for half an hour.

 

 

Ceviche

 

2 lb. freshly caught fish (raw)

4 limes

1 tbsp salt

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1/4 cup cilantro

1 Serrano chile

1 tbsp olive oil

10 olives

2 avocados, sliced

 

Cut up the fish.  Cover with the lime juice and salt and let stand in a cool place for 4 or 5 hours.  Chop the vegetables finely.  Mix them and the other ingredients.

Ceviche is, of course, a universal Mexican delicacy; this is a Tabasco variant.  Any fresh sea food can be used (the more the better–a contrast in textures is desirable).  However, be absolutely certain the sea food is really fresh and from uncontaminated water.  Pollution has rendered Mexican seafood very dangerous when raw.  Sadly, Tabasco is one of the worst-polluted areas.

 

 

Drunken Fish

 

1 tomato

2 Serrano chiles (remove seeds and membrane)

4 allspice berries, powdered

Oregano to taste

2 or more bay leaves

1 glass of sherry

3 tablespoons vinegar

1/2 stick butter

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

1 large snook or other fish (whole or in steaks)

 

Blend the vegetables.  Add the wine, vinegar, bay leaves and spices, and a little butter.  Marinate the fish in this for half an hour.  Then add the rest of the butter, and the fish, and simmer (or bake) in a covered dish till sauce is mostly absorbed.

 

 

Fish in Adobo

Any firm but delicate white-fleshed fish is good for this.

“Adobo” is cognate with French “daube.”  It refers to a cooking process in which pieces of meat or fish are highly spiced and then simmered, or cooked in a casserole.

 

1 bream or similar fish, ca. 2-3 lb.

3 limes

1 onion

6 garlic cloves

10 cumin seeds

1 piece achiote (cube of paste or small bag of powder)

2 cloves

1/2 tsp oregano

8 peppercorns

2 oz. vinegar

1/2 cup oil

 

Clean the fish.  Slash diagonally.  Marinate for an hour in water with juice of one lime.  Then scrub the fish.  Blend the onion and garlic; add the achiote, and the spices, powdered.  Mix these with the oil and juice of the other 2 limes, and enough vinegar to make a paste.  Rub this over the fish.  Let stand one hour, then bake at 350o, basting with the sauce occasionally.

 

 

Fish in Hojasanta Leaves

 

2 lb. seabass or similar fish

1 tomato

2 (or more) laurel leaves

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 tsp. oil

Parsley leaves

Cilantro leaves

Tabasco parsley leaves

Chipilín leaves

Hojasanta leaves

Pepper, oregano and salt to taste

 

Rub the fish with the pepper, oregano and salt.  Add the tomato, bell pepper, and onion, all cut into strips.  Add the chipilín, chopped, and the oil.

Wrap in the hojasanta leaves.  Wrap the whole bundle in foil.   Bake at 350o till done (20-30 min.).

 

 

Fish in Paper (a simpler variant of the above)

 

For six persons:

6 pieces fish

6 cloves garlic

6 leaves of hojasanta

Salt and pepper to taste

10 green chiles

1 further clove garlic

1 slice of onion

 

Crush the garlic and spread it on the fish.

Roast the chiles and blend with the garlic clove and onion slice.  Briefly fry the mix in a little oil.  Spread this too on the fish.

Wrap each fillet in an hojasanta leaf, wrap the result in aluminum foil (or cooking paper), and bake at 350o.

 

Fish with Tabasco Parsley

 

1 fish or fillet, ca. 2 lb.

1 lime

Oil

1 large bunch of Tabasco parsley

3 peppercorns

1 garlic clove

1 cinnamon stick

1 slice of breaad

Salt and pepper to taste

Water to cook

 

Wash the fish and rub with lime, salt and pepper.  Cook in moderate oven, covering with the Tabasco parsley, pepper, garlic, cinnamon and moistened bread, blended, and fried in a little oil.

This dish is perfectly good with ordinary parsley.  Indeed, it is similar to dishes of Spain and other parts of Mexico that use ordinary parsley.

(Conaculta Oceano 2001c:31

 

Garfish in Chirmol

If you can’t get a garfish–or maybe even if you can–you might try this with any other firm-fleshed fish, whole or filleted.

 

1 garfish of ca. 3 lb.

3 thin tortillas

4 garlic cloves

1 large tomato

5 shallots

3 dried chiles

1 piece achiote (small cake or cube, or a small bag of achiote powder)

5 allspice berries

1/2 lb. masa

1/4 cup lard or oil

1 bunch epazote

A little oregano

Salt

 

Wash and clean the fish.

Toast the chiles; remove seeds and membranes.  Toast and crush the tortillas.  Roast the tomato, onion and garlic.  Fry and mash these together.  Grind the chiles and spices, and mix in.  Simmer to thicken.  Add the fish and enough water to cover.  Thicken the soup with the masa, add the lard, epazote, and oregano, and cook.

(Conaculta Oceano 2001c:32)

 

Fish with Tabasco Parsley

 

1 fish or fillet, ca. 2 lb.

1 lime

Oil

1 large bunch of Tabasco parsley

3 peppercorns

1 garlic clove

1 cinnamon stick

1 slice bread, moistened

Salt and pepper to taste

Water to cook

 

Wash the fish and rub with lime, salt and pepper.  Cook in moderate oven, covering with the Tabasco parsley, pepper, garlic, cinnamon and moistened bread, blended, and fried in a little oil.

This dish is perfectly good with ordinary parsley.  Indeed, it is similar to dishes of Spain and other parts of Mexico that use ordinary parsley.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:31

 

Garfish in Chirmol

If you can’t get a garfish–or maybe even if you can–you might try this with any other firm-fleshed fish, whole or filleted.

 

1 garfish of ca. 3 lb.

3 thin tortillas

4 garlic cloves

1 large tomato

5 shallots

3 dried chiles

1 small cube achiote, or achiote powder made up into paste

1 tsp allspice

1/2 lb. masa

1/4 cup lard or oil

1 bunch epazote

A little oregano

Salt

 

Wash and clean the fish.

Toast the chiles; remove seeds and membranes.  Toast and crush the tortillas.  Roast the tomato, onion and garlic.  Fry and mash these together.  Grind the chiles and spices, and mix in.  Simmer to thicken.  Add the fish and enough water to cover.  Thicken the soup with the masa, add the lard, epazote, and oregano, and cook.

 

 

Garfish in green sauce

 

1 garfish, ca. 3 lb.–or any other fish; this will work for anything, and almost any firm white-fleshed fish is better than a garfish unless you are a loyal Tabasqueño.

This recipe is a much-transformed descendent of a medieval Hispano-Moorish delicacy (see Introduction).  One wonders what the refined gourmets of old Grenada or Cordova would have made of a garfish—a living fossil biologically, and looks and tastes like it.

 

4 oz. chipilín leaves

4 oz. chaya leaves

2 oz. Tabasco chile leaves

1 chile xkatik

1 onion

5 cloves garlic

4 tsp. lard or oil

water

1/2 lb. masa

 

Wash the gar and cut in pieces.

Blanch and blend the leaves.  Take a slice off the onion and one from the chile; reserve for a minute.  Blend the remainder of these two items with the leaves.  Put the blended vegetables in pot with the gar, add salt (and water if necessary), and cook over a fairly low fire.

Fry the slice of onion and the slice of bell pepper.  Add to the rest.

Stir in the masa.  Cook till the whole turns from green to yellow; this should indicate doneness.

Tabasco chile leaves are widely but uncommonly used as a vegetable in Mexico.  (I have also seen them as a vegetable in parts of East Asia.)

 

 

Garfish Roasted

Possibly not the world’s most sophisticated recipe, but one of the very commonest in use in Tabasco.

 

1 garfish

5 shallots or onions

20 Tabasco chiles

Salt

2 limes

 

Roast the gar over coals.  Make a salsa of the other ingredients.

 

 

Piguas roasted

Recall that piguas are giant crayfish-like prawns.

 

2 lb. piguas, peeled

Juice of bitter orange

Salt, tabasco chiles, garlic, pepper.

 

Blend the condiments.  Paint the piguas with it; leave half an hour.  Cook in a covered pan or casserole dish till they become dry and golden.

 

 

Piguas with Garlic

See note on piguas, above.

 

4 large piguas

10 garlic cloves

10 ground peppercorns

2 limes

Salt to taste

 

Shell the piguas.  Mix the other ingredients and marinate the piguas half an hour.  Proceed as in previous recipe.  Cook very quickly.

This should be intensely garlicky.

Any large prawn or langostino will do as substitute.

 

 

Shrimp in Escabeche

 

2 lb. fresh shrimp

1/2 cup olive oil

4 tomatillos or tomatoes

6 yellow chiles, chopped

1 large onion

10 black peppercorns

6 laurel leaves

6 allspice leaves (if you can’t find any, use some ground allspice)

1/2 tbsp oregano

1 cup vinegar

10 garlic cloves

 

Peel the shrimp.  Fry in a bit of oil.  Add the other ingredients (except the vinegar), the spices ground, the leaves and vegetables chopped fine or less so according to taste.  Fry a bit more, then add the vinegar and boil till seasoned (a very brief time).

 

 

Shrimp in Green Sauce

That medieval green sauce again.

 

2 lb. shrimps

30 chaya leaves

4 garlic cloves

1 small onion

1 lb. masa

1/2 lb. lard

Leaves of chipilín

Salt to taste

 

Shell and clean the shrimp.

Blend the vegetables and cook with the shrimp.

Meanwhile, mix the masa with water to make a paste.  Mix into the shrimp.  Then mix in the lard and salt.  Cook.

 

 

Snook Casserole

 

Large snook (6 lb.)

1 laurel leaves

1 lime

Salt

2 onions

10 allspice berries

2 cloves

2 tomatoes

6 tbsp olive oil

Parsley, 1 bunch, chopped

1 jalapeno chile, cut up

2 tbsp lard

 

Boil the fish briefly with one laurel leaf, half a lime, salt, onion, allspice and cloves.  Pour off and save the water.  Fry the fish in a little oil in the same dish.  In a separate pan, take 4 tsbp oil, a chopped onion, then add the tomato, roasted and mashed.  When fried, add chopped parsley and 2 tbsp of the fish broth.  Add the fish and chile.  Put in a pan greased with butter.  Breadcrumbs can be added on top.  Bake for 10 minutes.

 

 

Snook steaks

 

2 lb. snook steaks

2 limes

1 1/2 tomatoes

2 sweet red peppers or, better, mild and flavorful red chiles

1 onion

Butter

Olive oil

Bottled chile pepper sauce (Mexican or Caribbean) if you can stand it

Allspice

Oil for frying

 

Season the steaks with lemon and salt.  Fry briefly in a little oil.

Slice the vegetables.  Fry in oil with chile sauce and ground allspice to taste.

Cover the steaks with this, wrap in aluminum foil and bake for 7 minutes.

 

 

Snook Stew

 

2 onions, sliced

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2 cups tomato, blended

1 bunch parsley, chopped

1 bunch oregano

1 bunch marjoram

Salt and pepper

2 cups water

2 lb. snook

 

Blend the vegetables and herbs, and fry.  Add to the water.  When they have boiled five minutes, add the snook, cut in pieces.  Cover and simmer 15 minutes.

 

 

Sole

 

1 sole, ca. 1 lb

3 tomatoes

1 onion

Cilantro

2 habanero chiles

Juice of 2 bitter oranges

Salt

 

Clean the sole, rub with salt and pepper, and grill.  Make the other ingredients into a sauce by chopping finely and adding the salt and orange juice.

 

 

Stuffed Snook Fillet

Wrap a thin snook fillet around shrimp, octopus bits, parsley.  Cover with local white cheese, crumbled.  Mask with a sauce of onion, tomato and chile, chopped and fried.

 

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Barbecued Ribs a la Tabasco

 

2 lb. pork rib slab

2 bitter oranges

Salt to taste

4 oz. black pepper

1 head garlic

1 onion

1 clove (or more)

1 pinch oregano (or more)

 

Marinate the slab in the juice of the oranges, and salt, for 8 hours.

Then mix in the other ingredients and marinate overnight.

Bake in oven till done.

Traditionally a dish of Jalapa, Tabasco, served with thick corn cakes of green corn.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:40)

 

 

Chanchac

Tabasco variant of a traditional Maya dish (Ts’anchak; see Yucatan section) made with deer when available.

 

2 lb. stewing beef or venison

2 oz. chives

2 oz. cilantro

2 oz. Tabasco parsley (or ordinary parsley)

1 small onion

1 bell pepper or mild chile

2 garlic cloves

3-5 whole allspice berries (or more to taste)

 

Cut the meat into cubes, for soup, and boil till meat is tender.  Chop the vegetables.  Add these and the seasonings to the soup and cook till just done.  Eat with relish of chopped cilantro, onion and hot chile marinated in lime juice.

 

 

Chile pepper stuffed with meat

 

1 lb. lean pork

2 garlic cloves

6 cloves

2 onions

2 oz. oil

15 black peppercorns, ground

1 stick cinnamon

3 tbsp vinegar

1/2 tsp sugar

2 oz. raisins

5 egg whites, beaten to meringue

Ca. 5 bell peppers to stuff

1 bell pepper or mild large chile

1 large tomato

1/2 tsp oregano

Small bit of achiote

 

Boil the meat with one of the garlic cloves and the 6 cloves.  Take out, saving the water.  Mince the meat fine.  Chop the other garlic clove, and one onion, very fine and fry.  Add in the meat.  Grind the spices and add, along with the vinegar and sugar.  Mix these and the raisins into the meat.

Roast, peel and seed the stuffing peppers.  Stuff them, roll in the egg white and a bit of flour, and fry.

Meanwhile, make a soup of the water by blending up some onion, bell pepper, tomato and oregano, frying, adding to the water, and seasoning to taste with achiote or the like.  If desired, add masa to thicken.

Pour this sauce over the peppers and finish cooking (very briefly; just warm them up together).

If you don’t want to fry these, you can treat these as they would be treated in the Near East: leave off the egg whites and bake these in a casserole dish.

(In this case, they are baked in the sauce.)  This is healthier and, to our taste, better.

This is originally a Near Eastern dish, made with Mediterranean vegetables.  The Spanish brought it to Mexico and adapted it to local ingredients.  Variants of it are found all over Mexico.

 

 

Chirmol

 

Meat (beef, pork, deer…), marinated in bitter orange juice, garlic and salt 2 hours

5 dried ancho chiles

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 piece achiote

8 allspice kernels

10 black peppercorns

1 pinch oregano

5 toasted tortillas

6 tbsp lard

1 spring epazote

8 roasted garlic cloves

 

Briefly roast the meat over charcoal or flame.  Then add to water and boil.

Vein and seed the chiles.  Roast these, the tomato and the onion; peel.  Blend.  Fry these in the lard.  Grind up the other ingredients.  Add these and the boiling stock from the meat.  Add the epazote.  Simmer till somewhat thick.  Add the meat and serve.

The Tabasco version of a Maya classic.  No doubt some form of it—without the black pepper and garlic—was central to feasts in Palenque and Yaxchilan in their glory days.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:43)

 

 

Chocolomo

“Choco lomo” is a “mestiza-Maya” name: choko means “hot” in Maya, while “lomo” is the Spanish for “loin roast.”  This is basically a Yucatan dish (see Yucatan section), but has spread all over southeast Mexico.

 

2 lb. beef, cut up

1 beef heart, cut up

1 beef brain

1 beef kidney, prepared (see below)

2 garlic cloves

1 purple onion

1 bell pepper

20 black peppercorns

1 tsp. oregano

2 tsp. vinegar

1 tomato

 

For salsa:

1 bunch radishes

Cilantro

White onion

Bitter orange juice (or lime juice or vinegar)

 

Prepare the kidney: soak overnight in refrigerator; discard water; cut up the kidney, trimming off and discarding all membranes and white fibrous parts.

Boil the meats with the garlic, onion (quartered), bell pepper, tomato, and peppercorns.  When meat is close to done, add the oregano and vinegar.

Add the brains toward the very end of the cooking process, and simmer a while.  (If cooked too long or on too hot a fire, they fall apart.)

For the salsa: cut the ingredients fine.  Add the juice.

Kidneys are hard to get and rarely prepared now, in Mexico or the United States.  This is a pity; they are very good if prepared correctly.

 

 

Green Sauce (for use on any boiled meat)

 

Cilantro

Chipilín (or alfalfa sprouts or pea tendrils)

Chile leaves

Tender hojasanta leaves

1 onion

2 tomatillos

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

Meat

Masa to thicken

 

Use equal quantities of all the leaves–weight of each about equal to the weight of the onion.  Blend all the ingredients.  Add to the broth of whatever meat is being used.  Cook, stirring to prevent sticking and burning.  Cut up the meat and add, allowing it to boil once more.  Serve immediately, or it may lose the green color.

Tabasco or regular parsley can be added, or other green leaves that work well.

It is desirable to blanch the chipilin before blending up.

 

 

Meatballs

 

2 lb. beef

1 lb. pork

1 tomato

1 onion

l bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

2 eggs

4 leaves of Tabasco parsley

1 ball of masa (i.e. about half a cup)

1 piece of achiote (cube of paste, or small bag of powder)

1 tbsp viinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Grind the meats (or just use ground meat from the store) and mix with the garlic, pepper, salt and vinegar.  Leave a while.  Meanwhile, blend the tomato, onion, bell pepper, garlic and salt.  Fry this in lard or oil.  Add a pint of water to form a broth.  Add the achiote and masa.  When boiling, mix two raw eggs with the meat mixture and forming the meatballs.  Add these to the broth, with the parsley leaves (whole, separate).  Boil about half an hour.

 

 

Planked Pork Leg

 

1 pork leg (fresh ham), ca. 6 lb.

1/2 lb. Spanish-style ham

1/4 lb. prunes, soaked and mashed

1/4 glass vinegar

1 pint red wine

1 tomato

1 onion

1 bell pepper

1/2 head garlic

10 black peppercorns

1 spring thyme (or a good deal of powdered thyme)

1 bay leaf

8 allspice berries, or 1 tsp allspice powder

Marjoram, salt, and cinnamon to taste

 

Remove fat from the leg.  Chop or blend up the other ingredients and rub into the leg, sticking it with a fork to allow the spices to penetrate.  Bake.  Then sprinkle with sugar and roast in a hot fire.

The original recipe called for sodium nitrate to preserve the pork in Tabasco’s tropical climate.  No need for that now.

 

 

 

Tabasco Stew

 

1 lb. stewing beef

1 lb. beef ribs

1 lb. soup bones

1/2 head of garlic

1 bunch fresh oregano

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

1 onion

1 bunch cilantro

2 ears of sweet corn

2 chayotes

2 macal tubers

1 manioc tuber

1 summer squash

2 plantains

6 chaya leaves

Salt

 

Cut the meat in pieces.  Put in plenty of water and boil.  Add salt and garlic.  Skim the broth.  When the meat is tender, chop and fry up the garlic, oregano, tomato, bell pepper and onion; peel and cut up the other vegetables; add all to the soup.  Cook till nearly done, then add the cilantro and simmer a bit longer.  Serve with white rice.

Macal is a Maya root crop similar to taro.  Potatoes are perfectly good in this in place of macal and manioc.

 

 

Tasajo with Chaya and Plantains

 

1 lb. tasajo (dried salted meat)

4 oz. chaya

2 plantains, peeled and chunked

3 tomatoes

1 bell pepper

1 small onion

1 bitter orange

Oil for frying

Water

 

Soak the meat in several changes of water.  Then boil it till it softens.

Separately boil the chaya and plantains.

Cut the meat finely, as for hash, and fry till browning.  Add the tomato, pepper and onion, all finely cut up, and then the chaya and plantain, also finely cut up.

Add the juice of the bitter orange.  Cook a little longer.  (The earlier in the process you add the orange juice, the less orange flavor it retains but the more it adds sourness to the whole.  Thus, you can vary the final product to taste.)

 

 

 

POULTRY

 

 

Black-bellied Whistling-duck

 

2 ducks

2 garlic cloves, mashed

1 tomato

1 onion

1 Tabasco chile

10 peppercorns

1 cloves

Oregano

Salt to taste

1 cube achiote

Juice of 1 bitter orange

3 tbsp lard

 

Boil the ducks with salt and garlic till they become slightly tender.

Chop the vegetables and grind the spices.  In a casserole dish, heat the achiote till it softens, then add the orange juice.  Add the lard, fry the other ingredients.  Add the ducks; cover and simmer till they are golden.

As noted above, use ordinary duckling for this.

 

 

Polish chicken

A festival dish in Tabasco.  The connection with Poland seems pure fantasy, though a tenuous connection via the cabbage and tomato sauce may be implied.

 

2 chicken breasts

A quarter of a cabbage head, chopped fine

1 garlic clove, chopped

Oil

3 tomatoes

2 peppercorns

2 cloves

1 (or more) laurel leaf

1 sprig of thyme, or 1 tsp ground or crushed thyme

1 small can of chipotle chiles

1/2 onion, sliced

Salt to taste

Tomato sauce–just blend up a tomato and spice it

 

Fry the chicken, cabbage and garlic until lightly browned.

Blend the tomato, spices, and chipotle.  Add to the chicken.  Add the onion, and salt to taste.  Cook dry, then add the tomato puree and cook till done.  Serve with tortilla chips.

 

 

 

VEGETABLES

 

 

Chaya Salad

 

2 lb. chaya

1/4 onion, sliced

Salt, pepper and lime to taste.

 

Boil and cut up the chaya.  Mix with the other ingredients.

One can add other vegetables, and/or herbs.

 

 

Chaya with Squash

Special recognition for a superior vegetarian dish.

 

1 lb. chaya

1 lb. Mexican summer squash

1 chopped onion

3 chopped tomatoes

1 cup sweet corn kernels

Salt, pepper and chile to taste

 

Cook the chaya and chop.  Cut up the squash.  Fry the chaya, squash, onion, tomato and corn for about 20 minutes or till well cooked.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2001c:48)

 

 

Chayote Stew

 

3 chayotes

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

1 tomato

1 chile

Bunch of cilantro

Oil

 

Wash and peel the chayotes.  Cut in quarters.

Heat oil in a pan.  Add the onion, garlic and tomato.  Fry a while, then add the chayote.

Cover and cook till the chayote is done, then add the chopped chile and cilantro.

 

 

Chaya with Plantain

 

1 lb. pork rib roast or other cut, for boiling

Chaya to taste (1/2 to 1 lb.)

4 plantains

3 tomatoes

1/2 onion

Achiote to taste (1-2 tbsp. recommended)

 

Cook the pork.  When tender, add the chaya and plantain (cut up).

Cut up the onion and tomato and fry, adding in the achiote.  Then add to the meat and boil.

A rib slab is good for this dish in south Mexico, where pork is meaty and not always tender.  Americans will probably want to save the rib slab for barbecue and use a tougher, more boiling-oriented cut here.

 

 

Chayote Torta

 

10 chayotes

5 eggs

2 oz. raisins

2 tbsp. butter

1 cup lard (this can be cut down, or even left out, for a low-fat version)

2 cups sugar

Salt to taste

 

Boil, peel and mash the chayotes.

Mix the other ingredients into this paste.

Bake in a greased mold at 350o for about 20 minutes (until browning on top).

“Torta” is cognate with French “torte,” but the Spanish word means several quite different things: sandwiches, omelets, and baked egg dishes like the following.  These egg dishes are of Moorish origin (compare the Persian kuku dishes).

 

 

Guacamole a la Tabasco

 

2 avocados

4 hot chiles

Juice of 1 bitter orange or 2 limes

2 tbsp olive oil (optional)

1 onion, chopped fine

6 peppercorns, ground

 

Peel and slice the avocados.  Roast, peel, seed and mash the chiles.  Mix these with the bitter orange juice, and then mix in all the other ingredients.  Serve, garnished with raw onion rings and the like.

 

 

 

DESSERTS

 

Atole

A version of the standard Mexican corn drink.  Various atoles and pozoles are the staple food of much of Tabasco.

 

1 lb. masa

3 pints milk, scalded

3 pints water

Pinch of cinnamon or anise

Sugar to taste

 

Dissolve the masa in the water.  Strain through a colander.  Add the milk and spices.  Simmer, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes.  If too thick, add water to dilute.

This can be made with chocolate also: dissolve one tablet of Tabasco chocolate in the atole as it cooks.

Variants can be made with cooked corn meal or sweet corn.

 

 

Champurrado

 

1/2 lb. masa

3 pints water

1/2 lb. brown sugar

4 oz. chocolate

 

Make as for atole.

 

 

Chaya and Plantain Upside-Down Cake

 

1 1/2 cups butter

2 1/2 cups sugar

2 plantains

8 pitted prunes

5 eggs

2 cups flour

3 tsp. baking powder

1 can evaporated milk

Vanilla

3 cups cooked and chopped chaya

 

In a cake mold, put 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, slices of plantain, and prunes.

Beat a cup of butter with the rest of the sugar, mixing in the eggs one by one.

Mix the flour and baking powder.  Mix this into the above.  While mixing it in, add slowly the milk (mix the vanilla into the milk) and the chaya.

Turn the mix into the mold.

Bake at 325o for 1 hour.  Let stand till cool.  Turn out onto a plate.

If worried about cholesterol, you can use half as much butter, and 7-8 egg whites (discarding the yolks).  Do not, however, use margarine or oil instead of butter.  It won’t work.

 

 

Chocolate Made at Home

This recipe is offered for interest.  It’s too much work for a result that is inevitably inferior to good commercial chocolate (unless you have industrial equipment).  It would almost be easier, and certainly more fun, to go to Tabasco and get chocolate there.  It is sold there in many forms, from raw seeds to pure bitter chocolate to the elaborate, spiced chocolate tablets described here.  I prefer the straight bitter chocolate.

This recipe is a standard way to make the chocolate tablets typical of Tabasco.  However, for real chocolate tablets, you have to ferment the beans, and that is an expert technical job out of the reach of the ordinary cook.  You can get raw beans in Central American markets and try this yourself, roasting the beans like almonds in an oven, till they are just brown.  Raw beans are hard to work with–the line between too raw and too burnt is a fine one, and only an expert can roast them properly.  Also, they have a different taste from processed chocolate.

 

2 lb. cacao beans (seeds of the cacao tree)

1 lb. English-style biscuits (similar to nonsalty crackers or not-very-sweet cookies)

4 oz. almonds

1 1/2 lb. sugar

4 oz. cinnamon sticks

5 egg yolks

 

Heat a griddle.  On this, heat the cinnamon and then pulverize it.  Then toast the cacao beans until browned.  Peel and grind up.  Soak the almonds in hot water, peel, and toast till golden.

Blend the yolks, almonds, sugar and biscuits.

Mix all the above and pass through mill again.

Form into the characteristic Mexican chocolate tablets: flat disks 2″ to 3″ across and about 1/8″ to 1/4″ thick.

Break up one of these and mix with hot water, for cocoa.

 

 

Cocoyol fruits

The hard, sour fruits of a local palm tree.  They are only marginally edible even after this treatment, but they were often the only fruit around; they crop in the worst droughts, and were a famine staple in the old days.  They remain popular.  This product is thus of solely local appeal, but is added for ethnographic interest.

 

50 cocoyoles

4 cones of raw sugar (i.e. about 2 lb.)

 

Wash the cocoyoles a long time.  Cook in water.  Add the sugar and cook down to a thick syrup.

 

 

Grapefruit Conserve

 

6 lb. grapefruit

3 or more lb. sugar

 

Grate the peel, separating the white inner part.  Remove, but save, the membranes, seeds, etc., saving the pulp and juice.  Mix these latter with the sugar.

Boil these.  Put the white peel, membranes and seeds in a cheesecloth bag and cook with the rest until the syrup starts to thicken.  Then take out this bag and squeeze the juice out of it, back into the pot.

Add the peel and cook 10 minutes.

Put into jars, seal and label.

If properly canned (check that the seal is tight) this will last three months.  Of course, you can store it in the refrigerator for quite a long time without an airtight seal.

 

 

Guava ears

 

2 lb. lemon guavas (guayavas)

2 lb. sugar

Juice of 3 limes

1-3 fig leaves

 

Cut the guavas in half and remove the seeds.  As this is done, put each guava half in the lime juice, to prevent browning and add flavor.

Meanwhile, prepare a syrup: boil a quart of water with the fig leaves.  (These make the syrup thicker and stickier, but can be dispensed with.)  Then add the sugar.

When this syrup thickens, add the guava halves.  Cook down till syrup is thick, stirring frequently.

(cf. Conaculta Oceano 2001c:52, which adds 4 cinnamon sticks)

 

 

Monkey Ears

 

Same recipe as above, but using small wild papayas instead of guavas, and panela (Mexican brown sugar) instead of white sugar.  The fig leaves provide an enzyme that tenderizes the papayas.  The cinnamon can be omitted.  This is a very characteristic Tabasco sweet.  The wild papayas are sharp and sour, counteracting the sweetness of the syrup.

 

 

Orange Cake

 

1 lb. cake flour

Grated peel (zest) from 1 orange

Zest of 1 lime

2 tsp baking powder

10 oz. butter

6 oz. sugar

4 eggs + 4 egg whites

1/4 tsp salt

6 oz orange juice

Orange marmelade

1 packet of confectioners powdered sugar

 

Mix the flour, zests and baking powder.

Separately, beat the butter and sugar until creamy.  Add in the whole eggs one by one.

Beat in the flour, salt, and orange juice, adding alternately, little by little.

Grease two cake molds and pour in the batter.  Bake 45 minutes at 350o.

Use the orange marmelade between the two layers.

Top with meringue of the beaten egg whites and powdered sugar (or any other frosting desired).

 

 

Tascalate

 

3 large tortillas, without salt

2 tablets of Tabasco chocolate

Cinamon stick

Water

Small amount of achiote powder or dissolved paste (optional, but usual)

Sugar or chile powder to taste

 

Toast the tortillas in low heat until very crisp but not brown.  (Beware–they go from moist to burned with almost no intermediate stage.  Watch them like a hawk.  In South Mexico they are often just sun-dried.)  Then crush them with the chocolate and cinnamon.  Add to water and sweeten to taste.  This can be drunk as is, but is better cooked a minute and cooled.

An easier variant, universal in Chiapas and southwest Mexico, uses toasted corn meal.

The combination of chocolate and chile is traditional, and I much prefer chile powder to sugar in this recipe.  Tascalate is a very refreshing drink, and making it too sweet ruins it.

 

 

 

 

Mayaland Cuisine: Yucatan

October 10th, 2016

MAYALAND CUISINE

E. N. ANDERSON

 

Dedicated to

Doña Elsi, Doña Zenaida, Doña Noemy

Doña Aurora, Doña Elide and Don Felix,

and all the other teachers

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Yucatan and Quintana Roo                               3

 

Campeche                                                       85

 

Chiapas                                                           97

 

Tabasco                                                           128

 

 

 

Preface

This work consists of the recipes lying behind the book K’oben by Amber O’Connor and E. N. Anderson (Rowman and Littlefield 2017).  Originally, the present work (Mayaland Cuisine) had a large component of regular text, introducing and explaining the Maya world and Maya food.  All that material was updated, fleshed out, and incorporated in K’oben.  The recipes, however, were very thinly represented, so here they all are together.  Enjoy!

Gene Anderson, Riverside, CA, 2016

 

YUCATAN AND QUINTANA ROO

Culinary Specifics

An important characteristic of Yucatecan cuisine is that onions and garlic often roasted.  The distinctive taste of thoroughly roasted and mashed onion or garlic is one of the real “signature flavors” of Yucatan.  Traditionally, they are roasted over an open flame till the skins begin to blacken and the inside begins to soften.  It should be soft enough to mash easily—no more than that.  In the kitchen, the broiler does the best job.  You can also bake them, or roast them in a covered frying pan.

The other recipe chapters of this book are arranged in a traditional cookbook fashion, but I have taken the liberty of arranging this chapter according to local thinking, since it makes the task of explaining everything a good deal easier.  I begin with basic maize staple foods.  Then follows a section for recados.  Then come relishes and salsas.  Then tamales and related foods.  Only then do I move on to the traditional soups, fish, flesh, fowl, desserts, and drinks.

Critical to Yucatecan food are recados (from Spanish recaudo, “collection”), called xak’, “mix,” in Maya.  These are homemade or bought in the market in bulk or in cubes.  These cubes are sometimes found in North American markets that have a Caribbean clientele, but should be avoided unless you know your spices well.  In the United States, cubes of recado and of achiote paste are sometimes adulterated or stale.  Thus, in the following recipes, when the recipe calls for a cube, use a cubic inch of homemade recado.

A special section of the following is devoted to recados.

 

One recipe needs to be here, as it is basic to tamales and much else that follows:

 

Maya Lard

Take fat cuts of pork.  Chop fine and fry over low heat, adding some water.  Stir to avoid sticking.  Or: cut into larger chunks and bake (adding water) in moderate oven till the drippings are rendered out and the meat is quite dry.  In either case, enough water must be added so that the meat juices do not cook out or dry up.  The goal is a mix of fat and meat juices, not just fat.

 

 

BASIC MAIZE FOODS

 

Bread of the Milpa

 

This is a ritual dish for the Food of the Milpa (janlikool) and Praying for Rain (ch’a’ chaak) ceremonies.  The number 13, the masa, and the sikil were all sacred to the ancient Maya.  The thirteen layers represent the thirteen layers of the cosmos.  These breads are sometimes marked with sacred designs in achiote-colored oil or stock, as well as with sikil.

The dish is included here for ethnographic interest.  The culinary interest is slight.

 

2 lb. masa

2 cups cooked beans (black-eyed peas or black beans) (optional)

6 oz. sikil

Salt

Banana leaves

 

Make thick tortillas of the masa.  Stack them with layers of sikil and beans in between, till they are seven tortillas high (13 layers in all).  Wrap in banana leaves and cook in pib.

 

Variant:  Piim waj

Maya for “thick corncake.”  Sometimes reduplicated (pimpim) or translated into Spanish as gordita.

 

Make a giant tortilla: 1 foot across and 1/4″ thick.  Wrap in leaves and bake in pib.  Or it can be cooked, unwrapped, on a griddle.

This is much better if the masa is mixed with lard, as for tamales, especially if you are cooking it on the stovetop.

It is even better if mixed with cooked beans (black-eyed peas are the traditional ones), including their liquid.  In this case it has to be wrapped and baked (in oven, about 350o, if no pib is at hand).  It is then eaten with Tomato or Chile Sauce.

 

 

Is Waj (“Corncake of New Maize”)

 

Market version:

Grind up new maize (cut from ears of sweet corn) and leave standing for a few days until very slightly sour.  Add salt and make into very thin tortillas.  Cook till crisp.

More sophisticated version:

1 cup white flour

1/2 cup lard

Kernels from 3 roasting ears, cut off close

1/4 tsp. baking soda

Salt

 

Grind kernels.  Mix with other ingredients.  Make into very thin tortillas and cook on griddle.

Kernels from really young, tender sweet corn are really too soft for this; one needs kernels with some substance.  The Maya eat young corn at the stage that in my youth was called “roasting ears”—the kernels still tender, but somewhat more starchy than the sweet-corn stage.  One can use tender sweet corn kernels, however, by reducing the quantity somewhat, so the resulting dough is firm enough to make good tortillas.

Variant: common is a sweet version, using sugar instead of salt.

 

 

Saka’ (Sak ja’, “white water”: Corn gruel)

The other staple food–along with waj.

The ancient saka’ is just corn meal or mashed new corn in water.  Today, the word usually means pozole:  Wash nixtamal kernels (available in Mexican markets).  Boil till they break open.  Drain.  Grind and form into a ball the size of a tennis ball.

Variant:  Fry or toast the nixtamalized kernels before grinding.

For consumption, the ball is dissolved in water, stock, or soup.  The simple rural method is to dissolve in water with salt and chile.

To approximate saka’: Cook a small amount of “Maseca” or other prepared Mexican corn meal in good stock, stirring constantly.

Similar preparations are made by processing the maize in slightly different ways.  Sikil can be mixed in and the resulting atole cooked.

Fancy pozole or atole: Grind fresh green corn.  Mix with sugar.  Coconut cream can be mixed in if desired.

Ground toasted corn kernels, made into a drink, are pinole.  (Pozole, pinole and atole are Nahuatl words; saka’ is the basic Maya word.)

 

 

 

RECADOS

 

These are the soul of Yucatecan cooking.  It is essential to make your own recados, unless you can get to a major public market in Yucatan.

To make a recado, grind all the ingredients very fine, and moisten with enough vinegar or bitter orange juice to make a solid paste, adding salt to taste.  Failing bitter orange juice, use lime juice or a mix of orange and grapefruit juice (do not use bottled bitter orange juice preparations).

In Yucatan, you can get a spice mix called xak’. (This just means “mix” in Maya, and is also used for the recados themselves.)  The pre-made spice mix typically involves a cinnamon stick, 1 tsp. cloves, 1 tsp. pepper, 2 tsp. oregano, 1/4 tsp. cumin, and 1 tsp. allspice.  (Naturally, these ingredients are variable.)  All these are ground fine.  Then all you have to do is add achiote paste and you have your recado.

 

 

Achiote Paste

 

Bring achiote seeds to boil, in water.  Drain and soak overnight in vinegar, bitter orange juice or lime juice.  Blend.  It takes a tough blender to make these hard seeds into a paste.  A stone mortar and pestle is preferable, but then the preparation takes a strong arm and a lot of pounding.

 

 

Black Recado

 

2 ancho chiles or other dark dried chiles

1 tsp. allspice

1/2 tsp. cumin

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 tbsp. achiote paste

2 garlic cloves

2 tsp. oregano

Citrus juice or vinegar

 

Roast the garlic cloves.  Seed and toast the chiles.  They should darken enough to make the recado quite dark.  Grind all.  In Yucatan the chiles are actually burned to a glossy black, but this kills the taste of the chiles.  It also has to be done outdoors, standing upwind, since the vapors of burning chile peppers are seriously dangerous to eyes.

Variant: the garlic is not always roasted.

 

 

Hot Recado

 

2 tbsp. dry chile

4 allspice berries

8 epazote leaves

1/2 tsp. black pepper

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. achiote

Vinegar or bitter orange or lime juice to make thick paste

 

 

Mole Recado

 

2 ancho chiles

3 pasilla chiles

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

3 cloves

Half tbsp. sesame seeds

3 garlic cloves

Bitter orange or lime juice to make thick paste

 

 

Recado for cold meat

 

3 allspice berries

1/2 tsp. black pepper

3 cloves

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

1 roasted head of garlic

Pinch of saffron (optional)

Ground dry chile to taste

Vinegar, bitter orange juice, or lime juice to make paste

 

Spread on the meat or mix in with it.

 

 

Red Recado

This is the standard–the Universal Seasoning of Yucatan.

 

1 tbsp. achiote paste (more in Quintana Roo, often 3 tbsp.)

1 tsp. (or more, to taste) black pepper

1 tsp. dry oregano leaves, crushed

1/4 – 1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

2-4 cloves

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

3 garlic cloves, slowly roasted till soft

Bitter orange juice (or substitute) to make thick paste

 

Prepare as with above.  Variants:  Allspice is often added—about 4 berries.  Garlic can be unroasted.  Coriander seeds (very few) can be added, but are rare in Yucatan.  Naturally, everyone varies the amounts slightly.

A village recado would be heavier on the achiote, garlic, and oregano, which everyone grows in the yard, and much lighter on the expensive store-bought spices (cloves, cinnamon, cumin, pepper).

 

 

Roast Garlic Recado

 

20 large garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

1 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. cloves

2 tsp. oregano

Bitter orange or lime juice

 

Roast the garlic (broiling in oven, or over open flame).  Peel and mash. Grind the spices.  Mix with enough bitter orange juice or equivalent to make a paste.

Variant: use some unroasted garlic, and/or a roasted onion.

 

 

Steak Recado

 

1 tbsp. black pepper

3 garlic cloves

2 tsp. oregano

Vinegar (recommended for this one) or bitter orange juice or lime juice, to make thick paste

 

Some steak recados add allspice, cinnamon and cumin—very little of each, say about 1/4 tsp.

 

 

Spicy Recado

 

1 tbsp. pepper

1 small stick cinnamon

4 cloves

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. oregano

1 pinch saffron

Bitter orange juice or lime juice, to make thick paste

 

 

Tamale Recado

 

1 tbsp. black pepper

3 allspice berries

5 epazote leaves

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. achiote

ground dry chile

Vinegar or bitter orange juice or lime juice to make thick paste

 

 

White Recado

Not called for in any of the following recipes, but great in soup or stew, especially with turkey.

 

1 tbsp. black pepper

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. oregano

2 cloves

1 pinch cumin seeds

1 pinch saffron

1/4 tbsp. cilantro seeds

Coriander seeds (optional)

Vinegar (white vinegar is ideal here; citrus juice is not recommended for this one)

 

 

APPETIZERS AND SALSAS

 

Basic relish to eat with Maya food:

 

1 bunch radishes

Few leaves cilantro

Chopped onion and/or garlic, to taste (optional)

1 fresh green chile or one habanero chile (if you can stand it–the taste is much better, but habaneros are almost unbearable to the uninitiated)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Chop the radishes and other ingredients and marinate in bitter orange juice or lime juice.

Chopped tomatoes can be added.

 

Botanas (snacks to eat with drinks)

A typical selection might include:

onion, garlic and tomato stir-fried and then mixed with cilantro and sikil

Cucumbers, onions, cilantro, radishes, cut up, in vinegar

Boiled potato cubes with onion, cilantro, vinaigrette

Ceviche (raw fish and shellfish bits marinated in lime juice with cut-up chiles and tomatoes and onions, with salt and black pepper)

 

 

Ha’ Sikil P’ak (“Water, sikil and tomatoes”—a nice descriptive name)

 

2 tomatoes

1 red onion

Few sprigs cilantro

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1/2 cup sikil
Chile habanero to taste

Salt to taste

 

Roast and peel tomatoes.  Chop these with cilantro and onion.  Add the bitter orange juice.  Stir in the sikil, then the habanero.  This should be a thick paste.  Serve for dipping up with tortilla wedges.

 

 

Habanero Salsa

 

1 onion

5 garlic cloves

2 lb. tomatoes

1 habanero

1 tbsp. oil

1 pinch oregano

1 pinch salt

 

Chop all.  Fry the garlic and onions first, then the chile and finally the tomato, stirring constantly.  Add the oregano late in the process.

 

 

K’utbi Ik (Chile Sauce)

 

Seed and toast fresh chiles.  Wrap in cloth for a few minutes so skins steam loose, and then peel.  Blend or mash with similarly roasted tomato, and garlic or onion.  Herbs may be added.

 

 

K’utbi Ik, dry chile version

 

Toast and grind dry red chiles.  Roast garlic, green chiles, and onion.  Mash all with lime juice.

 

 

K’utbi p’ak (Tomato Sauce)

 

Same as above, but with little or no chile.

Or: Chop and fry onion or  garlic.  When colored, add chopped tomato, salt, and herbs (epazote, cilantro, oregano) if desired.  Bitter orange juice or lime juice can be mixed in.  Mash somewhat—it should be chunky, not a paste (see below).

Or: Roast and peel tomatoes.  Blend with some cilantro, salt, bitter orange juice and habanero chile.

It can also be yach’bij (mashed more thoroughly—to a paste—with a pestle in a molcajete—a small mortar), or suut’bij (the same, but with a revolving motion, not smashed down), or just licuado—blended in a blender!

 

 

Little Dogs’nose (Xni’-pek’)

 

This is the standard Maya salsa.  It gets its name because it makes your nose run and become cold and wet like a dog’s.

 

Seed and chop a habanero chile.  Add chopped onion, garlic, tomato, and any herbs, to taste.  Marinate in bitter orange juice or lime juice, with salt.

It is important that all the ingredients be absolutely fresh for this.  Xni’-pek’ can marinate for a day or so, but no more than that.

 

 

Marinated Onions

This is the universal accompaniment for many cooked meat dishes, including pok-chuk and turkey.

 

1 large red onion

10 peppercorns

3 allspice berries

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp. oregano

1/4 cup bitter orange juice

As much habanero chile as you can stand

Salt to taste

 

Cut onion into slices.  Add the peppercorns and allspice.  Let stand very briefly in boiling water.  Drain.

Add garlic, oregano, orange juice and chile.  Let marinate briefly.

Variant: use vinegar and some water instead of bitter orange juice.  In this case, everything is combined, brought to a boil, and left to marinate for a day or more.

 

 

P’uybi Ik (Ground Chile)

 

Toast dried chiles till slightly colored.  Then (not before) seed them and grind fairly fine.

 

 

Rooster Beak (pico de gallo)

 

5 jicamas

5 sweet oranges

3 bitter oranges

Ground chile, to taste

Cilantro, to taste

Salt, to taste

 

 

Peel and cut up the jicamas and sweet oranges.  Mix with the juice of the bitter oranges and add the seasonings.

“Rooster beak” is a name generally given to salsas that have a bite like the peck of an angry rooster.  This is a mild one, somewhere between a salsa and a salad.  It need not be; you can use chopped fresh habanero chiles.

The pieces should be small and even, but definitely separate.  This is not a blended sauce.

 

Rooster Beak II

 

1 tomato

1 small white onion

1-2 cloves garlic

1 jalapeno chile (or whatever chile you prefer)

Bitter orange or lime juice

 

Chop first four ingredients into quite small but distinct pieces, and marinate in the juice.

 

 

Wasp Larvae

 

Toast wasp larvae and eat with relishes.

Or just smoke a wasp nest to drive away the adults and more or less cook the larvae, then open the nest and eat the smoked larvae from it.  They taste like smoked bacon (at best). (I have tried this one.)

 

 

Wolis

A mixture of masa, cooked black-eyed peas, sikil, ground dried chile, chopped cilantro and chopped onion.  These are not mashed up—just mixed, so the peas and onions remain chunky.  The mixture is wrapped in hojasanta leaves, then in a second wrapping of banana leaves, and cooked in the pib or steamed to make tamales.

Without the masa, it is a standard quickly-improvised relish to put on tortillas or other corn cakes.  For this, take cooked black-eyed peas; drain; mix in the other ingredients, to taste.

 

 

Xek’

The term just means “mixed,” but one standard “mix” is a salad of orange sections and chopped jicama with salt, chile, chopped cilantro, and lime juice.  This is traditionally served on the Day of the Dead, November 1.

 

 

Xub Ik (Superhot Chile Sauce)

 

30 dried chiles

2 lb. tomatoes

6 allspice berries

A few peppercorns

4 cloves garlic

8 or more oregano leaves

Branch of epazote

 

Seed the peppers.  Toast them (optional, but typical).  Boil.  When soft, add other ingredients.  Blend all.

Meat can be cooked in this, or it can used simply as a sauce.

Prepare with all windows open.  Use rubber gloves if your hands are sensitive.  Avoid touching eyes or other sensitive parts of the body.

 

 

Some other typical garnishes and relishes:

Tomato, sikil, coriander, garlic, onion, salt–chopped fine, fried and blended to a smooth paste

Cucumbers vinagreta (thin sliced with onion, cilantro, habanero chiles, garlic, vinegar, oil)

Potato slices vinagreta

Cabbage, chile and cilantro, chopped, vinagreta

White beans cooked with tomato, onion, spices, bits of ham and bacon

Chicharrones stewed with onion, tomato, chile

 

 

 

TAMALES AND RELATIVES (including antojitos—substantial snacks—and tortilla-based items)

 

 

 

Black-eyed Pea Tamales

 

A standard market snack.

 

1 lb. pork (shoulder is good; loin or other cuts perfectly all right)

Water to cover, 4-6 cups

6 tomatoes

1 clove garlic, roasted or not

1 chile, toasted

1 branch epazote

1 oz. masa

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1 cup cooked black-eyed peas

Masa for tamales

 

Put the pork in water with the tomatoes, garlic, chile, and epazote.  Cook till very tender.

Remove the pork from the broth.  Save the broth.  Shred the pork into small pieces; chop up the other items, leaving out and discarding the garlic and epazote.

Now cook the broth down with the 1 oz. masa and the bitter orange, till thickened, so it has a high percentage of fat.

Mix this and the black-eyed peas slowly into the masa.  Cook down very slowly till hot.  The result should be thick enough not to stick or collapse; it has to be the main substance of the tamales—a firm, solid mass, largely maize dough.

Let cool.  Then make tamales by putting a layer of masa about ¼” deep on a corn husk, banana leaf segment, piece of foil, or kitchen paper.  The big tough corn husks sold for this purpose in Mexican markets are best, but foil will very often have to do.  Put a heaping tablespoonful of pork filling on the masa and roll up into a tamale:  a sealed, stuffed corn-dough item some 4-6” long.

Steam.  The Maya traditionally seal them tightly in a closed vessel and bake them for anywhere from an hour on up in a pib.  The classic method otherwise—for those of us without a pib—is to crowd them vertically into a pot with an inch or so of water or stock at the bottom, and steam them on the stove top.  They also do fine in the oven, on a rack over water in a pan, the whole being sealed with tinfoil; or vertically in a casserole dish in the oven.

A very cheap version leaves out the pork, but in that case you still have to boil down a fatty cut of pork to get the “Maya lard” to make the tamales.

 

 

Chanchamitos (simple tamales)

 

Yucatecans love multiple diminutives.  “Chanchamitos” means “little little little ones”–Maya chan, “little,” is doubled, and the Spanish diminutive ending added for good measure.

 

1/2 lb. pork or chicken meat

1 spring epazote

1 1/2  lb. masa

1 square of recado rojo

1 tbsp. lard

Salt to taste

Corn shucks

 

Chop up the pork.  Boil with the epazote.  Then dissolve some masa in the stock to thicken it to thin sauce consistency.

Mix the rest of the masa with the recado, lard, and salt.

Using this masa, make tamales in the usual way, but only 1/4 to 1/3 the size of regular ones.

Variants:  These can be made with any sort of meat that will do for a filling, including leftovers.

 

 

Chaya Tamales (also called “Braza de Reina”—“Queen’s Arm”–or sometimes “Braza de India”)

 

Boil chaya leaves.  Roll any kind of tamale or similar food in them, using the same technique as for stuffing grape leaves or cabbage leaves.  Eat the whole thing, chaya leaves and all.

As the name implies, these are usually made long and rather slender, like a girl’s forearm.

One good filling mix: 1 kg chopped tomatoes

½ onion

3 small chiles or 1 chile xkatik, chopped

Oil for frying

Salt

Hardboiled eggs, chopped

 

Fry up the tomatoes, onions, and chiles (to a sofrito).  Mix with the eggs.  Use for stuffing the tamales.

 

Hojasanta is very often used instead of, or even with, chaya.  Chard leaves work perfectly well.

 

 

Chaya-stuffed Tamales (Ts’otobij Chay; “Dzotobichay” on restaurant menus)

As the name suggests, this very popular dish is thoroughly Maya, surely pre-Columbian.  The name means “chaya stuffing” or “chay with filling stuffed into it” (Maya ts’ot, “to stuff something into a hollow space”).

 

1 lb. chaya (swiss chard if you can’t get chaya)

3 lb. masa

1 lb. lard

8 eggs

¼ – 1/2 lb. sikil (ground squash seeds)

Salt and pepper to taste

Chaya leaves for wrapping

6 small tomatoes

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

Some chile, optional

 

Chop the chaya and mix with the masa, lard and salt.

Cook the eggs and chop finely.  Mix with the sikil.

Make tamales the usual way (the egg mix inside the chaya-masa mix), steaming for an hour.

Roast the tomatoes, onions and garlic.  Add whatever chile is desired.  Mash.  Serve as sauce for the tamales.

This recipe invites creative interpretation.  You can stuff it with anything, as long as the stuffing is not strong-flavored enough to kill the delicate chaya taste.

 

 

Chulibuul with sikil

Chulibuul means “stewed beans.”

 

2 lb. young fresh beans from the field (substitutes: frozen limas or black-eyed peas)

2 lb. masa

3 onions

Branch of epazote

4 garlic cloves

1 lb. sikil

Salt to taste

 

Cook the beans.  Mix the masa with a little water.  Chop finely the onions and epazote.  Grind the garlic.

Mix all, and cook slowly and carefully.  Add half the sikil.  Serve with the rest of the sikil sprinkled over it and with tomato sauce poured over it.

Fresh variant:  Use sweet corn kernels instead of masa.  Cook the beans first; add the corn and just bring to boil, no more.  The result bears a great resemblance to succotash, except for the sikil.

Toksel variant:  If this is made without any maize–just the beans and sikil–it is “toksel.”

Out in the fields, farm workers heat stones in the campfire and drop them into this stew to cook it.  Stone soup?

 

 

Codzitos

Another mestiza-Maya word: Kots’ (codz in the old spelling), “something rolled up,” with the Spanish diminutive ending added.  These are the simple, finger-food version of enchiladas.

Roll fresh or freshly-fried tortillas around tomato sauce with Mexican cheese or ground or shredded meat.

A fancy version I noted at the wonderful Hacienda Teya–a restaurant in a restored henequen estate east of Merida–rolls the codzitos around shredded boiled chicken, then covers them with k’utbi p’ak, then crumbles fresh white cheese over all.

 

 

Eggs a la Motul (Huevos Motuleños)

Motul is a large, historically important town in central Yucatan.  This dish is a standard breakfast all over the Peninsula.

 

2 tortillas

Lard

1 tomato

1/4 onion

2 oz. ham

2 eggs

Oil

Salt to taste

1-2 oz. refried black beans

Several green peas (necessarily canned in Yucatan, where peas don’t grow, but much better if fresh)

Tomato sauce

 

Fry (saute) the tortillas in the lard.

Cut up the tomatoes and onion in small pieces.  Fry.

Cut up the ham into small pieces.  It can be fried also (but usually isn’t).

Fry the eggs.

Now cover the tortillas with beans; the beans with the eggs; the eggs with the tomato, onion and ham; and the whole thing with tomato sauce.  Garnish with the peas (or mix them in with the tomato and onion, earlier step).

Chickpeas or other vegetables can be used.  Various garnishes exist.  Much of the quality of the dish depends on the ham; get the best.

Of course, the true Yucatecan eats this mammoth breakfast with habanero sauce–the perfect wake-up at seven in the morning!

 

 

Empanadas

 

Make small tortillas from masa.  Fold them around any filling—beans, chopped meat, chicken, k’utbi p’ak, etc., in any combination.  Moisten the edges to seal them.  Then shallow-fry (sauté) in a pan, or deep-fry in hot oil (but shallow-frying is better).  Serve with sliced cabbage, onions in lime juice, or other topping over them.

 

 

Enchiladas a la Quintana Roo

 

10 tortillas

1 cup shredded cooked spiced chicken

3 oz. Mexican sharp white cheese, crumbled

1 onion, chopped

2 ancho chiles

2 pasilla chiles

1 oz. almonds

1 oz. peanuts (optional)

1 cup chicken stock

1 tbsp. lard

Salt to taste

 

Shallow-fry the tortillas in lard (basically, just put them in some oil in the skillet and move them around till they soften and begin to toast at the edges).  Roll them around the chicken.  Top with cheese and onion.

Seed and toast the chiles.  Grind with the almonds and peanuts.  Blend with the stock and season.  Cook quickly to thicken and pour over enchiladas.

 

 

Fish Tamales

 

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. cumin seeds

3 tbsp. achiote

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 lb. fish fillet

4 tbsp. lard

1/2 onion, chopped

2 tbsp. cilantro, finely chopped

1 tomato, chopped

1/2 cup bitter orange juice

2 lb. masa

Banana leaves

 

Grind up the garlic, cumin, and one tbsp. of the achiote with the salt and pepper.  Cut up the fish and rub this recado into it.

Heat half the lard.  Fry the vegetables in it.  Add the fish and then the bitter orange juice.

Mix the masa with the rest of the lard and achiote, and some salt.

Make tamales the usual way.

 

 

Green Corn Tamales with Chicken

 

Grains from 30 sweet corn ears

1/2 lb. lard

1 tbsp. sugar

1/2 cup milk

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 lb. pork loin meat, cooked

Meat from 1 small chicken, cooked

5 chiles

1/2 tsp. black pepper

2 cloves

2 garlic cloves

1 small piece of cinnamon stick

Salt to taste

 

Grind the kernels.   Mix in the lard, sugar, salt, milk and soda.  Beat.

Shred or cut up the meat.  Seed and toast the chiles.  Grind all the flavorings.  Mix all, and make tamales in usual way.

Variant: red recado has been known to work its way into these, though it is a fairly strong flavor for green corn tamales, and tends to kill the delicate flavor of the green corn unless very small amounts are used.

 

 

Hojasanta Tamales

 

Make as for Chaya Tamales, above, or wrap any tamale in hojasanta (mak’ol or mak’olam in Yucatec Maya) and then in banana leaves.  Steam or bake in pib.  The hojasanta leaves are edible, but not the banana leaves.

 

 

Joloches (joroches)

From Maya jooloch, “corn shuck, dried corn leaf”–presumably from the appearance of the dumplings, like corncobs in the shuck.

 

1/2 lb. ground beef

1/2 lb. ground pork

1 lb. tomato

1 onion

1 bell pepper

3 garlic cloves

Red recado

1/2 cup vinegar or bitter orange juice

1 1/2 lb. masa

2 tbsp lard

Salt to taste

1 lb. cooked black beans

3 oz. sikil

 

Cook the meat with the tomato, a strip on onion, half the bell pepper, three garlic cloves, salt, some water and the recado diluted in vinegar or juice.

Mix the masa with lard and salt.  Form cones, and stuff them with the meat mix.  Close the tops with masa.

Chop and fry the rest of the onion and bell pepper.

Warm up the beans and add the fried vegetables.

Add in the cones and cook 15-20 minutes.

This is one of those common, standard recipes that is infinitely variable.  Almost any ingredient can be left out or decreased in quantity, and other common ingredients sometimes find their way in.

For instance:  A quick-and-easy village form of the above is simply:

 

Squash flowers

Onion

Salt

Masa

 

Boil the flowers with the onion and salt.  Form the masa into little cones and add in.  The cones should look like the flowers; presumably this is the original inspiration of the dish.

Or we can have:

 

Joloches with Longaniza

 

1/2 lb. longaniza

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 xkatik chile

1 lb. masa

Lard

Salt to taste

Kabax beans

 

Cut up the longaniza and vegetables.  Fry the longaniza, and then the vegetables in its oil.  Make small masa dumplings filled with this mixture.  Flatten and fry.  Add to the beans and serve.

 

 

Panuchos

 

As popular as salbutes (for which see below).  A typical workers’ breakfast, using up the remains of dinner from the day before.

 

2 lb. masa

1 lb. mashed black beans (cooked with two branches of epazote; left over from yesterday)

3 red onions

Leftover breast meat from a turkey roasted in red recado

Juice of 4 bitter oranges (or 8 limes)

Tomato and chile sauces

Lard

 

Make small tortillas.  The Maya way is to put an ounce or so of masa on a banana leaf—or, today, a plastic sheet—and press the masa gently into a tortilla.  These have to be homemade and 3-4” across (about half as big as regular ones), so they will puff up.

Toast on griddle or frying pan.  Hopefully, they will puff up, leaving a hollow center (like pita bread or Indian puris).   This hollow center is known as saay in Maya.

Stuff the hollow with mashed beans.

Fry (sauté) the bean-stuffed tortillas in lard.

Shred the turkey meat and put on top.  Shredded lettuce or other vegetables can be added.  (Chicken or other meat can be used, though turkey is traditional and particularly good.)

Cut up the onion and marinate in the salt and orange juice.  Serve separately.  Also serve separately the k’utbi p’ak and chiles.  Panuchos are very much an eaters’-choice type of food.

 

 

Papadzules

 

Papa ts’uul means “rich people’s food.”  (Ts’uul, or “dzul,” is now used to mean “foreigner,” but seems originally to have meant “rich person.”)  This may, however, be a folk etymology; Cherry Hamman explains it as “papak’, to anoint or smear, and sul, to soak or drench” (Hamman 1998:94).  Either way, economic progress has come, and this is now a relatively humble staple dish, typically found on the breakfast menu.

 

1 egg

1 tomato

Bit of habanero chile

1 sprig epazote

Oil

4 tortillas

2 oz. sikil

Salt to taste

 

Hardboil the eggs.  Chop or mash up.

Boil the tomatoes, chiles and epazote.  Drain, but save the water.   Blend.  Fry in oil.

Dissolve the sikil in the reserved cooking water.  Mix half of this with the oil.  (This is what people generally do now, and I have watched it many a time, but Hamman tells you the ancient way: roast and grind the squash seeds yourself, mix with water, and knead till they produce some oil.  See Hamman 1998:94).  Spread on the tortillas.  Then spread on these the egg mix and roll up.

Pour over the roll-ups the rest of the sikil sauce, and the tomato sauce.

Variant: a much more elaborate version involves mixing the sikil with stock, epazote, onion, garlic and chile, and serving the whole with marinated onions:  red onions cut up, blanched, and marinated in vinegar or bitter orange juice with spices and chopped habanero chiles.

Another variant involves boiled chaya (or spinach, one bunch) and 3 tbsp of cut-up chives.

 

 

Polcanes

 

Maya pool kaan, “snake head,” with a Spanish plural.  The name comes from the resemblance between the opened-up dumplings and a snake’s head with mouth open.  Another common and cheap market snack.

 

2 lb. black-eyed peas (fresh or briefly cooked to soften)

1/2 lb. sikil

1 tsp. ground chile

1 lb. masa

3 tbsp. lard

Salt

 

Cook the beans.  Drain.  Mix with sikil and chile.

Mix the masa with the lard and salt.  Stuff with the beans.  (Or mix flour and masa, make a thin skin and stuff like ravioli.)

Steam or pib-bake in corn husks like tamales, or deep-fry like hush-puppies.

For eating, split and fill with tomato sauce.

 

 

Salbutes

 

Something of a national dish of Yucatan.  The name is from Maya tsajil but’, “fried minced meat.”  As with such “small eats” the world over, the best place to get these is down at the marketplace in the morning, where the working people are stoking up for a hard day’s work.  Salbutes become a powerfully nostalgic flavor for those who regularly eat them in such circumstances.

 

Make small tortillas from fresh masa.  Deep-fry in very hot lard.  While these are still as hot as possible, pile on them shredded cooked chicken or turkey (preferably cooked in red recado), chopped cabbage or lettuce, marinated onion (see above), tomato slices, radish slices, and/or anything else desired.

This is often accompanied by the chicken or turkey stock; black beans; and lime slices.  As the Maya name implies, they are often topped with fried minced pork instead of poultry.  In fact, they are topped with just about anything: beans, tripe, chorizo, etc.  A good market stall will have alternatives, the eaters choosing what they want.

 

 

Sopes

 

Fry small, thick tortillas.  Top with anything interesting.

Some toppings noted at Merida markets and fiestas include:

Nopal salad (prickly pear pads cooked, cut up, and marinated in oil and vinegar with spices)

Nopal cut up in chocolate mole (made by cooking and mixing chocolate tablets and ground chiles)

Any and all meat, preferably cooked in red recado, shredded

Beans or beans and meat, usually refried black beans

The sopes are then usually further topped off with lettuce or cabbage, various sauces, etc., over the meat.

 

 

To’obi joloch (Sweetbread Tamales)

 

Boil sweetbreads until tender.  Chop; eliminate tough membranes.  Mix in a handful of chopped shallots and 2 cups sikil.

Use to fill tamales in the usual way.

 

 

Vaporcitos (“little steamed ones”)

A very common, minimalist sort of snack.

 

Mix masa, lard and cooked black-eyed peas.  Make this mix into tamales—no filling added—and steam.  Eat with Tomato Sauce.

The same thing baked in a pib is called xnup’.

 

 

Wedding Tamales

This is the full-scale tamale of Yucatan.  The main ingredients can, of course, be varied, according to what is available.

 

1 chicken

1 lb. pork

1 cube red recado

1 tbsp. steak recado

2 lb. tomatoes

1 tbsp. ground allspice

1 small head of garlic, roasted and bashed

Branch of epazote

1 lb. lard

Chile and salt to taste

Masa

 

Cook the meats.  Dissolve the spices in vinegar and add.  Add other ingredients.  Bone the meats and make tamales in the usual way, using the stock, or grease skimmed from it, for the lard.

 

 

 

SOUPS

 

 

“Barriana” soup

Silvia Luz Carrillo Lara, in Cocina Yucateca (1995:17-18), reports that this is a true “mestiza” soup, found in many old cookbooks.  This is an adaptation of her recipe.  It is a relatively “Spanish” dish, preserving the flavors of the Spanish Colonial world.  Like all such recipes, it seems to be dying out in Yucatan, but variants of it can still be found.  The Spanish ancestors of this dish are still around in southern Spain, and use leftover bread instead of masa, the latter being an obvious Mexicanization.

 

1/2 lb. masa

1 tomato

1/2 red onion

1 bell pepper

1/4 cup lard (“Maya lard” recommended)

3 pints chicken or beef stock, freshly made

12 olives

2 tbsp. capers

2 tbsp. raisins

2 tbsp. chopped almonds

Salt and pepper to taste

Pinch of saffron (optional)

 

Break the masa into small pieces and fry them in the lard.  Chop the tomato, onion, and pepper, and fry them separately.  Add the masa.  Then add the stock and cook ca. 10 minutes.  Add the other ingredients and cook until all is heated.

Variants without the masa, often with different thickenings, exist.

 

 

Chaya Soup

 

8 or more fresh chaya leaves

1 chayote

1 summer squash

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. ground oregano

6 cups water

1 chipotle chile in vinegar or marinade (canned marinated chipotles are fine)

Salt to taste

 

Chop the chaya finely.  Cut up the other vegetables.  Cook all.

Obviously, this recipe can be varied at will.  The basic idea is chaya plus other vegetables—a mix of starchy and crunchy ones—and standard Yucatecan spicing.

 

 

Covered Soup

This is what Mexicans call a “sopa seca,” a “dry soup.”  This isn’t an oxymoron, just the standard term for a soup that includes enough starch to absorb all the free liquid.  Such dishes have a Moorish origin; they are related to pilaf.  This one is thoroughly Spanish, and thus out of place in a book about the true mestizo cookery, but it is far too typical of Yucatan to leave out.  It represents a large class of popular recipes transported from Spain to Yucatan virtually without change.  It also provides insight into what was imported from Spain in the old days: capers, saffron, oil, vinegar, wine, and olives were staples of trade.

 

For the “stuffing”:

A large chicken cut up, or any small poultry

3 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. oregano

2 bay leaves

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1 stick cinnamon

2 cloves

6 allspice berries

1/4 cup vinegar

 

For the rice:

1/2 lb. rice

5 tbsp. oil

2 xkatik chiles

2/3 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. saffron

1 bunch parsley

1 banana leaf

3 oz. lard

 

For the final assembly:

1 oz. lard

2/3 lb. tomatoes

1/2 cup stock

2 oz. bottled green olives, optional

1 tbsp. chopped parsley

4 tbsp. sherry

1 oz. capers

3 oz. Mexican white cheese

 

Cut up the poultry.  Grind the onions, garlic and spices, rub onto poultry, and marinate overnight.

Soak the rice for an hour or more.  Drain and fry in the oil.  Add chopped chiles.  Roast the tomatoes and blend with the onion and garlic.  Soak the saffron in 1 oz. water.  Add all these to the rice, cover, and simmer over very low heat for a while–not till fully done.

Spread the banana leaf with lard, in a baking dish.  Put half the rice mix on this.

Then fry the poultry in the final 1 oz. lard.  Add tomatoes (roasted and chopped) and stock.  Then add olives, parsley, sherry and capers.

Cover with the rest of the rice mix, fold the banana leaf over, and bake 10-20 minutes at 375o.

Sprinkle with broken-up white cheese for serving.

 

Much simpler variants exist, converging on the familiar “Spanish rice” of Mexican restaurants everywhere.  This is basically a pilaf with peppers and tomatoes instead of Moorish ingredients.  Rice is fried with chopped onion, then spices and other ingredients are added, then liquid to cover ½-1” deep, then all is simmered at the lowest possible heat till the liquid is absorbed.  Standard in Yucatan are simple “Spanish rices” with chicken cooked in red recado, or other variants, added to the tomato-onion-pepper basic formula.

 

 

Lentil Soup

 

1 lb. pork

1 tbsp oregano

2 cups lentils

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 onion, chopped

Red recardo, 1 oz.

2 mild chiles

1 carrot

1 chayote

1 platano

2 potatoes

Salt

Pepper

 

Boil the pork and lentils till the lentils are tender but not quite thoroughly done.  Add other ingredients and finish cooking.

 

 

Sopa de Lima (Bitter Lime Soup)

This soup requires a strange lime-like citrus fruit, the lima agria, with a unique flavor.  Note that it is a lima, not a limón (lime or lemon).  It is fact the Thai lime, easy to find in any Oriental market.  (No one knows how it got to Yucatan.)  The Yucatecan bitter lime should be fresh for this soup, but I get acceptable results with dried Thai lime and a bit of fresh ordinary lime.  It is also possible to use ordinary lime only.  This is done even in Yucatan if bitter limes are not available. The real lima is preferable, though.

This is probably the most famous single Yucatecan dish, after cochinita pibil.  Yucatecan restaurants far from Yucatan all carry it.  They often can’t get the real lima agria, so don’t judge this soup by versions you may have had outside Yucatan.

 

For the stock and meat:

1 chicken

Salt and pepper, to taste

4 cloves

1 tbsp. dried oregano

4 garlic cloves

1 tsp. cumin seeds

Enough water to produce 8 cups stock

 

For the soup:

2 tomatoes

1 onion

1 xkatik chile (or other mild chile according to your preference)

1 tsp. vinegar

1 lb. tortillas, cut in strips or wedges and fried in lard

1 bitter lime

 

Cook the chicken with the other stock ingredients.  Eat the dark meat (cook’s privilege).  Shred the white meat.

Blend the tomatoes, onion, chiles (seeded and soaked), vinegar, and salt.

Combine all: into the stock, mix the blended vegetables; the shredded chicken; the fried tortilla strips; and the cut-up lime.  A few sqeezes of ordinary lime juice are good too.

Variants: Chicken cooked in red recado is often used, and adds to the flavor.

A couple of tablespoons of beer find their way into some versions.

The fried tortilla strips are dispensable.

 

 

Squash Soup

 

1 tomato

1 bell pepper

3 oz. butter

6 small summer squash

6 or more squash flowers

Salt and pepper to taste

 

In a saucepan, chop the tomato and pepper and fry in the butter.  Add water and the cut-up squash and flowers.

Variant:  a couple of ounces of chopped ham can be fried with the tomato and pepper.  I prefer the vegetarian form, however.

 

 

Tortilla Soup

 

1 lb. beans

6 tortillas

Oil for frying

1/2 onion, chopped

1 serrano chile, chopped

2 sprigs epazote

2 tomatoes, roasted and skinned

1/2 lb. chorizo, taken out of its casing and fried

Grated Mexican sharp white cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook the beans in enough water for the final soup.

Cut the tortillas in wedges and fry.  Fry the onion, chiles, and epazote.  Add the beans and tortilla strips.

Blend the tomatoes with salt and pepper.

Combine all ingredients–sprinkling the chorizo and cheese over the top.

 

 

White Bean Soup (Yucatan form of a very popular Spanish dish)

 

1/2 lb. white beans (traditionally small white limas, but ordinary white beans will do)

1/2 white onion

2 tomatoes

1/3 lb. of chorizo sausage, or 1 small chorizo and 1 longaniza sausage

1/4 head of cabbage (optional)

1 green pepper

1/4 lb. Spanish, Virginia or similar flavorful ham

Salt and pepper to taste

Cayenne pepper to taste (optional)

1/2 lb. potatoes

 

Wash the beans.  Then soak, and boil in the same water until beginning to be tender.

Chop and fry the tomatoes, onions, pepper, cabbage, and ham.  Add seasonings.

Combine these and the sausages with the beans.  Cut up the potatoes, add, and cook all till the beans are tender.

A sprinkling of marjoram and oregano–fresh or dry—is good.  One can also decorate with chopped parsley, or even (untraditional but good) cilantro.

 

 

SEAFOODS

 

 

Baked Fish I

 

1 large fish (preferably fairly oily)

3 garlic cloves

1 onion

3 oregano leaves

5 bay leaves

1 glass white wine, optional (it’s good but the Maya would never have it)

1/2 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1/4 cup olive oil

Salt to taste

 

Marinate the fish in the other ingredients for an hour.  Bake.

This can also be done on the stove top in a heavy saucepan.  Try adding xkatik chiles.

The fish is often even better if rubbed with red recado or otherwise marinated beforehand.

 

 

Baked Fish II

 

1 large fish

3 oz. olive oil

1/2 lb. potatoes

1/2 cup vinegar

6 tomatoes

1 onion

2 xkatik chiles

1/2 tsp. ground cumin or cumin seeds

6 leaves oregano

4 bay leaves

Salt and pepper to taste

Chopped parsley

 

Grind the spices (except the bay leaves) and blend with vinegar and some oil.  Rub into fish.

Cut up the vegetables.  Put the fish on the bay leaves and cover with the vegetables mixed with the rest of the oil.  Bake.

Variant: Lard is used in the villages instead of olive oil.  Butter can be used.

This can be done on the stove top also, in a heavy saucepan.

 

 

Chiles Stuffed with Dogfish

See also following dish.

 

1 piece, ca. 1 lb., of roast dogfish

Branch of epazote

4 tomatoes

1 onion

6 xkatik chiles

Vinegar

1/2 lb. lard

1 cube red recado

 

Boil the dogfish with epazote.  Flake and fry with onion, tomato, and epazote (all cut up).  Separately fry some of the onion and tomatoes.

Roast the chiles, wrap in a cloth and leave for a while, then skin and seed.  Stuff with the dogfish mix.  Fry.

Add the rest of the onion and tomatoes, with the recado, to the boiling stock.  Cook down and pour this sauce over the chiles.

A much more elaborate version of this occurs in Patricia Quintana’s wonderful book The Taste of Mexico (pp. 274-275).

However, only a true dogfish addict would go to the trouble of making even the simple form with real dogfish, and I strongly recommmend using regular shark, or (still better) codfish, or some other firm white-fleshed fish.  I always do.  I admit it—I am not fanatical about dogfish.

 

 

Chiles Stuffed with Seafood

Quintana Roo variant of a universal Mexican dish.

 

6 large poblano chiles, or bell peppers

1 lb. mixed seafood: shrimps, crabmeat, fish, shellfish

Lard

2 cloves garlic, chopped

Oregano to taste

3 tbsp. cilantro, finely chopped

2 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

1 xkatik chile

1 habanero chile (if tolerated)

 

Sear the large chiles or bell peppers.  Seed.  They can be peeled also.

Cut up the seafood (the more variety the better).  Fry quickly with the spices.  Stuff the chiles.  Sauté and serve.

Separately, chop the tomatoes, onion and other chiles, roasting any or all if desired.  Fry quickly.  Serve this sauce over the chiles.

Tomatoes or other vegetables can be stuffed similarly.

 

 

Conch in Escabeche

Conch is, alas, getting rare due to overfishing and pollution, and this magnificent dish may not be with us long.  However, the loss is not total, for any seafood can be cooked this way.  Abalone or other relatively chewy sea food should be particularly good, but now abalones are rare too.  One reader suggests scallops—not very close, but perfectly acceptable.

 

1 lb. conch meat

Juice of 2 bitter oranges or 6 limes

1 onion

5 oz. oil

1/2 bottle vinegar

2 xkatik chiles, roasted and seeded

6 oregano leaves

1/2 tsp. toasted cumin seeds

1 roasted head of garlic

4 bay leaves

Pinch of nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil conch till tender.  (For a conch, that can vary from several minutes to an hour, depending on the maturity of the conch, but for scallops a very few minutes is quite enough.  Small scallops need little more than being brought to the boil.)  Leave to cool in the orange or lime juice.  Cut up.

Fry the onion lightly in the oil.  Add the other ingredients.  Boil quickly.

Marinate the conch in this.

 

 

Dogfish Pudding

 

1 1/2 lb. dogfish

1/4 tsp. oregano

2 branches epazote

1 onion

2 large chiles in vnegar

1 lime

4 eggs

1 tbsp. lard

1 oz. breadcrumbs (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Sauce:

2/3 lb. tomatoes

1 onion

1 tbsp. lard

1/4 cup dogfish stock

 

Garnish:

2 avocados

1 head of lettuce, preferably buttercrunch or red leaf

1 bunch radishes

 

Boil the dogfish with the oregano and epazote; save the stock.  Shred the fish.  Chop and fry the onion.  Add the fish with the epazote leaves.  Chop and add the chiles.  Fry quickly.

Beat the eggs with some lime juice, salt and pepper.  Blend into the fish mix.  Put all in mold.  Top with breadcrumbs if desired.  Bake at 350o.

For the sauce, roast the tomatoes.  Blend with the onion.  Fry in the lard.  Add in the stock.  Put over the pudding.

Garnish with avocado and radish slices and lettuce leaves.

I have not brought myself to using dogfish (see Chapter 2) in this.  Use any white-fleshed fish, cod being probably best because it has enough flavor and texture to stand out in this pudding.

 

 

Fish a la Celestun

 

1 onion

1 bunch parsley

2 tomatoes

Fresh chile, to taste

1 red snapper or similar fish

4 cloves

1 tsp. pepper

Pinch saffron

Frozen peas (optional)

1/4 cup vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Chop the onion and parsley.  Fry.  Add the tomato and chile, roasted and blended.  Add the fish and spices and vinegar; cook in the sauce till nearly done, about 15 minutes.  Add the peas (if wanted) and finish cooking, 5-10 minutes.

In Celestun, a charming old fishing village famous for its flamingoes, the fish is usually fried first, sometimes grilled, and then covered with the sauce after it is cooked.  The Celestunians use canned peas, having no frozen ones available, but frozen ones are better.

 

 

Fish Fajitas

 

A creative response to the fajita craze.  This version is an elaboration of that created by the Faisan y Venado restaurant in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo.

 

1 lb. white fish fillet (not too delicate a species), cut into strips

Salt and pepper

Juice of 2 limes

4 oregano leaves

Pinch of cumin powder

2 cloves

Ground dried chile

1 onion

1 green pepper

1 tomato

 

Marinate the fish in the spices.

Cut vegetables into strips.  Stir-fry with the fish.

 

 

Fish in Green Sauce

A classic Arabo-Spanish recipe, which has evolved into countless variations in southern Mexico.  Compare variants in Chapters 2 and 4.

 

1 large bunch parsley

1 sprig oregano

1 bunch green onions with tops (trim off the ends)

1 bunch cilantro

6 tomatillos

2 xkatik or other mild green chiles

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

6 tbsp. vinegar

1 onion

Salt to taste

Oil

1 fish

 

Blend up the greens and flavorings in the vinegar.  Fry in oil.  Add the fish and cook.

Variants:  This may be the most variable dish in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Everybody has his or her own version of it.  You can use any mixture of the green ingredients, in any quantity.  You can vary the spicing at will.  You can fry, grill or boil the fish first.  Sometimes, people don’t fry the green sauce first, but just fry or bake the fish in the sauce.  In fact, you don’t even have to have a fish.  This sauce is used for other seafood and even for pork.

Here, for instance, is another version:

1 fish, ca. 2 lb.; or 2 lb. of fillets or fish steak

5 garlic cloves, roasted

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. black pepper

Salt

4 tbsp. chopped Italian parsley

1/3 lb. tomatillos

2 xkatik chiles

2 green onions with the leaves except for the very tips

1/2 cup vinegar

1/2 cup oil

 

Clean the fish.  Grind the spices and rub into the fish.  Leave for an hour in cool place.  Blend the other ingredients (greens, vinegar and oil).  Put over fish.  Cook in a covered dish over a slow fire.

Note that in this version the green sauce is not fried.

Yet another version, almost unbearably good, uses some hojasanta leaf.

 

 

Octopus in Its Ink

 

3 large octopi

6 garlic cloves, chopped

2 lb. tomatoes, chopped

1/2 cup olive oil

2 large onions, chopped

2 serrano chiles, chopped

Lard

3 bay leaves

1/2 tsp. ground pepper

1 pinch ground cumin

1/2 tsp. ground oregano

1 tbsp. parsley, chopped

2 tbsp. vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Take out the ink (remove ink sacs from octopi) and save it.  Wash the octopi and rub with 1 clove of the garlic, mashed.  Simmer, with a tomato, one onion, and lard, till octopi are tender.  Then clean off membranes etc. and cut up.

Chop and fry the rest of the garlic, the chiles, and the other onion.  When colored, add the bay leaves, the rest of the tomato, the pepper, cumin, oregano, parsley and the octopus ink dissolved in vinegar.  When this begins to boil, add salt and the octopus. Boil a few minutes, till done.

Squid in its ink is made more or less the same way.

At this point I cannot resist mentioning a dish from Tampico’s great seafood restaurant, the Restaurante Diligencia:  seafood petrolera.  This is basically the above recipe with other seafoods–shrimp, fish roes, some fish, clams or oysters–cut up and added.  The name is a sick joke; Tampico has offshore oil, and thus oil spills at sea.  This dish looks exactly like the aftermath of an oil spill.  However, it tastes heavenly.  The roes in particular “make” the dish.

 

 

Rice with Seafood

Another of those infinitely variable recipes.  More typical of Campeche than Yucatan.

 

6 garlic cloves, chopped

1 onion, chopped

Oil

1 lb. seafood (mixed, or cut-up squid, or shrimp, or other)

1/4 cup vinegar

Several sprigs parsley, chopped

2 roasted tomatoes

2 cups rice

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Fry the garlic and onion in a little oil.  Add the seafood.  Add the vinegar.  If octopus or squid are among those present, mix in the ink.

Add the parsley and tomatoes, chopped finely.

Separately, fry the rice.  Add water and simmer over very low heat.  When almost done, add the seafood.

Variant:  This is the minimal recipe.  Most people would add bay leaf, oregano, green peas, and bell or chile peppers (chopped).  Many would add spices including clove, cinnamon, cumin and allspice–all in very small amounts.  Some would throw in a carrot, or summer squash, or chayote, or anything else interesting and available.

 

 

Salpicon de Chivitos

Tiny sea snails with shells like curled goat horns (hence their name—“chivitos” means “little goats”).  This is good with any shellfish.  I first encountered it in a tiny cafe on an isolated beach on the north coast of Yucatan.

 

Boil the shellfish.  Mix with their own weight (or a bit more) of raw chopped tomato, onion and cilantro.  Dress with salt, pepper, dried oregano, lime juice and a bit of oil.

 

 

Samak Mishwi

 

Arabic for “roast fish.”  I have seen it Yucatecanized to “samik mishul.”  This is one of the relatively recent Lebanese contributions to the Yucatan world.  It is as un-Maya a recipe as could be imagined, but I find fascinating the adoption of Lebanese culture in the Yucatan Peninsula.

 

2 fish

Olive oil

1 garlic clove

2 limes

4 oz. tahini (ground sesame seed paste)

6 sprigs parsley

 

Brush the fish with olive oil and grill.

Serve with sauce:  Mash the garlic cloves with salt and mix with the lime juice and sesame paste.  Thin this with water as needed.

Garnish with chopped parsley.

This sauce is a version of the famous taratur sauce of the Mediterranean,but substituting Mexican limes for lemon or vinegar.

 

 

 

Shrimps in Chirmole (or Chilmole)

Chilmole (Nahuatl for “chile sauce”) is a very widespread recipe type, deriving from central Mexico, and based on a rich sauce of ground dried chiles, usually thickened with masa.  In central Mexico there is a whole conoisseurship of dried chiles, but in Yucatan there is not much choice.

 

1 lb. fresh or dried shrimp

4 oz. dried chile (ancho, morron or the like)

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

3 Tabasco peppers

6 peppercorns

1/2 tsp. achiote

4 large oregano leaves (or 1 tsp. ground oregano)

2 cloves

1 lb. tomato, chopped

1 branch epazote

2 oz. masa

3 eggs

Salt to taste

 

Boil the shrimps, peel and clean.

Toast the chiles and grind with the onion, garlic and spices.  Combine with the shrimps, the stock they were boiled in, the tomato, the epazote and the salt.

Dissolve the masa and cook down the whole into a thick sauce.  Serve decorated with slices of hardboiled eggs or other garnishes.

Warning: note that this recipe uses lots of chile.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:33)

 

 

Snook in Escabeche

 

As explained in the Introduction, robalo in southeast Mexico is what is called “snook” in the southern US.  It’s a flavorful, slightly oily, white-fleshed fish.  Any equivalent fish will do; even salmon works fine for this one (texture and richness being more important in this case than flavor and “white fish” qualities).

 

4 robalo steaks

1 tsp. steak recado

1/2 tsp. ground coriander

1 pinch ground oregano

1 pinch cinnamon

1 pinch ground allspice

2 garlic cloves

2 heads of roasted garlic

4 bay leaves

Vinegar

Salt to taste

 

Fry the steaks till not quite done.  Cool.

Dissolve the spices in the vinegar and some water.  Add the fish steaks.  Boil quickly.

 

 

Snook in Orange Juice

 

Fish:

2 lb. snook fillets

Juice of 1 bitter orange or a few limes

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. oregano

Juice of 3-4 bitter oranges (or equivalent)

 

Sauce:

1/4 cup oil

2 cloves garlic

2 onions

2 bell peppers

2/3 lb. tomatoes

Salt and pepper to taste

1 sprig or more parsley

 

Marinate the fish in the orange juice, to which the ground spices are added.

Roll the fillets and fry very lightly.  Cover with bitter orange juice.  Bake at 350o.

Meanwhile, make the sauce:  Fry the garlic and onions, chopped, in the oil.  Add the chiles and tomatoes, roasted.  Add the salt and pepper.  Then add the chopped parsley.  Cook.

Serve the fish with the sauce poured over.

 

 

Tik’in-xik

A very widespread traditional Maya fish dish.  Its ancestry must go back to ancient times.

 

1 fish (2-3 lb.)

3 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

Juice of 1 bitter orange or 2 limes

2-3 tsp. achiote

1 tomato, sliced

½ small white onion, sliced

1-2 xkatik chiles, seeded, roasted and cut in strips

Salt and pepper to taste

Hojasanta and/or banana leaves

 

Clean the fish and slash its sides.  Blend the spices, garlic, achiote and orange juice.  Rub this recado well into the fish.  Marinate for several minutes to overnight, according to preference.

Line a baking dish with banana leaves (or substitute).  Wrapping with hojasanta leaves and then banana leaves gives better flavor.  Put the tomato, onion and chile slices on it.  Wrap well in the leaves and bake in a slow over for 30 to 45 minutes.

Originally, of course, this would have been made in a pib, and you can still do this if you are very good at wrapping.  It is also made on the grill, which is easier.

Fish steaks marinated in the recado and simply grilled (without the wrapping) are also excellent.

If you can’t find banana leaves, wrap in any flavorful leaf, or put some fennel or bay leaves around the fish, and wrap all in aluminum foil.

Variants:  Cinnamon can be added to the recado.  All quantities can be, and are, varied according to what’s cheap, available, or preferred.  This is a notably variable dish; every restaurant has its own recipe.

 

 

Worker’s Shrimp

 

1 lb. tomato

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp. achiote

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

5 allspice berries

1 oz. bottled green olives

1 oz. capers

A few raisins

1 sprig parsley

6 tbsp. oil

2 bell peppers

2 xkatik chiles

4 summer squash

2 chayotes

1/2 lb. potato

2 platanos

3 tbsp. vinegar

1 1/2 lb. shrimp (shelled and cleaned)

 

Roast the tomatoes.  Blend with the onion, garlic, spices (ground), olives, capers, raisins, and parsley.  Fry this sauce in the oil.  Cut up and add the vegetables and cook ca. 20 minutes.  Add the shrimp and cook till done, about 10 min.

Workers have more appetite than money, so a great quantity of vegetables are used here to stretch the shrimp.

The olives, capers, and raisins were originally elite Spanish ingredients, and are optional here.  Leaving them out gives a more Maya dish—more like what workers really eat.

 

 

Fish in Vinegar

A variant of fish in escabeche—the classic Spanish sour sauce, from the Arabic as-sikbaj for a vinegared dish.

 

2 lb. fish, preferably robalo steaks but any firm-fleshed fish will do

4 bay leaves

1/2 bottle cider vinegar

1 onion

1 carrot

1 bell pepper or mild chile

4 potatoes

Oil

4 tomatoes

Oregano

Few sprigs parsley, chopped

Pinch of nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Set a bit of water to boil, with the spices.  Cook 10 minutes and take out fish.  Chop the vegetables and cook in the vinegar and stock.  Add a biot of olive oil.  Pour over the fish and serve.

 

 

 

 

MEAT

 

 

Ajiaco, Yucatan style

 

A rather spectacular elaboration of a standard Mexican recipe.  This is another dish that stretches the meat with lots of vegetables.  It is thus notably healthy.

 

1 lb. pork loin

1 lb. pork short ribs

8 allspice berries

2 cloves

1 small cinnamon stick

1/2 tsp. coriander seed

1/2 tsp. oregano

3 garlic cloves

6 tsp. vinegar

1 onion

1 plantain

1/2 lb. tomatoes

2 bell peppers

3 xkatik chiles

1 chayote

1/2 lb. potatoes

1/2 lb. sweet potato

2 summer squash

1/3 cup rice

Pinch of saffron

 

Cut up the meat.  Grind the spices and garlic, mix with vinegar, and rub into the meat.  Cook for a few minutes.  Then add the vegetables, in the order listed.  The rice can be added with them or cooked and served separately.

Add the saffron at the very end (last 5 minutes of cooking).

 

 

Ajiaco, Quintana Roo style

 

2 lb. pork

4 leaves of oregano

4 garlic cloves

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 pinch cumin seeds

2 summer squash

2 carrots

2 chayotes

1 sweet potato

1 plantain

2 potatoes

1 cup rice

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 green chile

4 oz. lard

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1 pinch saffron (optional; rare)

Salt and pepper to taste

One is tempted to add: 1 kitchen sink.

 

Boil the meat.  Add the spices.  As it cooks, cut up the vegetables and add them in.

Separately, chop up and fry the onion, tomatoes and chile.  Add the rice.  Add enough stock to cook and simmer slowly.  As it cooks, squeeze in the bitter orange juice.  Add the saffron at the very end.

Variant:  This is a typical Quintana Roo dish in that it is delicately spiced.  Most ajiacos use a great deal more chiles than this, with dried chiles being notably evident.  Adjust accordingly.

The saffron is an exotic touch; in the villages it would not be found.  But the other ingredients would.  Dishes like this are typical of Maya village cooking, because the dooryard garden is apt to produce, each day, one squash, a couple of tomatoes, a few chiles, and so on—not a lot of any one thing, but an awful lot of different things.

 

 

Balinche Salad

Compare the Chojen Salad of the Chiapas highlands.

 

Cold boiled meat—deer preferred, beef common.  It is shredded or chopped, with bitter orange (or lime) juice, chopped radish, cilantro, chile xkatik, and onion.  Half a bitter orange is served on the side to squeeze on it.

Other names are used, and ingredients are mixed and matched according to taste.

This is one of those simple dishes that vary according to the creativity of the maker.

 

 

Beef in Broth

 

2 lb. beef, cut up

3 tomatoes

1 bell pepper

1 xkatik chile

1 onion

Half of 1 bunch cilantro

1 tsp. oregano

3 leaves mint

1 head of garlic

1 tsp. black pepper

4 tbsp. red recado

2 chopped summer squash

2 chayotes, cut up

 

Relish:

6 radishes

Rest of the cilantro

Juice of bitter orange

Salt

Habanero chile (optional)

 

Boil the meat.  Chop and fry the tomatoes, bell pepper, chiles and onion.  Add to the meat.  Late in the cooking, add the herbs.

Roast the garlic and add it in.

Dilute the recado in some of the stock, and add in.  Put in the squash and chayote.  Cook till done.

Meanwhile, chop up the radishes, cilantro and chile and marinate in bitter orange juice.  Eat as relish for the meat.

 

 

Bistec

In spite of the name (which is, of course, “beefsteak”), this dish is usually made with pork in Yucatan and Quintana Roo.  However, it is made with beef too, especially rather tough cuts like flank steak.

 

2 lb meat, cut into thin steaks (1/8-1/4” thick)

Cinnamon stick

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp cloves

1 tbsp peppercorns

3 cloves garlic

Juice from 4 bitter oranges and 2 limes (or just 4-6 limes)

1 carrot

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1-2 potatoes

Salt to taste (traditionally this is an extremely salty dish, to restore salt lost in working in the blazing Yucatan sun)

 

Grind the spices together, and thin with the citrus juice.  Marinate the pork in this for an hour or two.  Fry in lard till done.

Meanwhile, peel the vegetables.  Boil with salt.  Serve the boiled vegetables separately from the bistec.

For sauce (separate):  Roast the habaneros.  Mash with salt.  Add cilantro and onion, and a bit of lime juice.  Or serve with limes, radishes and k’utbi p’ak.

Variants:  The vegetables can vary according to taste, except that the tomatoes, onion and potatoes must be there.

 

 

Bistec (Steak with Potatoes) II:  Urban Form

 

2 lb. tender beef or pork steak, cut thin

1 cube steak recado

Vinegar

Oil

3 tomatoes, sliced

1 onion, sliced

1 bell pepper, sliced

4 potatoes, sliced (in rounds)

Salt to taste

 

Dissolve the recado in a little vinegar and rub into the meat, with a lot of salt.  Put a little oil on the bottom of a casserole or saucepan.  Layer meat and vegetable slices.  Cook over low heat.

Variant: with more onion and some garlic, instead of the tomatoes and potatoes, this becomes “steak and onions.”

 

 

But’

 

Maya for “minced meat” (not rump steak!).  But’ is translated into Spanish as relleno, “stuffing,” which is confusing when it is not being used to stuff anything.

 

1 lb. ground pork (ideally, finely minced meat of fresh leg)

1 tsp. steak recado

1 pinch ground clove

1 pinch ground cinnamon

1/4 cup vinegar

2 tsp. sugar

4 tomatoes

1/2 onion

1 green chile (or bell pepper)

12 or 15 olives

1 tsp. capers

Raisins to taste

Almonds (to taste; optional)

4 hardboiled eggs

Salt to taste

 

Mix the spices into the meat.  Chop the vegetables.  Chop the whites of the eggs (reserve the yolks for garnish).  Mix all ingredients and cook in a frying pan, stirring.

This is usually used as a topping or stuffing.  It is used to stuff turkey or to make meatballs cooked with cut-up turkey.  Either way, the turkey is often boiled in a richly spiced stock (see turkey recipes).  But’ is also used in tacos or on sopes, etc., and of course for stuffing vegetables.

A very characteristic use:  wrapped around hardboiled eggs and fried, like Scotch eggs.

Traditional village versions leave out some or all of the classic Spanish imports:  olives, capers, raisins, almonds.

In fact, the very traditional, all-local form of it is:

 

But’ Negro

 

2 lb. ground pork

1 cube red recado

1 cube black recado

1/2 cup vinegar

4 tomatoes

1/2 onion

1 xkatik chile

 

Proceed as for previous recipe.  The same comments apply.

 

Variant:

8 tomatoes

1 xkatik chile

2 lb. ground pork

1/2 cube steak recado

1 cube achiote paste

1 pinch cumin

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

 

Roast and peel the tomatoes and chile.  Dissolve the spices in water.  Add to meat.    Cook all in a frying pan, stirring.  Chop the onion and garlic and add; they should fry up in the fat from the meat.  Eat with tortilla chips.

 

 

Chocolomo

The name is “mestiza Maya”; choko is Maya for “hot,” lomo is Spanish for “loin.”  Supposedly, the name comes not from the heat of the cooked dish, but from the fact that this was, and is, the traditional way to cook a freshly-butchered animal whose meat is still warm.  The purpose of this dish is to use the more delicate parts of the animal—loin and innards—before they spoil.  It is the standard “variety meats” dish in much of south Mexico.

 

Pork or beef heart, and small pieces of tripe

1 lb. pork or beef loin

Liver, kidney

Brain (optional)

Soup bones

Cube of steak recado

1 head of garlic

Juice of 1/2 bitter orange

4 tomatoes

1 onion, cut up

Sprig of cilantro

Sprig of mint

Chiles to taste

 

Clean the various meats well.  Before cooking, the meat of the kidneys has to be trimmed of fat and thoroughly cut away from the tough white tubule system, and then soaked in water for a while.  Discard this water after soaking.  This process makes kidneys taste good instead of gross.

Cook the meat with the recados.  Start with the heart, tripe, bones, and any tough cuts.  Cook for an hour or more.  Add the loin and cook a while longer.  Then add the liver and kidney; cook for a little more.  Add the brain (it is very delicate and cooks fast), vegetables and herbs.  Serve with Basic Relish, lime wedges, xni-pek, and other garnishes; it is traditional to have a fairly full board of relishes and garnishes with this dish.

Variants:  People use whatever mix of “variety meats” is available.  If you don’t like the innards, it is perfectly possible to make this dish with just pork loin (as the name implies).

Cabbage, chayote, xkatik chiles, radishes, and other vegetables are added to this dish, according to taste.

 

 

Chorizo

 

2 lb. pork

1 tsp. pepper

5 allspice berries

1 glass sherry

1 cup vinegar

Nutmeg

1 dried chile, seeded, toasted and ground

 

Grind the pork twice.  Grind the spices and add.  Mix all ingredients and knead well.  Let stand a while, then stuff into sausage skins.  Smoke over smoldering fire including aromatic leaves such as guava, allspice or avocado.

It is possible to make patties and cook directly, without the sausage skins and the smoking process.  In this case, try forming the patties around some aromatic leaves (bay leaves, herbs, etc.).

 

 

Cochinita Pibil

With this, we reach the crowning glory and fame of Yucatecan cuisine.   It goes back to pre-Columbian times; the pit barbecue, a worldwide cooking method, was sacred to the Maya–or at least was used to prepare the sacred foods.

Unfortunately, this is also the easiest Yucatecan dish to ruin.  I confess I have tried it only with pork roast, and only in the oven.  I have ruined a few roasts even with this simplified form.

 

This recipe is adapted to a very small piglet.  For a larger animal, you have to scale up the ingredients proportionately.

 

1 piglet, cleaned (ca. 10 lb., or up to 20), with all its innards, or a large pork roast (plus a pork liver, if you like liver)

3-4 cubes red recado, or mix equivalent amount of achiote with clove, cumin, black pepper, oregano, cinnamon and bitter orange juice to make up a paste.

Juice of 5 bitter oranges

Ground chile

Salt and pepper to taste (traditionally, a lot)

Mint leaves

2 xkatik chiles, cut up

Chives (or green onions)

Salt

 

Banana leaves, for wrapping

 

Relish:

2 red onions, finely chopped

Juice of one bitter orange

Chopped chiles

 

Dilute the recado in the juice of 5 of the oranges.  Rub this well into the meat and let it marinate overnight.  If using a pork roast, slash it and rub the marinade into the cuts.

Now, dig a pit about 4′ by 4′ by 3′ or more.  Heat rocks as hot as you can get them in a fire of very hot-burning wood.  Transfer these into the pit.  Put over them a layer of wet leaves.

Put the pork in a large, high-sided roasting pan and wrap thoroughly with banana leaves.  (If none is available, use any flavorful, safe leaves and wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil.)

Separately wrap the brain (or leave it out).  The liver should be wrapped separately, with chopped-up mint, chives, green chile and salt.  (If liver is not liked, do this with some of the meat.)

For a really thorough job of using all the pig, chop up the fat, mix with the blood and some spices, and pack into the carefully-cleaned small intestines, thus making blood sausage.  Cook with the rest.

Put the pork in the pit.  Cover carefully with a fitting metal cover.  Bury under a good foot of dirt.

Leave overnight.  (Times range from four to twelve hours, but the longer the cooking, the better the result.)

Serve with the raw onions, chopped, marinated with chopped chile (and sometimes tomato) in the juice of the remaining bitter orange.  Naturally, fresh habaneros are the chile of choice, but milder forms can be substituted.

Tomato or chile sauce is also often served.

In the Chetumal market, where many stalls sell cochinita pibil, the accompanying sauce is quite different, and wonderful with the dish: a simple guacamole made by mixing avocado and xkatik chiles, about half and half.  (Some stalls use more avocado, some use more chile.)  These are mashed to a smooth paste.  Some lime juice can be added, to good effect.  This is a really outstanding sauce for cochinita.

 

Fortunately for apartment-dwellers (and lazy people like me), this dish is perfectly easy to make in a regular oven, though it never tastes quite so good as when made in a pib.  The secret is to wrap it thoroughly and cover it well, so that no liquid or steam escapes, and then cook it VERY SLOWLY–200o–for several hours, until the pork is very thoroughly done.  A lot of liquid should result.

It is possible to wrap it thinly and roast at regular temperature (375o).  Indeed, this is what almost all restaurants do, especially Yucatecan-style ones that are not in Yucatan!  This produces perfectly good roast pork, but it isn’t cochinita pibil, any more than orange soda is Dom Perignon.

The best cochinita pibil is found before dawn in the village marketplaces, where the farmers are getting a quick breakfast before going off to their milpas–cornfields–for a day’s work.  The cochinita, prepared by one of the country folk the night before, is freshly dug up and still hot and juicy.  The cool air, wood smoke scent, and quiet Maya conversation add much to the experience.

 

 

Gopher

A traditional Maya dish.  So far, I haven’t tried it.  You are welcome to do the experimenting with this one.

 

Trap a gopher.  Roast (don’t skin, don’t clean, just roast).  Rub the carbonized hair off.  Take all the meat, innards included, off the bones.  Mix with salt, bitter orange or lime juice, and chile sauce (or use these as a garnish).  Make tacos of this with fresh tortillas.  (The true outback thing to do is to pick the meat off the bones with the tortilla pieces.)

This is sometimes referred to, with more rhyme than reverence, as baj yetel u taj, “gopher with its dung.”

 

 

 

K’ab ik (“Chile Stew”)

 

2 lb. beef with bones

2 cubes red recado, and a bit of extra achiote paste

1 cube steak recado

Pinch of allspice, or allspice berries

2 to 4 dried ancho chiles (I hope no one reads that as “24 dried chiles”)

2 sprigs epazote

Bitter oranges

1 head garlic

4 tomatoes

1 onion

 

Cut up and boil the meat.  Add the recados, with a pinch of allspice powder or a few allspice berries.

Seed, toast and soak the chiles.  Grind and add.

When the meat is soft, add epazote, juice of 1/2 bitter orange (or 1 lime), and a head of roasted garlic (peeled and mashed).

Add the tomatoes and onion, cut up, and finish cooking.

Serve with salsas.

 

 

Kibi

This is by far the most popular of the Lebanese contributions to Yucatecan food.  Kibis are sold on every busy street corner.  They have become so thoroughly Yucatecan that they appear on the menus of Yucatecan restaurants in Mexico City and Los Angeles!

The standard street kibi is uninspiring: ground lamb, bulgur, chopped onion and mint, formed into a depth-bomb (fusiform) shape and deep-fried.  It is often served with a relish of chopped cabbage, chile and cilantro in vinegar.

A more authentic Yucatan Lebanese kibi recipe (from a booklet of Lebanese cooking in Yucatan, by Maria Manzur de Borge, that I have lost and that is no longer available) gives a better product:

 

2 lb. beef

2 lb. leg of lamb meat

1 lb. fine bulgur

Bunch of mint

3 onions

Handful of pine nuts (pinon nuts, pignolias)

Oil

Salt

Black pepper and chile, if wanted

 

Separate the fatter from the leaner bits of meat.  Mince the meat and the onions.  Soak the bulgur for an hour.

Mix the leaner meat with the bulgur and one of the chopped onions.  Fry the fatter meat with two of the chopped onions.  Add the pine nuts.

When the fat is fried out of the meat, drain and mix with the lean meat.  Form into depth-bomb shapes and deep-fry.  A lower fat alternative (perfectly traditional) is to bake in a baking tray.

 

 

Lomitos

 

2 lb. pork, cut up

1 cube red recado

Juice of 1 bitter orange

1 onion, chopped

2 tbsp. lard

1 lb. tomatoes

2 xkatik chiles (or other fresh chiles, even to habaneros)

1 roasted head of garlic

 

Rub the pork with the recado mixed with the juice.

Chop and fry the onion in the lard.  Add the tomato and chiles.  Put in the pork.  Add water and simmmer.  Add in the garlic and cook till done.

 

 

Old Rags

Ropa vieja–so named from its appearance, like old shredded rags–is a classic dish known throughout Mexico and the Spanish Caribbean.  This is the Yucatan version.

 

1 lb. leftover stewed pork or beef (if starting from scratch, stew the meat a LONG time, till it is “boiled to rags”)

1 onion

4 cloves garlic

5 tomatoes

1 bell pepper and/or 1 xkatik chile pepper

1-3 sprigs or small branches of epazote

1/2 cup bitter orange juice

1 cube red recado

2 tsp. black pepper

Salt to taste

 

Shred the meat into small fibres.

Chop up the vegetables and fry, starting with the onion and garlic.  Add the meat and fry all.

Many variants of this recipe exist.  Tomato sauce, other spicing, etc. can be tried.

In much of the Caribbean this dish is served with “Moors and Christians” (cooked black beans mixed with white rice).

The famous Cuban version of this dish is much spicier.  It uses much more garlic, and really hot chiles instead of mild ones.  You can vary this recipe accordingly.  3 dried ancho chiles, ground, is a good start.

 

 

Om Sikil (Pipian I)

This is a village recipe, extremely conservative–basically pre-Columbian (note lack of frying and lack of any nonnative ingredient except black pepper).

The Nahuatl word “pipian” has almost displaced the ancient Maya name om sikil, but the latter is still heard.

 

2 cups sikil

6-8 cups water

1/2 red onion, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

2 cloves garlic, mashed

1 tsp. ground pepper

2 achiote cubes dissolved in water

1 tsp. dried oregano leaves

2 red chiles

2 lb. meat or fowl

1 cup sour abal (Yucatan “plum”; substitute sour plums)

1 tbsp. lard

4 oz. masa

 

Mix the sikil with the water.  Strain.  Bring to boil and add the chopped vegetables.  Cook ten minutes.  Add in the meat and spices.  Cook till meat is tender, about 1 hour.  Toward the end, add the abal or sour plum fruits.

Take out 2 cups stock.  Slowly work into it 1 tbsp. lard and 4 oz. masa.  Return this to the soup to thicken it.

It is perfectly possible to dispense with this thickening step.

 

 

Pipian

Compare Om Sikil, above.

 

4 oz. sikil

3 dried chiles

2 tbsp. achiote

2 garlic cloves

2 lb. meat (any sort), cut up

1 branch epazote

4 tomatillos

1 tbsp. masa

2 tbsp. lard if using lean meat (pan drippings here, definitely not commercial lard)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Mix sikil with water and bring to boil.

Seed, toast and soak the chiles.  Grind them with pepper, achiote and garlic.  Add to the sikil.

Add the meat, epazote and salt.  Let boil.  Add the tomatoes, blended up.

Thicken the sauce with the masa.  Add the lard.  Cook till done.

 

 

Pok Chuk (Maya for “pork chop,” usually spelled “poc chuc”)

This dish was created by the restaurant Los Almendros of Ticul.  Los Almendros has an old Mérida branch, and now is developing branches elsewhere.  This dish is widely imitated and varied.  What it lacks in complexity, it more than makes up in popularity.  One of the reasons is the beautifully artistic arrangements that can be made with the separate sauces and beans on the plate.

 

Rub a thin-cut pork chop with steak recado or red recado.  Grill.

Serve with Tomato Sauce, K’utbi Ik, roast onion, cooked black beans, and bitter orange or lime quarters—each served separately in neat piles around the plate.  Avocado slices and other garnishes are often added as well.

 

 

Pork and Chaya

 

2 lb. pork

2 tsp. oregano

4 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp. cumin powder

20 chaya leaves (if no chaya is around, substitute 1 bunch Swiss chard)

1/2 cup rice, pre-soaked

1 pinch saffron

 

Relish:

1 red onion, chopped

3 tbsp. chopped cilantro

Juice of 2 bitter oranges

 

Boil the pork.  Add the spices.  When well cooked, add the chaya, rice and saffron.  Simmer till rice is just done, ca. 15 min.

Prepare a relish with the onion, cilantro and bitter orange juice.

This is a very Moorish-style recipe; Moorish cooking often involves cooking the rice or other starch in with the meat (as well as the addition of saffron).  It produces a rather stodgy dish, especially if overcooked.  Thus, you might well want to cook the rice separately and serve the stew over it.

 

 

Pork and Beans I (Frijoles con Puerco)

This dish is the local variant of a dish universal in the west Mediterranean world:  south France, Spain, Portugal.  Always, it involves beans of one or another type, with various tough parts of the pig.  This black-bean version is a sacred Yucatecan tradition.  It is often served regularly on a particular day of the week (the day varies from place to place) as the Daily Special.  Whoever said neck bones were low?  They’re among the best parts of the pig.  Also, true Yucatecans are sometimes militant about the tail and ear, but non-Yucatecans can be forgiven for leaving them out!

 

1 lb. black beans

1 lb. pork meat, cut up

1/2 lb. pork neck bones

1 pig tail, cleaned

1 pig’s ear

1 tbsp. black recado

1 tbsp. red recado

4 chopped tomatoes

1 branch epazote

3 oz. lard

1 tbsp. masa

 

Cook the beans.  Cut up the pork and add.

Dilute the recados in half a glass of water and add to the above.

Fry the tomatoes and epazote in lard.  Add in the masa and half a glass of water and cook till thick.  Add this to the stew.  Cook a minute more and serve forth.

Serve as is, or remove the pork from the beans and serve them separately.  Either way, a full range of relishes and garnishes should be provided, but must always include chopped radish with onion and cilantro in bitter orange or lime juice; and Tomato Sauce or K’utbi Ik on the side.

Rice is often cooked in the cooking liquid (after initial frying) and served separately.

“Red” variant:  Use more red recado (2-3 tbsp. or even more) and some ground allspice.

 

 

Pork and Beans II

This is a Yucatecan variant of a more Peninsular-Spanish version of the same dish.  In Spain the beans would be white–originally fava beans, now white frijoles.  In Yucatan red beans are sometimes used, and are very good in this dish.

 

1 lb. white or red beans

1 lb. pork

1 lb. pork ribs

6 cubes red recado

Vinegar

1/4 cabbage

1 summer squash

2 plantains

1 lb. potatoes

3 oz. raw ham

2 oz. bacon

2 Spanish chorizos

4 tomatoes

1 onion

1 bell pepper

4 green chiles

1/2 lb. lard

Salt to taste

 

Cook the beans.

Cut up the pork and ribs.  Add the red recado dissolved in vinegar.

When the pork is mostly done, add the beans, and the squash, cabbage, plantains, and potatoes (all cut up).

Separately, fry the chorizo, bacon and ham.  Add the tomatoes, onion, bell pepper, and chiles.  Fry.  Add a bit of vinegar.  Mix into meat and beans at last minute and simmer a while.

Variation comes by adding or subtracting different sorts of preserved pork products.

 

 

Pork and White Beans

By contrast, this is a very traditional, very Maya recipe.  White navy beans, dried limas or black-eyed peas may be used.

 

2 lb. white beans

2 lb. pork, preferably leg meat and ribs

1 onion, chopped

1 bell pepper, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

1 tbsp. red recado

Water

1 xkatik chile

1 head garlic, roasted

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook the beans.  When mostly done, add the pork, previously fried in its own fat (i.e. cook, preferably in stickproof pan, till some of its own fat renders out to fry it; you may have to add some water at first).

In this fat, fry the chopped vegetables with red recado dissolved in water or bitter orange juice.

Combine all ingredients and cook till done.

 

 

P’uyul de Chicharron K’astak’an (“small pieces of thoroughly-cooked chicharrones”)

A very Maya dish.

 

Take bits of pork skin attached to fat and meat–i.e. like chicharrones but with the meat attached, not just the skin.  Deep-fry for a very long time, till thoroughly crisp.  Eat in tacos with Basic Relish or similar garnishes.

Low-fat variant: pan-fry or grill bits of pork.

 

 

Steak a la Valladolid (Bifstek vallisoletana)

A simple but wonderful and deservedly popular recipe.  Valladolid (Yucatan) is the center of the highly traditional maize-growing region of eastern Yucatan state and neighboring Quintana Roo.  It is a homeland of simple, filling, but superb foods.

 

Rub a thin steak or pork fillet in recado of black pepper, garlic, lime juice and salt.  Then rub on red recado made of one cube achiote paste, lime juice, ground cumin and a little ground clove, dissolved in bitter orange or lime juice.  Marinate an hour or more.  Grill.

 

 

Stuffed Chayote (“Chayote Slippers”)

A manifestation of the classic stuffed vegetable dishes of Middle Eastern cooking—another Moorish legacy in Spain; note the distinctive suite of Spanish ingredients, the olives, capers, and raisins, appearing yet again.

Basically a variant of Stuffed Squash, below.

 

1 lb. ground pork

1 onion

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

1 tomato

4 chayotes

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 cup oil

Olives, capers, and raisins (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cook the chayotes.  Cut in half lengthwise, removing the central seed.  (The result looks like a slipper.)

Meanwhile, cook the meat in a frying pan.  In the rendered fat, cook the tomato, onion, and pepper, chopped.  Add the olives, capers and raisins.  Cook this mixture down till dry.

With this, stuff the chayotes.  Bake in a pan for a few minutes till it all holds together.

 

 

Stuffed Cheese

A thoroughly Spanish-style dish, with Moorish antecedents, now thoroughly nativized in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Large Dutch Goudas–alas, often of a quality too low to be seen in the home country—used to be sold everywhere, wrapped in red wax and red plastic wrap.  Recently, however, the balance of payments has made them expensive, and they are no longer village food.

There may still be a few proper ladies who refer to these cheeses as chak chi, Maya for “red edge,” since queso, “cheese,” is one of the many, many, many words that have a double meaning in Yucatan.  (The same ladies refer to brown sugar as piloncillo, never panoche, and refer to eggs as blanquillos–“little white things.”)

These large cheeses are often sold by the slice in rural markets.  Only the rich can afford the luxury of using a whole ball for a single dish.

Unlike most Yucatecan specialties, this dish is a cholesterol-avoider’s nightmare.

 

1 ball of Dutch cheese

2 lb. pork

14 eggs, 12 of them hardboiled

3 cloves garlic

Dried oregano to taste (use a lot)

1 clove (or more)

Oil

Raisins, olives, and capers, to taste (a lot)

Lard

Saffron, to taste (optional)

1 cup flour

2 cups of tomato sauce

Salt and pepper to taste

2 xkatik chiles

2 serrano chiles

1 bell pepper

1 lb. tomato

1 lb. onion

 

Unwrap the cheese, remove the wax, cut in half and hollow out.

Cook the meat.  Save the stock.

Peel the boiled eggs.  Chop up the whites.

Prepare a recado by grinding together the garlic, oregano, clove and saffron.

Mince the pork.  Mix in the egg whites.  Fry with a bit of the recado.  Add generous amounts of raisins, olives, capers, and 3-4 oz. of the scooped-out part of the cheese.

Take off the fire and mix in the two raw eggs and the saffron.  Stuff the cheese with this mixture.

Seal the cheese shut with the flour (made into paste with a bit of water).

Wrap in a cloth and steam (or boil, but the water coming up only an inch or so) for an hour (adding water if necessary).  Don’t worry if it falls apart.  It often does.

Serve with a sauce, as follows:

Roast the chiles, tomatoes and onion.  Skin.  Chop fine and fry in lard.  Add the meat stock and the rest of the recado.  Add more capers, olives and raisins.  Thicken with a bit of flour.

Cut the cheese in quarters and cover with the sauce.

 

The flavor of this recipe depends heavily on the use of a lot of recado, capers and olives.  Otherwise, it is bland and greasy to a serious degree.

Variant:  Shrimps and other sea foods are sometimes used for the stuffing.

 

 

Stuffed Squash

A dish with Spanish and, ultimately, Moorish roots, adapted to New World squash.  Very similar dishes are prepared by more recent Arab immigrants, especially of the Lebanese community that developed in the late 19th century in Yucatan; see below.  Moreover, this dish has rebounded to the homeland; stuffed Mexican summer squashes, prepared with recipes very similar to this one but substituting lamb for pork, now universally join the original stuffed eggplants and so on, throughout southern Spain, the Middle East, and the Arabic world.

 

6-8 summer squash

1/2 lb. ground pork

4 cloves

Small stick cinnamon

6 leaves oregano

4 cloves of garlic, roasted

Vinegar

Pinch of saffron

Around 20 raisins

1 tsp. capers

Olives, as desired

Almonds, as desired

4 tomatoes

1 onion

2 xkatik chiles or 1 bell pepper

Lard or oil (olive oil is traditional, and best)

Pork stock

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Blanch the squash and hollow out.

Fry the ground pork.  If it is fat, enough fat will render out to fry it; if it is lean, add a little lard or oil.

Grind the spices, except the saffron, and make into a recado paste with a little vinegar.  Add to the pork.

Add the vegetables (chopped finely; the onions first), then the saffron (not all of it), raisins, olives, almonds and capers.

Stuff the squash with this mix.  Bake, or cook on stove top in a pan with a little water, until squash is soft.

Prepare a sauce by cooking down the stock with some vinegar, saffron, salt, and, if wanted, a little flour to thicken.  Pour over the squash.  Some form of tomato sauce is often used with or instead of this sauce.

Variants: the raisins, olives, almonds, and capers can be left out.  The sauces can also be dispensed with.

Variant:  A Lebano-Yucatecan version uses lamb, pine nuts, tomato and cinnamon as the basic stuffing.  It can be modified by adding the chiles, etc.

 

 

Tablecloth Stainer (manchamanteles)

One Yucatan variant of a very widespread and popular Mexican dish.  The sauce is brilliant red and leaves an almost permanent stain, hence the name.

 

2 lb. pork loin (or other meat)

Lard for frying

Meat stock

4 dried ancho chiles

2/3 lb. tomato

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1 stick cinnamon

2 cloves

8 allspice berries

1 tsp. oregano

1 tsp. sugar

1 plantain

1/2 lb. potatoes

1 sweet potato

 

Cut up the meat.  Fry in lard.  Toast the chiles.  Roast the tomato, onion, and garlic.  Blend these with the chiles.  Grind the spices and mix in.

Add these to the meat.  Add the stock.  Simmer till meat is done.

Separately, boil the plantain, potatoes, and sweet potato.  When done, add to the meat.

In central Mexico this dish would usually have a lot more chiles, of 2, 3 or even 4 varieties.  I prefer that to the Yucatan form.  But the Yucatan form has more subtle, harmonious spicing and more vegetables, and the wonderful roasted tomato-onion flavor.  Nobody says you can’t have it all….

 

 

Tasajo with Chaya, I

 

2 lb. tasajo (salted air-dried beef), soaked and cooked for a very long time

3 cubes red recado

1 lb. chaya leaves

2 summer squash

1 bitter orange

1 roasted head of garlic

Juice of 2 limes

3 habanero chiles

 

Tasajo is the Spanish and Central American equivalent of jerky (which is originally Peruvian—our word comes from the Quechua Indian word charki).  Tasajo is saltier and not quite so tough as real jerky.

Soak the tasajo for a long time in several changes of cold water.  Then wash and cut up.

Boil with the recado for a couple of hours.  Then add the squash (cut up), garlic and chayas.  Cook another 15 minutes.

Take the ingredients out of the stock.  Squeeze the bitter orange (or a couple of limes) over them.  Serve the soup separately.

Seed and roast the chiles.  Mash with salt and lime juice.  Serve on the side.

Variant:  The meat and chaya can be taken out of the stock before quite done, chopped finely and fried with onion or garlic.  I like this better.

This recipe would work with corned beef or even with a tough cut of fresh beef.

 

 

Tasajo with Chaya, II

 

2 lb. tasajo (salted dried beef), soaked and cooked for a very long time

1 lb. chaya leaves

2 oz. bacon

2 oz. chopped ham

4 cloves

4 bay leaves

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Fry the meat, bacon, ham and flavorings.  Add water and cook 30 minutes.

Boil the chaya leaves and blend.  Fry this in a little oil.  Put over the meat and cook.

Variants:  This sauce is also ideal with fish.  Add any other greens to the chaya.  More or different spicing can be used.

 

 

Ts’aanchak (familiar as dzanchac in older spelling)

A traditional way to cook deer, from long before the Europeans came.  Now adapted to Spanish-introduced animals.

 

1 lb. beef, any cut (this is a good way to use tough or bony cuts, etc.)

3 garlic cloves

1 onion, chopped

6 ears sweet corn (optional)

2 summer squash, cut up (optional)

2 limes

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Relish:

1 bunch radishes, cut up very finely

1 habanero chile, cut up

1 onion, cut up finely

1/2 cup cilantro, cut up

Juice of 1 bitter orange

Salt to taste

 

Boil the meat till tender.

When almost done, add the vegetables (if wanted—this is often just a meat dish).

Serve with the relish–the cut-up ingredients marinated in the citrus juice.  Slices of bitter lime can be used as flavorful garnish, if you can get them.

The vegetables are optional; any combination can be used.  The Maya village version is simply boiled deer meat with the relish.

The stock is critical here.  Tough, lean, flavorful meat should be used, and simmered slowly for a long time, to produce a really good stock.  It is eaten as soup, accompanying the meat, like the ancestral peasant form of French bouillon et bouilli.  Naturally, this is also accompanied by a constant stream of fresh-made tortillas from home-grown corn.

There are many variants.

 

 

Ts’ik

 

1 lb. venison, cooked (any other meat can be substituted)

2 tomatoes

1 onion

Several radishes

10-20 sprigs cilantro

1 jalapeño chile

Juice of 4 bitter oranges

 

Cut up and boil the venison.  Cut up the other ingredients and serve with the cooked meat.

This is better if the venison is marinated before cooking, and better still if it is cooked in an earth oven (pib) rather than boiled.

A very simple standard.  This is the way ordinary Maya prepare the leaner types of meat—traditionally, venison—for a quick lunch.

By shredding the meat and mixing it with the relish, one creates the dish known as “balinche salad,” above, or by other names.

 

 

White and Gold Stew

A superb, elegant dish, this stew is thoroughly Spanish in origin, and thus out of place in this book—but too good to leave out!

 

1 lb. meat (anything will do)

4 cloves

Small cinnamon stick

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

2 packets saffron, dissolved in a little water

1 tsp. ground oregano

1 tsp. ground thyme

1 head garlic, roasted

Salt to taste

2 oz. vinegar

Olive oil (or lard or vegetable oil)

1 bunch green onions, roasted

Green chiles, to taste

Sugar to taste

 

Grind the spices (or use ground ones to begin with).  Rub into the meat, with the salt.  Brown the meat over low heat.  Add water, vinegar, oil, the sugar (if desired) and the vegetables.

Variants: a little sherry can be added.  Red recado can be used.

 

 

Xakan jaanal

Maya for “mixed food,” which this certainly is.  It is a particularly good and easy dish.  In contrast to the foregoing, this is a solid village dish.

 

2 lb. pork ribs

1 10-oz. package frozen lima beans or black-eyed peas

3 garlic cloves

1-2 tsp. oregano

Salt and pepper to taste

Branch of epazote

2 chayotes

1 kohlrabi

1 head cabbage

1 onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

1 xkatik chiles, chopped

1 cup rice

 

Cook the pork.  When it is nearly done, add the beans, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper and epazote.

Cut up the chayote, kohlrabi and cabbage.  Add into the pork and beans.

Separately, fry the chopped onion.  Add in the tomato and chiles.  Add in the rice and fry a while.  When it begins to stick, add in enough broth from the pork and beans to cover to depth of 1/2 to 3/4 inch.  Simmer over very low heat till the liquid is absorbed.

Serve the pork and vegetables over the rice.

Variants: this dish is infinitely expandable.  It can also be contracted perfectly well by leaving out the chayotes, kohlrabi and cabbage, or replacing them with any appropriate vegetable.  Eggs are sometimes added to hardboil in the stock.

 

 

Yucatan Stew

 

1 lb. meat

1 head of garlic, roasted, mixed with juice of one bitter orange

1/2 tsp. pepper

1-2 cloves

1 pinch cumin seeds

Sprig of fresh oregano or tsp. dried oregano

1 small bunch cilantro

3 tomatoes or 6 tomatillos

1 large green chile

1 onion, chopped; and/or a whole green onion, leaves and all except the tough top ends

 

Cook the meat.  When it comes to boil, add the spices.  When it is soft, chop or blend up the vegetables, fry, and add.

Eat with Basic Relish.

 

 

POULTRY

 

Chicken Adobo

 

1 chicken

3 cloves garlic

1 ½ tsp oregano

Large stick of cinnamon

1 tbsp peppercorns

1 oz. red recado

1 lb potatoes

½ onion

2 mild chiles, chopped

1 lb tomatoes, chopped

 

Cut up the chicken and boil.  Mash the garlic, oregano, cinnamon, and peppercorns together.  Add these and the potatoes, cut up, and cook till chicken is nearly done.  Then mix recado with some of the the stock.  Fry the onion, chiles and tomatoes.  Add these to the mix and finish cooking quickly.

 

 

Chicken Asado

This dish is great as is, but is far, far more commonly used as the start of something else.  This is the cooked chicken that is used in panuchos, salbutes, tamales, and countless other snacks and made dishes.   It was originally made with turkey, and often still is.

 

1 chicken

1 oz. red recado mixed with lime juice, lard or chicken stock, and more salt

½ onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, cut up

1 hot chile

Cut up and boil the chicken until almost but not quite done.  Take it out of the stock; save the stock.  Rub the chicken with most of the recado mix and roast it in a hot oven (ca. 375o).  At this point, if you are making this chicken only to use in panuchos or the like, set the chicken out to cool and then pull the meat off it.

Then, mix the rest of the recado into the stock.  Add the onion, tomatoes, and chile to the stock.  Cook and serve as soup with the chicken if you still have it, or, if the chicken’s destiny is otherwise, add noodles and/or potatoes and  other vegetables and a little of the dark meat of the chicken to the soup and finish cooking.

This dish has to be carefully made if you use United States chickens, which are very tender.  They tend to fall apart if boiled very long.  This dish requires that the chicken be boiled only enough to tenderize it and sterilize it.  If it falls apart, it can’t be roasted properly.

Variant:  this is made with black recado, too, especially if one is using turkey.

 

 

Chicken a la Motul

 

2 chickens

1/2 cup red recado

Juice of 2 bitter oranges

Lard

10 fried tortillas

3 large tomatoes

1 lb. refried beans

4 oz. cooked ham

Canned peas for garnish (or 1 10-oz pack frozen peas—untraditional but far preferable)

3 oz. grated Mexican sharp white cheese (if unavailable, use feta)

Salt to taste

 

Rub the chickens with salt and recado dissolved in the orange juice.  Boil in a little water.  Drain; fry.  Take the meat off the bones and shred the meat.

Boil the tomatoes in a very little salted water.  Blend and fry in the oil.

To serve:  Layer beans on a plate.  Put a fried tortilla on this.  Add the shredded chicken.  Then add the tomato sauce.  Cover with another tortilla.  Pour sauce over all.  On the top of this stack, put the ham, peas, and grated cheese.

Variants:  Turkey is more traditional, but very rarely found now in this dish.

The chicken can be cut up, and used bone-in, rather than boned and shredded.

This is only one of the architectural marvels of Motul cuisine.   Motuleños love to pile foods on a tortilla and top with some peas.  Possibly the Maya pyramids inspired it all.  It is cooking for the eye as well as cooking for the palate.

 

 

Chicken a la Ticul

Ticul is a large town in southern Yucatan, famous for its pottery, shoemaking, and food.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Lard

2 oz. ham, chopped

2 heads lettuce, chopped; optional (I prefer it without)

2 potatoes, cooked, chopped

1 stick cinnamon

6 peppercorns

2 cloves

4 large oregano leaves (or 1 tsp. ground oregano)

1 onion

3-4 garlic cloves

4 tbsp. vinegar

Grated Mexican sharp white cheese (or feta)

Green peas (traditionally canned, but briefly-cooked frozen peas are far better)

Salt to taste

 

Boil the chicken.  Drain, saving the stock.  Fry in the lard with the ham, lettuce and potato.

Grind the spices, onion, garlic and vinegar.  Add this to the stock and boil till it thickens.

Serve the chicken with this sauce poured over it.  Top with grated cheese and peas.

Variant:  The chicken can be breaded and fried.  Fried beans are often an accompaniment.  Other garnishes include red pepper strips, fried platano, etc.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:45)

 

 

Chicken Chirmole

 

1 chicken

5 mulato chiles (or other dried chiles; mulato specified because the common ancho is a bit sweet for this recipe, but mulatos are rarely seen in Yucatan, so ancho is very often used)

1/2 cup sikil

5 toasted tortillas

5 peppercorns

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

¼ tsp allspice

2 tbsp. lard or oil

Salt to taste

 

Cut up and boil the chicken.

Blend the chiles (seeded, toasted and soaked), sikil, tortillas, pepper and onion.  Note: the quality of the tortillas matters a lot in this dish.  Get good, fresh ones.

Fry this sauce in the lard.  Add two cups of the chicken stock.  Add the chicken and cook till sauce thickens somewhat.

Variant:  Ground blanched almonds make a very good substitute for sikil in this recipe.

 

 

Chicken in Bread Crumbs (Fried Chicken)

 

Not the most exciting dish, but too universal in Yucatan to ignore.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Lime juice

Salt and pepper

1 egg

Flour

Breadcrumbs

Oil

 

Boil the chicken.  Then take out and marinate in lime juice, salt and pepper.  Meanwhile, make a batter by beating the egg with flour.  Dip the chicken in this, then roll in breadcrumbs.  Deep-fry.

The advantage of this village method is that, since the chicken is already cooked, one leaves it in the boiling oil only long enough to crisp the outside into a shell.  The result should be very crisp and not even slightly greasy.

 

 

Chicken Pibil

 

1 large chicken

1 cube red recado

2 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. ground allspice

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

Pinch of ground oregano

6 cloves garlic, roasted and mashed

Juice of 2 bitter oranges (or 4 tbsp. cider vinegar)

12 leaves of epazote

4 pieces of tomato

Chopped onion

Chopped chile

1 tbsp. lard

Salt to taste

 

Cut up chicken into quarters.  Rub with spice mix (the spices dissolved in the bitter orange juice).  Anoint banana leaves (or foil) in lard and wrap the chicken quarters–with a few epazote leaves, a slice of tomato, and a some chopped onion and chile on each quarter.  Cook in a pib.

If baking in an oven, use a covered dish.  The idea is to hold in all the steam, so none of the aroma is lost.  Many a chicken pibil has been utterly ruined by baking without proper attention to this detail.  One warning:  If you do this, be sure the orange juice and the tomato don’t supply too much liquid, or you’ll get chicken soup instead of chicken pibil.

Naturally, one can vary the spice mix.  Unauthentic but good is to add powdered chile pepper to the recado.

 

 

Chicken with Potatoes a la Quintana Roo

A very standard dish in the area where I lived and worked, out in central Quintana Roo.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Oil

5 oregano leaves

5 allspice berries

1 slice of onion

1/2 tbsp. black pepper

2 garlic cloves

1/2 cube red recado or achiote paste

Juice of one bitter orange

3 tomatoes, roasted and blended up

1 xkatik chile

1/2 bell pepper (optional)

1 jalapeno chile

1 lb. potatoes (small new potatoes, or cut-up larger ones)

 

Fry the chicken lightly in the oil, with the spices.

Blend up the onion, garlic and recado in the orange juice.  Add to the chile and add just enough water to cook.

Separately, fry the tomato and the peppers, chopped.

Add to the chicken.  Add in the potatoes and finish cooking.

Like many Quintana Roo dishes, this is very delicately spiced, and you may want to raise the amount of oregano, allspice and black pepper.

 

 

Chilmole

A relative of the “Turkey in Black Sauce” below

 

1 chicken, cut up

1 tsp oregano

4 cloves garlic

1 tbsp pepper

2 oz black recado, or make or approximate your own (see recipe above)

2 tomatoes

2 onions

Several dried chiles (1-2 anchos, or a few smaller chiles)

4 oz masa

½ c white flour

 

Boil the chicken.  Grind the spices and garlic together, add to recado, add to stew.  Roast the onion in the ashes.  Add it and the tomatoes to the stew.

Toast the chiles (traditionally until completely black).  DO THIS OUTDOORS, STANDING UPWIND; the smoke is intensely irritating.  Add.  Cook 45 min. Knead the masa and flour together.  Add to stew, mix thoroughly to thicken stew, and cook for 10 min.

Variants:  Pork can be added to this.  The black recado can be left out, since it merely adds more to the toasted chiles and spices.  Fresh chiles, roasted, can be used (but are not traditional).

 

 

Cuban Rice

A Quintana Roo dish, reminding us of the links between the Mexican Caribbean and Cuba.  The Quintana Roo version seems generally to use more lime and herbs, less achiote and oil, than the Cuban.

 

1 chicken, cut up

Oregano, to taste

1 cube steak recado

7 garlic cloves

2 tomatoes

1 slice onion

1 bell pepper

3 cups rice

Lard

1 cup green peas (traditionally canned, but fresh or frozen are far better)

Juice of one lime

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil the chicken with oregano, the spices, and 5 of the garlic cloves.

Blend or chop finely the tomato, bell pepper, and onion.  Fry.  Add to stock.

Fry the rice with the other two garlic cloves.

Add the stock to this and simmer.  When partly cooked, add the peas, chicken, and lime juice.  Cook till rice is tender.

 

 

K’oolij blanco (“white stew”)

1 chicken or (more traditionally) small turkey

White corn meal, stirred into stock to whiten it

1 small xkatik chile

2 cloves

Few cumin seeds

Few allspice berries

1 cinnamon stick

Head of garliic

1 tsp crushed oregano leaves

2 sprigs epazote

Salt

Pepper

Sprig of mint

1 onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

 

Roast chicken unitl almost done, on grill.  Boil with corn meal and xkatik or bell pepper.  Mash the spices and garlic together and add to stew.  Add oregano and epazote.  Add mint at end.

Separately fry the onion and tomato to sofrito.  Add to stew near end of cooking, and cook just to get all mixed.

 

 

Mukbipollo

“Mestiza Maya”–Maya for “buried” (mukbij) and Spanish for “chicken.”

John Stephens’ account from around 1840 is classic:

“A friendly neighbour…sent us a huge piece of mukbipoyo.  It was as hard as an oak plank, and as thick as six of them;…in a fit of desperation we took it out into the courtyard and buried it.  There it would have remained till this day but for a malicious dog which accompanied them [the friendly neighbours] on their next visit; he passed into the courtyard, rooted it up, and, while we were pointing to the empty platters as our acknowledgment [sic] of their kindness, this villanous [sic] dog sneaked through the sala and out the front door with the pie in his mouth, apparently grown bigger since it was buried.” (Stephens 1843:21-22.)

Alas, all who travel in rural Yucatan, now as in Stephens’ time, encounter these oak-plank mukbipollos.  They are the result of skimping on the fat chicken broth when you mix the masa for the crust, and perhaps of also baking too long.

 

The following is an elaborate village version.

 

1 chicken

2 lb. pork (optional)

1 cube red recado

1-2 tsp. steak recado (or just another half cube of the red)

Branch of epazote

Few oregano leaves

5″ stick of cinnamon

Tsp. ground allspice or several allspice berries

2 cloves

5 roasted garlic cloves

4 tomatoes

3 onions

2 xkatik chiles

8 lb. masa

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Cut up and boil the meat in a lot of water.  Grind the spices and add.

Separately cook the tomatoes and onions in a very little water with 1 tbsp. lard, and boil 10-15 min. till a sauce is formed.

Take out a cup of stock.  Mix one fourth of the masa into the remaining stock and meat—slowly and carefully, so that lumps do not form.

Work the reserved cup of stock into the rest of the masa.  If the stock isn’t rich and fatty, you will have to add lard or oil, typically about ¼ cup, or you will wind up with the oak plank.  Again, work slowly.

With this mix, shape small pie shells like the familiar little chicken or steak pot pies of European and American cooking.  Fill with the meat.  Top with the tomato sauce.  Cover with a top crust of masa.  Rub over with thinned masa to seal.  Wrap in several layers of leaves.  Tie tightly to make a bundle.  Bury these in the pib.

The feast from which this recipe comes was cooked in a pib 3′ by 3′ and 1 1/2′ deep.  My next door neighbors in Quintana Roo, Elsi Ramirez and her family, dug it in their front yard.  Good firewood (the local equivalent of oak or mesquite) was put in, with large cobble-sized rocks on top of it.  The wood was burned till it became ash and the rocks changed color.  Then palm leaves were put over these until they were thoroughly covered.  The mukbipollos, wrapped in banana leaves and then in palm leaves, were then put in.  A metal cover was put over all, and dirt piled over it.  It was left for 3 hours.

In urban realms where you can’t dig up the yard:  Line a baking dish with banana leaves or foil.  Put the pies in, or just make one huge pie by pressing the masa against the banana leaves or foil.  Bake in a slow oven, around 350o, for 3-4 hours.  The exact heat must vary with circumstances.  The idea is to get a soft bottom crust and tougher, somewhat crisped and toasted top crust.

Variants:

Ch’a-chaak waj (bread for the ceremony of praying for rain) is made as above, or one can fry achiote in the lard used in the recipe.  The sauce should be thick so that the whole thing is more a cornbread than a pie.

The chicken can be shredded off the bones before use in the pie.

Dried chickpeas or lima beans, boiled till tender, can be added.

Spicing changes with the cook’s taste at the moment.

 

 

Chekbij waj

Similar to a mukbipollo, but, instead of making yellow corn meal into a solid piecrust, one uses a very soft, wide, round cake of white masa with a lot of chicken-grease-rich-stock worked into it (making it quite red).  The chicken is wrapped in this so the result is more like a tamale than a pie.  It is baked or steamed in leaves like the preceding.

 

 

Pabixa’ak’ (grilled or roast chicken)

Marinate chicken in red recado dissolved in bitter orange or lime juice, or in the spice mix for Cuban Rice, above.  Marinate for an hour or two, then grill or roast.

 

 

Puchero

 

1 chicken

Lard

Black pepper

1/2 tsp. cumin

2-3 cloves

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. oregano

3 garlic cloves

1 white onion

2 tomatoes

1 small summer squash

2 chayotes

2 carrots

2 small bell peppers

2 potatoes

1 or 2 plantains

Cabbage

1 package (8 oz.) fideos noodles

Salt to taste

Sprig of mint

 

Cut up the chicken, scrub with lime, and fry in lard.  Add salt, 1/4 of the onion, 2 tomatoes.  When all have colored somewhat, add water.  Make recado of the spices; add.  Then add in the vegetables (the plantains cut up but not peeled).  The cabbage goes in only when the other ingredients are fairly thoroughly cooked.

Saute fideos (thin angel-hair pasta) in a little oil.  Add stock to cook them.

Angel hair pasta may be substituted, but look for Mexican fideos (thin noodles—from Arabic fidaws, old Andalusian pronunciation fideos, meaning “noodle”).  They are thinner, cook faster and have more flavor.

Serve the puchero over these.  Serve with Basic Garnish or close relative thereof.

Variants:  The main one is that puchero is made with meat as often as with chicken.  Pork or beef neck bones are particularly common and good.  Pork ribs and pieces of stewing beef are also excellent.  Pork and chicken, or pork and beef, are routinely combined in pucheros.

The vegetables, of course, are an open set.  Garbanzos, sweet potatoes and other root crops are typically added.  Sometimes turnips and kohlrabi (the latter surprisingly common in the Yucatan) find their way in.

Thai lime, cut up, is very good in this–served in the bowl, not cooked with the chicken.

Rice is also used.  Any meat can be used instead of, or along with, chicken.  Chicken and pork make a good—and frequent—combination.

Garbanzos are sometimes added.

 

 

Rice and Beans

A dish native to Belize—some would call it the national dish there.  It has spread just across the border, and nativized in the Caribbean city of Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo.

 

1 chicken

Coconut oil

1 cube achiote paste

2 cloves garlic

Salt and pepper

1/2 cup rice

1/2 cup cooked red beans

1 plantain

1 onion

 

Cut up the chicken.  Make a recado of the spices.  Rub into chicken.  Cut up chicken and roast the pieces or fry them in coconut oil.

Sauté rice in coconut oil.  Add coconut cream thinned with some water and cook.  Mix with the beans.  (Excellent canned coconut cream may be found in any Asian-food market.  If you feel compulsive, here’s how to make it:  Grate the meat of a very ripe coconut.  Soak the gratings in warm water.  Pack in a cheesecloth and wring out.  This is great for developing the arm muscles.)

Cut plantain into thin strips and fry.  Serve on the side.

Separately, slice and fry the onion.  Serve over the chicken.  Alternatively, make Marinated Onions (see above) and briefly fry them.

Serve the chicken separately from the rice-bean mix.

Accompany with boiled local vegetables (such as chayote), sliced; chopped cabbage marinated in vinegar, salt and pepper; sliced raw tomatoes; salsa cruda of onion, tomato, cilantro; and xni’pek’ (habanero salsa; see above.  Habaneros are just as popular in Belize as in Yucatan.  In Belize they go by the English Caribbean name of “Scotch Bonnet” peppers.

 

 

Salpimentado (“salted and peppered”)

 

2 chickens

1 lb. pork, lean, cut up

2 summer squash

2 potatoes

1 chayote

1 plantain

3 cloves

1 stick cinnamon

1 tbsp. oregano

1 red onion

3 bunches of spring onions (scallions)

2 heads of garlic

2 mild chiles

Salt and pepper to taste

 

2 white onions

1 cup vinegar

Pinch of salt

1 habanero chile

2 Thai limes (bitter limes)

1 bunch cilantro

 

Cut up the chickens.  Set to boil with the pork.  Skim, then cook for 15 min.  Chop and add the vegetables  Grind the spices and add.  Cook 20 minutes or more, until all are done.  Meanwhile, roast the red onions, spring onions, chiles, and garlic.  Add them into the soup at the end; cook a minute or so.

For the relish:  chop the white onions very fine; add the vinegar

 

 

Turkey in Black Sauce

Here follow the traditional dishes of the four sacred colors.  Turkey, the only large domestic animal in pre-Columbian times, was the ritual food, and still is to some extent.  Chickens usually replace it now, being easier to raise.

 

1 turkey

1/2 lb. dried chiles

1 tbsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1 tsp. oregano

15 cloves

1 1/2 tsp. achiote

4 oz. lard

2 onions, chopped

20 leaves epazote

3 lb. tomatoes, chopped

4 lb. ground pork

2 raw eggs

10 hardboiled eggs

2 limes

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Seed the chiles.  Then toast them till they burn (literally catch fire).  DO THIS OUTDOORS, STANDING UPWIND; the smoke can seriously damage eyes.  Be sure no one is downwind.  When the chiles begin to burn, stop the fire by throwing water over them; let them just blacken.  Wash and grind with the spices.  Then blend all in water.

Heat the lard.  Then chop the onions and fry.  When they color, add six epazote leaves and a pound of tomatoes (chopped).  When fried, add the ground meat and half the ground chile mix.

Add the raw eggs and the chopped-up whites of the cooked eggs.

Meanwhile, clean the turkey and rub with salt, pepper and lime juice.  Stuff the turkey with the meat sauce and the egg yolks.

Cook in a closed pot over a low fire.  Add the rest of the ground chile, the tomatoes, the rest of the epazote, and some lard.  Cook till turkey is done.

To make sure the chiles aren’t overburned (producing bitter, scorched or sooty tastes), make them a day or two ahead of time, soak them, and discard the water.

Variant:  The village form of this uses a lot of masa (about 6 lb.), stirred into the soup to lengthen it and make it suitable for pib uses.  This makes a pretty stodgy dish, though.

Allspice berries can be added.

 

 

Turkey in Red Sauce

The red version of this quartet of traditional ritual turkey dishes.

 

1 turkey

1 tsp. black pepper

1 tbsp. oregano

8 cloves

¼ tsp. allspice

2 tbsp. achiote

2 oz. dried chile

10 tomatoes

3 onions (and/or several cloves garlic)

10 leaves mint

3-4 oz. lard

½ -1 lb. masa

 

Rub the turkey with salt and leave for several minutes.  Soak the dried chile.

Grind the spices (including the soaked chiles and the achiote) in a little water.

Roast the turkey till browned but not fully cooked.  Cut in pieces.  Simmer with the pork in 5 quarts water.  Add the recado.

Chop the tomatoes, onion and mint.  Fry in lard.  Add to the above.

Thicken with masa.  Cook till sauce thickens.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:46)

 

 

Turkey in Yellow Sauce

The recipe for the brilliant yellow k’ool is about the same, with half the achiote and without the tomatoes and mint.  Or use the very similar chicken stew from the mukbipollo recipe above.

 

 

Turkey in White Sauce

 

1 lb. pork ribs

1 turkey

1 branch oregano

10 peppercorns

3 garlic cloves (or more–up to one or two heads)

1 tsp. steak recado

1 tsp. red recado

Vinegar

Sliced onions

1 cup white corn meal

1 tsp. cumin seeds (optional)

1 tbsp. dried oregano

 

Boil the pork ribs in a large pot.  Add the turkey, cut up.  Add the spices, dissolving the recados in the vinegar.

Separate a few cups of the stock and dissolve the flour very carefully in it.  Cook slowly till it thickens.  Serve the turkey with this sauce poured over it.

Variants: it is possible to add quartered tomatoes, bay leaves, etc.

A much fancier version uses the classic Spanish combination of olives, capers, almonds, raisins, and a pinch of saffron.

A very interesting, and common, variant uses ground pork.  It is fried, and when the fat has rendered out, the spices are mixed into it.  (Some even chop tomatoes, onion, and chile peppers, and fry them in the mix, adding some of the almonds, capers, etc., but by this time we are dealing with a Spanish pork dish rather than a Maya turkey dish.)

If you can’t find white corn meal, yellow will do.  Some use white flour, but it merely thickens the sauce and makes it gluey, rather than adding the delightful texture and flavor of corn meal.

 

 

Turkey in Escabeche I:  Simple Form

In most of the Spanish world, escabeche—from Arabic, and originally Persian, as-sikbaj, food cooked in vinegar—is something one does with vegetables and sea food.  In Yucatan, it is first and foremost a poultry dish.

 

Marinate a turkey or chicken in a recado of cloves, cumin seed, cinnamon, black pepper, allspice, oregano, and garlic, mixed with a little vinegar (variants:  water, lime juice, bitter orange juice).

Boil with salt and a chile or bell pepper.

Serve with sliced onions (as in recipe following).

 

 

Turkey in Escabeche II:  Classic Escabeche Oriental

No one seems to have a conclusive account of what is “oriental” about this dish.  One theory is that the name comes from the fact that the dish is typical of Valladolid in the eastern part of Yucatan state.  However, a similar dish is called “oriental” in Spain, and it seems unlikely that influence from Valladolid (Yucatan) got that far, so I suspect “oriental” means “Moorish” or “Near Eastern” in this case.

 

1 turkey

1 tbsp cumin seeds

1 stick cinnamon

20 oregano leaves

8 cloves

1 tbsp. peppercorns

1 bottle vinegar

1/2 cup lard

8 xkatik chiles

2 lb. red onions

6 habaneros (!! Or fewer—or, if you can’t deal with even one habanero, one mild chile)

4 roasted heads of garlic

 

The turkey can be cut up or whole.  For the pib, it should be whole.  Boil the turkey.

Grind up the spices and make a paste with the vinegar.  Rub into the turkey.  Put the turkey in large pot with the lard, garlic, and xkatik chiles (roasted).  Bury in pib, or roast in the oven.

Cut up the onions and habaneros.  Marinate in vinegar or lime juice, salt, cumin powder and toasted oregano leaves.  Add some of the turkey stock.  Serve as garnish.

 

 

Turkey Escabeche III

A variant, which I prefer, of the above.

 

3 lb. turkey parts, or 1 chicken

1/2 stick cinnamon

3 cloves

3 black peppercorns

4 cloves garlic

3 tsp. dried oregano

1 cube achiote paste

1 tbsp. lard

Juice of 6 limes

3 purple onions

 

Boil the turkey (or chicken) with a little dried oregano.

Grind the spices (including the rest of the oregano).  Add 1/2 of the achiote cube and mix with juice of 1 lime.  Score chicken and rub in this recado.

Slice the onions.  Let sit for a while, then pour boiling water over them.  Leave a few minutes, then drain and add juice of 5 limes and 1/2 tsp. salt.  Or make the full Marinated Onions recipe with them.

Roast the turkey in a hot oven for 15 minutes, till skin is crisping.  Or, if you have a pib, wrap it and cook it in the pib.

Add the rest of the achiote cube to the stock.  Add 3 xkatik chiles (seeded and roasted) and a head of roasted garlic.  Then add an onion, quartered.

To serve, chicken can be cut up and returned to stock.  But, if one is eating it all with tortillas, the method is to take the meat off the bones, return the bones to the stock to boil some more, and eat the meat and soup separately.  The onions are a side dish to add onto the meat.

Serve with jalapenos in escabeche or habanero chile sauce.

Variant:  The above is a village form.  Urban forms are apt to include canned green Spanish olives, capers, tomatoes, bay leaves, etc.

Fanciest of all is to use a turkey stuffed with but’ (ground meat) and garnished with hard-boiled eggs.  Increase spices accordingly.

 

 

Turkey San Simon

This dish is Yucatan food history in a nutshell.  The turkey, tomatoes, chiles, and most of the spices are indigenous.  The recado using bitter orange is Caribbean, specifically Cuban (itself a mix, about which I know far too little, of African and Native American elements).  The bread thickening and the rest of the spicing is classic Moorish-Spanish.  The plantains are a solidly African touch.  The peas are a 19th-century Mexican garnish, derived probably from French usage.  The roasted green peppers are a standard modern central Mexican garnish.  And so on….

 

Recado:

1 tbsp. black pepper

1 tbsp. cumin seeds

1 tsp. cloves

1 tsp. allspice

1 stick cinnamon

1 head of garlic, peeled

1 tbsp. oregano

 

Dish:

1 turkey (ca. 10 lb.)

Lard for frying (1-2 tbsp)

2 heads garlic

1-2 tbsp. oregano

1 branch mint

Juice of 5 bitter oranges (or 1 cup vinegar)

1 oz. achiote

3 plantains, cut into long thin strips

10 slices French bread (or less—or even leave out)

1 10-oz. package of frozen peas

6 tomatoes, roasted and peeled

2 xkatik chiles

2 bell peppers, roasted and peeled

Salt to taste

20 green onions, roasted till beginning to brown

 

Grind all the recado ingredients together, dissolve in the bitter orange juice, and rub into the turkey.  Marinate in refrigerator overnight.

Then, cut up and brown the turkey in lard with a roasted head of garlic, the oregano, mint and salt.   Add water and cook, covered, till the turkey is almost done.

Separately, fry the plantains till soft; toast the bread; fry the tomatoes (chopped), and the chile and bell peppers (cut up).

Blend the tomatoes with the roasted head of garlic.

Now combine all ingredients except the plaintains and bread.  Cook 10 minutes.  Then take the turkey pieces out of the sauce; serve the pieces and the sauce separately.  Garnish with the peas, cooked and put over the turkey.

Serve with the plantains and toast on the side.  Roast the green onions till soft and serve them on the side also.

(modified from Conaculta Oceano 2000b:47)

 

 

 

VEGETABLES

In general, the vegetable section of a Mexican cookbook is the shortest, if it exists at all.  Yucatan is no exception.  Vegetables are eaten as part of mixed stews, with meat, or they are garnishes.  Still, there are a few vegetable dishes.  Chaya, in particular, has been monographed by Jose Diaz Bolio.  Some of the recipes below are inspired by his.

 

 

Alboromia

Another Arab dish–using Yucatecan recado! According to legend, Burun was a queen of old Baghdad, the wife of Caliph Al-Ma’mun, and she liked mixed vegetable dishes.  Her name, variously distorted, applies to such, all over the Arab and Spanish worlds. She is especially associated with eggplant.  Alboromia in countless forms is universal in Andalucía and Extremadura, and presumably came to Mexico very early, but one suspects, also, later Lebanese influence in this dish.

Such vegetable recipes as exist in Yucatan frequently turn out to be Lebanese.  They are ideal for a vegetable course in a Yucatecan dinner, because they make an interesting contrast to the Maya and Spanish dishes.

 

1 eggplant

1 summer squash

1 lb. potatoes

1/2 tbsp. red recado

2 tomatoes

2 onions

2 garlic cloves, roasted

1 bunch parsley

1/2 bell pepper

2 tbsp. vinegar

Oil

 

Chop and fry the vegetables, starting with the onions, garlic and parsley.  Add in the flavorings.

Variants: More spices and herbs can be added.

In both Spain and Lebanon, the ancestors of this dish lack the recado.  In Lebanon, they usually have more herbs–mint in particular, and sometimes tarragon.  These do not go particularly well with the recado.  Leaving out the recado and using mint, tarragon and oregano or marjoram makes a good variant, similar to ones found among the Lebanese communities.

 

 

Bean Chirmole

 

1 lb. beans

25 small dried chiles or 4 dried ancho chiles

1/2 onion

1 lb. masa

2 cloves garlic

6 tomatoes

1 tsp. oregano

Cloves, to taste

Allspice, to taste

Lard (optional)

Salt and pepper, to taste

 

Cook the beans until almost done.

Toast and boil the chiles.  Wash.  Grind them with the spices.  Add to the beans.  Add the other ingredients.

Meat can be added to this, as can abal fruits (sour plumlike fruits; substitute sour plums).  Both improve it quite a bit.

 

 

Black Rice

Chop and fry an onion and some leaves of epazote, and chile if wanted.  Fry in a little oil.  Add ½ cup rice and stir-fry.  Then add liquid from cooking k’abax beans (enough to cover the rice to depth of 1 inch), and simmer, covered, over very low heat till done.

This is one of those simple but wonderful recipes.

 

 

Chaya basics

Chaya is much like spinach or swiss chard, and these leaves can always be substituted for it or combined with it.  (Incidentally, “spinach” in south Mexico usually turns out to be New Zealand spinach or some other heat-resistant green, not “real” spinach.)

Boil chaya leaves.  Chop and fry with onion.  Salt, bitter orange juice, garlic, etc. can be added.

Variants:  Scrambling eggs in with this mix is wonderful.  Or an omelette can be made thereof.  Adding chorizo, cut-up (previously soaked) salt meat, chopped ham, or comparable flavorings is even more wonderful.

Chaya is also good in any bean dish.  Combining beans and chaya enormously increases the nutritional value of the dish, and tastes better, too.  Chaya can also be put in any soup or stew, especially the ones with mixed vegetables such as puchero.

 

 

Chaya and Plantains

 

1 lb. chaya leaves

1 large plantain

1 bell pepper

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 tsp. cumin

Juice of 1 bitter orange

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Boil and cut up the chaya.  Peel and boil the plantain and chop it up.

Chop up and fry the onion, garlic, pepper and tomatoes.  Then add the chaya and plantain and the other ingredients and cook till hot.

This is a wonderful dish, very good with tender young Swiss chard or even turnip greens.

 

 

Chaya Rice

 

Fry onion in a bit of oil.  Add the rice and fry.  Add chopped chaya leaves (raw small ones or blanched larger ones), chopped tomatoes, and any other flavorings desired.  Finally, add water to cover to depth of 1/2 “-3/4” and simmer.

Chaya Seafood Rice:  Add shrimp and/or other seafood to this, along with the chaya.

 

 

Chaya Salad

 

Boil the chaya, chop, and eat with sliced onions and vinagrette dressing.  Other vegetables can be added.

 

 

Chaya with Bacon

That old reprobate, Bishop Landa, when he was not torturing Maya to death in the Inquisition, was enjoying their food.  (It is to the credit of the Spanish that Landa’s cruelty earned him formal censure, even in that dreadful age.)  Among other things, he noted that chaya was “good with much fat bacon.” How did he cook it?  History does not record, but here are some worthy possibilities:

  1. Parboil chaya. Meanwhile, fry chopped-up strips of bacon.  Drain off some of the fat.  Then fry the chaya in the remaining fat, with the bacon bits.

Adding garlic and dried chiles to the frying bacon improves this version.

  1. Boil the chaya with bacon strips, garlic cloves, and dried red chiles.
  2. Boil slab bacon. Skim off as much of the fat as you can.  Add chaya, garlic and chiles.

Being a Spaniard of his time, Landa probably went much more heavily into the bacon than we would do.

 

 

Chaya with Cheese

 

Boil chaya leaves in chicken stock.  Sprinkle crumbled sharp white Mexican cheese over them.

 

 

Chaya with Eggs

 

1 large bunch chaya

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 egg

 

Boil the chaya and cut up.  Cut up the onion and tomato.  Stir-fry the onion; add the tomato; then add the chaya; then add the egg.  Stir-fry all.

 

 

K’abax Beans (“Frijoles kabax”)

K’abax implies ordinary food without special seasonings.  This is the everyday bean dish of Mexico.  Cooked over a good wood fire on a Maya hearth, it is as fine a dish as anyone could want.

 

Put beans in water and bring to boil.  Turn off and soak a few hours.  Then (in the same water) boil till tender, adding salt, an onion, a sprig of epazote and perhaps some achiote.  Eat with a relish of lime or bitter orange juice with chopped onion, cilantro, radishes and habanero chile.

Further manipulations include:

Blended beans:  Cook beans as above.  Blend, with their liquid.  Add lard (Maya lard: see above) to taste.  Or, fry in lard chopped onion, epazote and chile, and add into the beans.  Boil.  (This produces something very like the black bean soup of traditional United States cuisine.)

Refried beans:  Mash the k’abax beans but without the liquid.  Fry in lard.  Add in above ingredients as desired.

 

 

Poor People’s Paté

One of the Lebanese contributions to Yucatan’s food.  It is a variant of the “poor man’s caviare” of the Near East and East Europe.

 

4 small eggplants

2 tbsp. chopped onion

6 chopped garlic cloves

1/2 cup chopped olives

2 bay leaves

3 tomatoes

2 cups cabbage, chopped

1/2 cup vinegar

1 cup yogurt (to serve separately)

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Peel and slice the eggplants.  If you dislike the bitterness, leave in salted water for 20 minutes and then drain, but you lose some flavor doing this.

Fry the onion and garlic.  Then add the eggplants, olives, pepper and one bay leaf.

Put the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute, to loosen the peels, and skin them.

Blend all the above (discard the bay leaf) with some olive oil.

Separately, make a cabbage salad:  Cook the cabbage.  Add vinegar, pepper and another bay leaf.

Serve, separately, the pate; cabbage salad; and the yogurt.  Eat on pita bread.

Variants:  infinite.  Try leaving out the olives.  The yogurt is optional.

 

 

Squash with Squash Flowers

 

Cook very small summer squash for a very few minutes.  Add squash flowers and then maize kernels cut from fresh sweet corn ears.  Boil for a very short time, until all ingredients are just tender.  Serve with lime wedges.

 

 

 

DESSERTS

Fresh fruit and the universal Latin American flan are the commonest desserts in Yucatan, but they need no recipes here.

Yucatan produces excellent sorbets from local fruit; the best are guanabana, mamey, and chicosapote.  They are just fruit pulp, sugar, and water.  Use any sorbet recipe.

 

Candied ciricote

The ciricote is a small fruit that has to be cooked to be edible, rather like a small quince.  It grows on a large tree whose wood is among the most beautiful of all tropical woods, but now cannot be legally cut because of the rarity of these important food-producing trees.

 

2 lb. ciricotes

2-3 limes

1 lb. sugar

Domestic fig leaves

 

Cook the ciricotes in water with some wood ash (a handful or so, to tenderize them).  When cook, take out and grate.

Mix with lime juice.

Cook down in sugar syrup with some lime juice and the fig leaves.  (The fig leaves produce an enzyme that further tenderizes the fruit.)

Simmer for half an hour.  Take out the fig leaves and bottle.

This recipe will work for any firm, sour fruit.  It is similar to that for orejas de mico (“monkey ears”—preserved wild papaya), etc.

 

 

Chayote Pudding

 

1 chayote

3 eggs or 4 whites + 1 yolk (untraditional but healthy and good)

2 oz. butter

2 oz. sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. ground cinnamon (or less if preferred)

 

Cook the chayotes, peel, and blend with the eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon.

Butter a mold.

Cook in the oven till done.  (For a softer texture, some use a bain-marie.  Basically, this is a dish of water in which the custard dish is set high enough so that the water does not come in, but rather steams the custard.)  Doneness is indicated by a generally firm appearance.  Don’t wait till a knife stuck into the center comes out clean–if you do, the pudding is overdone.

In Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, where apples cannot grow, nostalgic French cooks have found that chayotes make a very good substitute (if you use enough butter and spices).  I have had excellent French apple cake, apple tart, and so on, using chayotes.  There is even a restaurant totally devoted to the chayote.  Admittedly, this is far from Yucatan, but the tip is too good not to pass on.  Yucatan, like Reunion, is a tropical land where apples do not grow.

 

 

Cheese Pie (Pie de Queso)

Another very common dish, especially in Merida.  Ancestrally, it is some unsung American’s variation on cheesecake, but is in fact much better than cheesecake.  The English word “pie” is invariably used.  Sometimes the spelling is localized to pay, which just happens to be the Maya word for “skunk.”

 

1 can condensed milk

4 eggs

1/2 lb. cream cheese or Cheddar cheese

1/2 cup sugar

Vanilla to taste (optional)

Piecrust (see below)

 

Blend the milk with the egg yolks, sugar and vanilla.  Beat in the cheese.  Beat the egg whites to peaks and add in.  Fill into a regular piecrust and bake till firm.

Low-cholesterol version of the pie filling:  1 ½ cup regular milk, 6 egg whites, 1 package cottage cheese, 1/2 cup sugar, vanilla.  Blend all.  Not very authentic, but good enough.

One might also try Jack cheese in this.

Piecrusts:

Standard version:  1 cup flour, 1 stick butter, tiny bit of sugar, ice-cold water.  Cut the butter into the flour and sugar; rub in a while.  Mix in the water–just enough to moisten–and roll out.

A Yucatan version:  1 cup flour, 1/2 stick butter, 1 tsp. baking powder, 1 egg, bit of cold water.  Proceed as above.

Another Yucatan version: 1 cup flour, 1 tsp. baking powder, 1 stick butter, 1 cup condensed milk.

Low-cholesterol version:  1 cup flour, 1/2 stick butter, 1 oz. sugar, cold water.

 

The other classic Yucatan “pie” is “pie de nuez,” but it is just ordinary American pecan pie, migrant from the American south.

 

 

Coconut Flan

 

1 lb. sugar

1 can coconut cream

8 eggs

1/2 quart milk

1 tbsp. lemon juice (optional)

Vinegar

 

Simmer 13 oz. sugar with coconut cream (cans of it can be found at any Asian-food market) till slightly thickened.  Cool.  Separately, beat the eggs.  Beat in the milk and lemon.

In a nonstick pan, melt 3 oz. sugar with a small amount of vinegar till the sugar begins to caramelize.  Pour into a buttered flan dish and pour int he ingredients.  Cook in a bain-marie till almost firm (about an hour).  Refrigerate.

Simple way (not to say cheating):  Throw milk, coconut cream, eggs, and sugar into a blender.  Blend for several seconds at high speed.  Line a pan with dark brown sugar (so you don’t have to caramelize it).  Pour the blended liquid into this and bake in the oven at 325o till almost firm.  Take out and cool; it will finish firming up as it cools.  Leaving it in the oven till firm, as most cookbooks advise, overcooks it.

 

Cocoyoles

An impractical recipe for anyone outside of a Maya village, but ethnographically too interesting to miss.  Cocoyoles—t’uk in Maya—are the fruit of a palm.  They are too hard to eat without treatment.  They are boiled with water and lime—not the citrus, but the result of burning limestone—to soften them.  The outer part becomes soft and sweetish.  It is then boiled down with sugar (traditionally, honey) until candied.  It takes very slow simmering for 12 hours to do this perfectly.

 

 

Corn and Squash Sweet

 

1 cup sweet corn kernels cut from very young ear, cooked very quickly

1 cup cooked meat from butternut or other sweet winter squash

Sugar to taste

 

Mix all while hot.

Allspice, cinnamon, vanilla and other appropriate flavorings can be added.  Brown sugar gives more flavor.

This very traditional Maya sweet would originally have been made with honey, or simply relied on the sweetness of the young corn.

 

 

Fruit Salad with Xtabentun

 

Cut up tropical fruits.  Melon, mango, papaya, mamey, banana, and citrus make a good combination.  Squeeze lime or orange juice over them and sprinkle liberally with Xtabentun, the Yucatan aniseta liqueur.  Of course you can use any liqueur, or dark rum.

 

 

Guava Paste

A universal Latin American delicacy, developed from the quince paste of Spain.  Quinces don’t grow in the tropics, but settlers quickly found that guavas are a perfect substitute.

 

1 lb. sugar

1 lb. guava juice (cook lemon guavas; strain.  Force some of flesh through sieve)

 

Cook slowly, stirring constantly, till the mixture forms a paste (soft ball stage).

 

 

Mamey Paste

Local version of the above.

 

1 lb. sugar

1 lb. mamey flesh

 

Mix sugar and mamey meat.  Simmer, stirring constantly, for several minutes.

This can also be made as in preceding recipe, but-unlike the guava–the mamey does not really need the cooking and straining.

Mamey is quite sweet enough without sugar, so this recipe is for preserving the fruit.

 

 

Posole with Coconut

 

1 lb. nixtamal kernels (corn kernels boiled in lime)

Juice of 2 limes

Meat of 2 small coconuts

½ c sugar (or less, to taste)

 

Boil the kernels in water with juice of 2 limes added.  Grind these with the meat of the coconuts.  Boil this with sugar, till thoroughly hot and sugar thoroughly dissolved.

Nixtamal kernels are available canned at any Hispanic market.

 

 

Queso Napolitano

The “national dessert” of Yucatan–the one you actually see everyone eating.

 

2 cans of milk

10 eggs

Vanilla extract

3 oz. sugar

 

Blend all except the sugar.  Caramelize it.  Turn out into a baking dish and pour in the liquid.  Cook in bain-marie for an hour (or bake till firm–this one you don’t take out early, as with the preceding).

It is possible to use only egg whites in this, and thus keep the cholesterol down to virtually nil.

 

 

Ruined Dessert

Atropellado means “totally messed up.”   The name honors the appearance of the dish.  Fortunately, its taste is as good as its looks are messy.

 

1 lb. sweet potato

Meat of 1 coconut

¼ lb. brown sugar

1 stick cinnamon

1 tsp. ground allspice

 

Cook the sweet potato.  Peel and mash.

Blend up the coconut.

Mix the sugar with some water and add the cinnamon.  Put on fire.  When it begins to boil, add the sweet potato and mix into the syrup.

Add in the coconut.  Chill.

I’m usually too lazy to grate coconut.  Canned coconut cream works fine!  Store-bought grated coconut is okay too.  Best is to use both.  Standard in Yucatan is to soak grated coconut in a can of condensed milk.

 

 

Squash with Honey

The traditional Maya sweet.

 

1 winter squash

1 lb. honey

 

Cut small holes in the squash.  Pour in the honey.  Bake in pib or oven for 2 hours.

This dish is sickeningly sweet.  A tiny amount is quite enough.  More than that can produce severe hypoglycemia after a sugar “rush.”

 

 

Spanish Cream

 

1 quart milk

6 eggs

1 lb. sugar

2 oz. cornstarch

1 tbsp. vanilla extract

 

Blend all.  Cook in a nonstick saucepan over a low fire, stirring constantly.

Low-cholesterol variant:  leave the eggs out.  (Yes, this is traditional.)

 

 

Yucatan Marzipan

 

1 lb. sikil

1 lb. sugar

10 oz. water

Flavorings as wanted

Food coloring

 

Dissolve the sugar in the water.  Simmer until a syrup forms.  Slowly work in the sikil, stirring constantly.  Add any flavorings.

Cool thoroughly.  Now, model into small animal, fruit and vegetable shapes and paint with the food coloring.

This recipe is of purely ethnographic interest, to show the ingenuity of the Yucatecan culture.  Almonds were far too rare in the old days to waste on marzipan-making.  Thus, this form was evolved.  It finds its chief use in providing pretty modeled toys and small items for children—something the ordinary person can buy for practically nothing in the market, to pacify a young child.  This sikil marzipan is only marginally edible, like the flour-and-water marzipan of the rest of Mexico, and is more the equivalent of Play-Doh than a food.

 

 

DRINKS

The usual round of licuados (fruit smoothies) and alcoholic drinks occur, but are as elsewhere in Mexico.

 

Atole nuevo (green corn drink)

Kernels from an ear of fairly well matured sweet corn, soaked a day, then blended with a bit of sikil.  This is often sweetened with honey, or otherwise flavored.

 

Baalche’

The sacred ritual drink–still as important as in ancient Maya times.

 

Water

Honey, preferably of native stingless bee (much more flavorful than European bee honey)

Bark of baalche‘ tree (Lonchocarpus longistylus; sometimes closely related spp. are used)

 

Mix ingredients, bottle, and let stand until honey ferments.

Today, the drink is often made with regular honey cut with sugar, and the bark is reduced to a bare minimum.  The gods are said to be highly annoyed with this, and some would say the results are such events as Hurricane Gilbert and the droughts of the early 2000s.

If you are not given to brewing, but want to put on a Yucatecan dinner, be advised that Ethiopian t’ej is basically the same thing (flavored with Ethiopian hops instead of baalche’ bark, but the difference is not earthshaking) and can be bought in markets carrying Near Eastern or African products.

 

 

Chaya Drink

This is a very common, popular drink.  It is made quite sweet.

 

20 chaya leaves, boiled but not too soft

Juice of 3 limes

Sugar to taste

Water

 

Blend in a blender till a thick drink is produced.  Serve cold.

 

 

Chocolate

 

2 lb. cacao (chocolate) beans

2 oz. cinnamon sticks

1/2 lb. flour

1 package sweet biscuits

 

Toast the beans till they begin to color.  Heat the cinnamon stick.   Toast the flour till golden.  Grind up the cacao and cinnamon, and the biscuits.  Form tablets and store.  For drink, beat up in water, with sugar to taste.  Note that commercial Mexican chocolate tablets are mostly sugar, while these tablets are unsweetened.  Moreover, the taste will not be much like commercial chocolate; fermentation is needed to bring out the “chocolate” flavor known to the world outside Mesoamerica.

 

 

Coconut Pozole

 

1 kg. nixtamal kernels

Juice of 2 limes

Fresh meat of 4 small coconuts

1 cup sugar

Water

 

Cook nixtamal (whole kernels) for one hour with juice of limes.  Grate the meat of the coconuts.  Add this and the sugar to the mixtamal.  Chill.

 

 

Tan Chukwaj (“thick chocolate drink”)

 

The traditional Maya ritual drink, still served at festivals, often with mukbipollos.

Tan Chulwaj is almost certainly what was in those Classic Maya chocolate cups with the owners’ names on the rim, but it would have had chile then—if anything—instead of the modern cinnamon and sugar.

 

1 tablet Mexican chocolate

1 lb. toasted corn meal, or ground-up sweet corn kernels

1/2 tsp. allspice powder (or more)

Cinnamon stick

Sugar to taste (traditionally, none was used; today there is usually some sweetening)

 

Mix up the tablet with the corn and spices.  Heat.  Serve hot or cold.

Variants: Other flavorings can be added; anise is traditional and good.  The ancient Aztecs used chile powder, and one supposes the ancient Maya did too.

Water

October 10th, 2016

 

Water:  Sacred Trust or Resource to Waste

 

  1. N. Anderson

Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Anthropology,

University of California, Riverside

 

“Bless the Lord….

He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.

They give drink to every beast of the field:  the wild asses quench their thirst….

He watereth the hills from his chambers:  the earth is satisfied…..

The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted;

Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.

The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies [rock hyraxes].”

Psalm 104:1, 10-18, based in part on Egyptian originals such as Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun

 

“For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for the habitations of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that none can pass through them; neither can men hear the voice of the animals; both the fowl of the heavens and the beast are fled; they are gone….

The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah concerning the dearth [drought].

Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish…

And their nobles have sent their little ones to the water: they came to the pits [wells], and found no water; they returned with their vessels empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads.

Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads.

Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass.

And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no grass.”

Jeremiah 9:10, 14:1-6 (the sad touch of the deer deserting her young is based on solid observation, as is so much of Biblical natural history; the “dragons” sound impressive, but are probably jackals mistranslated, and jackals do sniff for water)

 

“Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting.”  Mark Twain

 

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry,

You don’t miss your sweetheart till she says goodbye.”

Traditional blues verse

 

“Demand for water is projected to grow by more than 40% by 2050.  By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions in which water is scarce, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in conditions in which the supply of clean water does not meet the demand… 750 million people do not have access to safe drinking water.  Roughly 80% of wastewater is discharged untreated into oceans, rivers and lakes.  Nearly 2 million children under the age of 5 die every year for want of clean water and decent sanitation….  Two and a half billion people do not have adequate sewage disposal.”  (Eliasson 2015; imagine it in 2050, with 10 billion people and all fresh water resources tapped out or depleted.)

 

The quotes give several views of water.  In abundance, it gives life.  Drought is the starkest and most terrifying symbol of death and loss.  Water is for fighting, and for cold economic calculations that imply all the horrors Jeremiah saw.

The western United States has a water problem.  Its water resources are exceedingly limited by climate and geography.  It is expanding rapidly.  Its citizens love lawns and gardens.  All models show that the American Southwest will be one of the most drastically drought-stricken areas of the world as global warming progresses (Overpeck and Udall 2010).  The climate we now associate with Arizona’s southwest border will move northward.   Arizona’s reservoirs will run dry.

Groundwater is overdrawn in Arizona, as elsewhere (Glennon 2004).  There is little recharge of Arizona’s groundwater basins today; the water is essentially fossil water, left over from the Pleistocene.

Arizona’s water is seriously overcommitted already.  The Colorado River is overcommitted by at least 50%.  It does not reach the sea; in fact, it is essentially dry below the Arizona-Mexico line, in violation of treaties with Mexico.  The Gila, Arizona’s major tributary of the Colorado, no longer comes even close to the Colorado except during abnormal flow.  Indeed, most of Arizona’s rivers are now dry washes for at least part of their length.  I remember when the Santa Cruz River still ran through Tucson, feeding mesquite thickets and the occasional cottonwood.  No longer.

At least Arizona is not, so far, forced to draw on poisoned wells, like the citizens of Bangladesh whose wells are increasingly contaminated with arsenic from groundwater.  Development has forced people to dig deeper wells, diverted and spread out aquifers, and introduced alkalinity and carbon that mobilize the arsenic, making water deadly in Bangladesh and parts of Vietnam (Daigle 2016).  Everywhere, though, agricultural and industrial wastes, including extremely toxic ones, are percolating into groundwater.

Arizona and drought-stricken California are typical of an emerging problem.  Worldwide, the situation is bleak.  Several excellent reviews of the situation exist, The best include Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry (2007) and Peter Gleick’s biennial reviews of world freshwater resources (e.g. Gleick 2006; see also De Villiers 2001; Fagan 2008; Glennon 2004; Oki and Kanae 2006; Postel 1999; Rogers 2008; Shiva 2002; Strang 2013.)

The Colorado River is not the only major river that no longer reaches the sea.  The Nile, the Yellow River of China, and many other rivers now share this dubious distinction.  The drying of the Yellow and other rivers in China has left 300 million people without adequate water for irrigation, sanitation, or locally even drinking (Smil 2004); there as in more and more parts of India, water must be trucked to villages.  Deforestation led to huge floods in China and elsewhere (Laurance 2007).  The Chinese belatedly tried to stop logging, but were too late; illegal logging is rampant (according to many reports I have heard, including studies ongoing by my students).  The Three Gorges Dam, in addition to its countless other problems, is already silting up because of deforestation (Stone 2008).  Droughts have brought down civilizations, including the ancient Maya (Gill 2000).  They have also depopulated whole areas of the United States, as in the dust bowl or the Oregon desert (Jackman and Long 1967).  Agriculture now uses 2/3 of the world’s available fresh water, and population is growing; desalination is still expensive in money and energy (Schiermeier 2014).

A recent review in Nature (Vőrősmarty et al. 2010) finds that river overuse and misuse is leading to a collapse of freshwater biodiversity.  Only 0.16% of the world’s rivers do not show this deterioration, and they are in isolated Arctic areas.  No area with water overdraft has avoided biodiversity problems.  Areas where dams and water systems have enabled consumers to have enough water in spite of short supply have done so at the expense of biodiversity; the dams and diversions dry up wetlands and distort the ecology.  A huge percentage of the world, including most of the United States, and virtually all of Mexico, China, India, and the drier parts of Africa, is now stressed.  As is expectable, the Nile is a particularly scary situation, with 180 million people depending on one relatively small (if long) river.  Most of its course is degraded, and from Cairo downstream it is basically a sewer.  Some short rivers now flow entirely within urbanized areas and have become urban drains (e.g. the Ogun River in Lagos, Nigeria) (Vőrősmarty et al. 2010:557).  Vast water transfer projects have dried up rivers.  The biggest of all, in China, transfers water from the Yangzi drainage to the north.  It is inadequate, but is causing major ecological and social disruption including displacement of millions of people (Barnett et al. 2015).

Deltas are also in extreme danger (Cooper et al. 2015).  Global warming is adding to existing problems by raising sea levels and causing more intense storms.  Groundwater withdrawal, pollution, poor dyke maintenance, poor erosion control, and similar problems are endangering the world’s deltas, in which a large percentage of the world’s population resides.

Global warming increases rainfall—rain has increased about 1% already and will increase 5% more before the end of this century (Smil 2008:401).  However, this rain will be largely over the ocean or in already-rainy areas.  On average, global warming is already drying up the land, worldwide (Jung et al. 2010).  It will increase drought in areas like the American Southwest.

Indeed, in spite of overall rain increase, the dry parts of the world are rapidly getting drier.  This is already happening in western North America and the Middle East.  The driest rainfall year in southern California history, as of 2000, was a year in the 19th century that gave Los Angeles about five inches and Riverside three.  Since 2000, 2001-2 gave Los Angeles four and Riverside less than three, and then 2006-7 only three and two respectively.  The winter of 2014-2015 was virtually rainless throughout the whole states of California and Nevada (figures from ongoing daily totals in the Los Angeles Times).  Projections of enormous rains the following winter were not fulfilled; southern California was drier than ever.

Population is rapidly expanding.  Agriculture is taking more and more.  The really productive agriculture of the world is typically irrigated.  The world’s best soils, irrigated ornot, are being rapidly urbanized and rendered unavailable for farming.  Cities have naturally been located where agriculture was most productive; in this age of urban sprawl, that has become, ironically, a recipe for disaster.  Urbanization pushes more and more agriculture out into increasingly marginal irrigated lands.

Some 66% of the world’s people do not have reliable access to fresh water (Bellware 2016), and the number is growing.  Extreme cases include Egypt, wholly dependent on the Nile, with a rapidly growing population not only in Egypt itself but in the upriver countries from whence the Nile comes.

Water use for agriculture is far greater than most people realize.  Agriculture takes 80-90% of California’s water, though supplying only 2% of the state’s monetary wealth; of course it provides food, something impossible to do without, so it is far more important than that 2% figure indicates.  A single almond requires 1.1 gallon of water; of course this can all come from rain—almonds are not irrigated in much of Spain or northern California—but almonds are heavily irrigated in much of California.  A head of broccoli takes 5.4 gallons, an orange 13, a single walnut 4.9, a tomato 3.3.  One strawberry requires only 1.9.  Only a grape is lower, at 0.3.  Again, these figures refer to products 100% irrigated (Park and Lurie 2014; see also Appendix).

Smil (2008) reports that rice requires 2300 kg (liters) of water to produce 1 kg of rice; beans, 2000; wheat, 1300; corn, 500; vegetables, 100 up; chickens, at least 4000; pork meat (muscle tissue—not whole pig) 10,000; beef 15,000.  Cotton and coffee are in the range of pork and beef, not in the range of grain.  Smil also notes that Americans “waste” 35-45% of the food available in the US.  (This is a bit harsh.  A lot of the “waste” is spoilage and other storage loss, which could be avoided but only with difficulty.)  This is a huge waste of water.

Households use a lot of water also, and they use much more if they are rich.  Rich people like huge lawns and water-sucking landscaping, as well as large swimming pools.  Thus communities differ.  In California overall, households and their outdoor landscaping use 360-400 gallons per day on average.  Turfgrass covers an estimated 11,000 square km of the state, consuming incredible quantities of water in California’s extreme drought of recent years; the water could all be saved by substituting dryscaping (Lees and Bowler 2015).

Consumption strictly within the house varies greatly.  In southern California, north Tustin’s Golden State Water Co. reports that its domestic user households (apparently not counting outdoor watering) average 281 gallons per day.  Next is La Cañada-Flintridge, with 191; East Orange County, 174; Arcadia, 173; Malibu, 165.  At the other end is Covina, 27; Vernon, 35; and Santa Ana, 38.  The Los Angeles overall figure is 70, the United States average 98.  Of course, the water use in southern California communities generally tracks wealth, but Covina is an interesting standout; it is a pleasant middle-class community that simply has economical landscaping.  Vernon, by contrast, is a desperately poor industrial ghetto, and Santa Ana is largely apartments.  A problem with the water economy in poor neighborhoods is that they are covered with asphalt and concrete, so the rain that falls on them goes directly into the sea instead of sinking into groundwater.  Thus, ironically, they waste far more than they consume.

Manufacturing takes more and more water.  Contamination is very rapidly increasing everywhere, and includes some horrific problems unknown till recently, including an explosive increase of drugs in the water.  Everything from cocaine to birth control pills is contaminating water supplies, with rapidly mounting serious effects.

Cities are rapidly expanding and using more and more water.  Much is lost to storm drains, leaky pipes, and evaporation (Larsen et al. 2016).  Sewage goes untreatred in much of the world.  Most of Africa lacks improved drinking water sources (Larsen et al. 2016:930).  Updating the world’s water systems simply to eliminate massive leakage would take billions of dollars and more will than current governments seem to have.  The problems of water supply take a back seat compared to war, crime, disease, and political conflict.

 

Peter Gleick, with Meena Palaniappan (2010), has shown that the world has plenty of fresh water, but not where people want it and not always in usable form or situation.  About 70% of it is tied up in ice sheets (rapidly melting with global warming).  Most of the rest is in groundwater, much of it too saline or deep-down to use.  These two authorities describe three types of peak water.  Renewable peak water refers to river flow and renewable groundwater.  This will reach peak when drafts on the water equal inflow, as on the Nile and Colorado now.  Nonrenewable peak water will occur when withdrawal of fossil groundwater becomes more expensive than the water is worth.  This is close to occurring in much of the world, including parts of the Ogallala Aquifer in the United States.  Ecological peak water occurs when damage to ecological services exceeds benefits from the water.  This is a sliding economic scale and very hard to calculate.

Also typical is waste of water by the rich, for trivial purposes, to the ultimate suffering of everyone.  Vast lawns and golf courses take up a huge percentage of the water in urban and developed areas.  In California, water withdrawn by giant agribusiness for very low-value agriculture (irrigating wild hay, potatoes, and the like) has destroyed extremely productive and high-value fisheries as well as wetlands that had less quantifiable but no less real values.  California now faces a huge water crisis that will send water prices sky-high for everyone—though no one really benefited from the hay and potatoes.

Water use for cities and irrigation tends to remove the water from the aquifer recharge system, thus leading to faster reduction of aquifers.  Where irrigation causes buildup of groundwater instead of drawdown, the buildup is often salty, making the water unusable.

 

Access to water should be about the most basic matter of environmental justice, and thus has been addressed by Meena Palaniappan et al. (2006), and by Wutich and Brewis (2014) in a long and important article.  They raise the usual cases of big dams, water privatization, and water waste by large-scale schemes, in the context of environmental justice, particularly for minorities and people of color (see esp. pp. 120-122, a statement on environmental justice).

Ismail Serageldin, former World Bank vice-president and a leading resource economist, said in 1995—as reported by Wendy Barnaby in an article in Nature—that “the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water” (Barnaby 2009).  This was overstated on both counts.  As of 1995, the main war over oil was still to come: the Iraq war in the next century.  And there has still never been a war over water.

Wendy Barnaby started out to write a book on the coming water wars.  Her research showed that no country has come even close, as of 2009.  Countries will deal over water.  It is not nearly so limited as oil; most countries have plenty of it.  The few dry countries can import water-demanding products (from fresh fruit and meat to paper).  She thus predicted that there will not be wars over water in the 21st century.  Many are not so sure.  Several letters to Nature about her article argued against her position.  Since her book appeared, there have been more and more dire predictions, but still no war over water.   Countries find treaty-making far preferable to fighting.  But local conflicts have erupted, and, as one letter says, “the potential for water conflict is on the increase, as populations in water-stressed areas continue to grow and the demand for water increases to improve living standards with better sanitation and a water-intensive diet” (Kundzewicz and Kowalczak 2009).

Detailed and thorough studies of transboundary water conflicts, now and in future, by Aaron Wolf and his group (Di Stefano et al. 2012; Wolf 2007) come to the same conclusion.  They emphasize the fact that even countries in serious conflict—and not just a few, but many—have managed to come to agreements about transboundary rivers.  They foresee a world of much more conflict, with at least 61 river basins short of water by 2050 and in potential conflict (Di Stefano et al. 2012), but provide full details on how new treaties could be negotiated to solve the immediate problems—though not the longer-term one of sheer exhaustion of freshwater resources.

Some countries are truly desperate:  Tunisia, Afghanistan, Jordan, and many others.  Some are very close to the edge, and will not be able to carry out current development plans without extremely major changes in water management; this includes China, India and Iran.  Some are in desperate straits because they are downstream:  Egypt, Syria and Iraq depend almost entirely on river flow from other countries.  Barnaby points out that Egypt has treaties with its upstream suppliers, but those are Sudan and Ethiopia, countries with no history of honoring such scraps of paper.  At present, Egypt has its armed forces on the ready.  Syria and Iraq are in worse shape, since their supplier, Turkey, has a military that could beat both of them (and several other countries) at once with ease, especially given their current chaotic state.  Big dams under construction in Turkey could cut off water to those nations.  My interviews with experts in Turkey in 2000 indicated that the government had little or no concern over that.  The same appears to be still the case.

 

The world’s fresh water is exceedingly limited.  Almost all of it is used to capacity.  Much of it, including the Colorado River, is overcommitted.  Much of the United States is under some form or other of English common law, variously adapted.  This guarantees riparian rights: people on a watercourse have rights to the water.  In this context, it is well to remember that the English word “rival” derives from Latin rivus, “riverbank,” as does the word “river.”  Twain’s famous comment on water in the west, quoted at the head of this paper, emphasizes the point.

This has been widely extended to water allocation, including a “first in time, first in right” principle that is the greatest bane of California water law.  Agricultural interests that descend, legally, from those established in the 19th century dominate the state, and sell, rent, or otherwise profit from their rights.

This leaves groundwater in a legal limbo.  Normally, anyone who owns the surface of the land owns the right to pump the water—in striking contrast to the rules concerning oil and minerals.  As a result, groundwater reservoirs are rapidly being exhausted.  Global warming is causing drought in arid parts of the world, including California and the southwestern US, and this has led to massive withdrawals of groundwater—many times more than could be recharged even in a good year, let alone in the horrible droughts that have followed on global climate change.  Until 2014 California (unlike other western states) had no regulations on groundwater use.  In late 2014, the Legislature finally recognized that catastrophic drought was forcing their hand and was here to stay, so even the most obstructionist Republicans agreed to pass a groundwater regulation law (George Skelton, 2014, decribed the micropolitics).

We cannot easily get more water.  Towing Antarctic glaciers north and desalting sea water are the only possibilities. This being said, more efficient use of water is imperative.  This is especially true of drylands agriculture (Cleveland 2014; Rockström and Falkenmark 2015).  There are two particularly fine books about how to do this:  David Cleveland and Daniela Soleri’s Food from Dryland Gardens (1991) and Gary Nabhan’s Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land (2013).

Sewage treatment is the most obvious and immediate need worldwide.  It would free up a great deal of water for better use.  Another need is dealing with waste of water in irrigation.  Drip irrigation instead of sprinklers, natural landscaping instead of lawns, and control of golf courses are familiar themes.  Common now is the use of dryscaping in place of grass lawns.  The total area of lawns and related water-demanding landscaping in the United States is greater than the area of Pennsylvania.  Lawns and ornamental gardens take a wholly disproportionate amount of water, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Few people seem to realize that human use of water for drinking and bathing is utterly insignificant relative to the use in agriculture and industry.  Personal use is less than 1% of all water use.  We should all take short showers, but it won’t matter much in comparison to even very water-sparing industrial processes, let alone agriculture.

Meat and milk are the worst problems (see Appendix).  Cows are fed on irrigated feed, and demand huge amount of water themselves for drinking and washing; then processing their meat and milk takes yet more water.  I have seen a wide range of figures for the water requirements of this process, but all are in the range of hundreds to thousands of gallons for a pound of beef or bottle of milk.  We need to go back to eating cactus fruit, mesquite beans, and prickly pear pads.  Or at least feeding them to the cows—there are areas of the world, including south Madagascar, where cows get along with essentially no water by living on spineless varieties of prickly pear.  Cotton is probably second; it is grown in dryland areas by irrigation, and is an incredibly thirsty crop.

People are very poor estimators of their water use.  Shahzeen Attari (2014) found that people underestimate household water use; they use about twice what they think they use.  Moreover, they think of saving waters in terms of curtailment (shorter showers and the like) rather than more efficient devices (low-flow shower heads, better toilets), though the latter would make far more difference, in most households.  Thomas Dietz (2014) placed this finding in a context of human cognition and decision-making, noting that it is all too typical of human understanding of environment and of factors influencing environment-affecting decisions.

Water experts are now talking about “virtual water,” a concept developed by John A. Allen in the 1990s (Barnaby 2009; Smil 2008).  It takes into account the water needed to produce goods.  All agricultural commodities and all manufactured goods require large amounts of water.  My consumption of such goods uses water indirectly.  If I buy a cotton shirt, I am probably not using any American water to speak of, but I am using enormous quantities of Egyptian and Chinese water—assuming, as if often the case, that the cotton is grown in Egypt and the shirt is made in China.  The horrific case of cotton in Uzbekistan is entirely export-driven.  Whoever gets the good quality cotton items made from Uzbeki cotton is ruining that desperately stressed nation, but is probably quite unaware of the fact (see Globalization of Water [Hoekstra and Chapagain 2008])

On the other hand, Barnaby (2009) points out that a dry country can spare its limited water resources by importing food and not growing crops with high water requirements.  Most of the water used to produce grain and coffee comes from rainfall, but most of that used to produce meat, cotton, and many vegetables is irrigation or piped water.  Thus, by eating lower on the food chain, and by wearing clothing more economically, we could save enormous amounts of water.

In China, water could be saved most easily by giving up irrigation in really water-short areas like Inner Mongolia and around Beijing, where groundwater is depleting at dramatic speed.  Agriculture drives 65% of water withdrawals in China, 59% worldwide (and 80 in California).  Inner Mongolia loses the most virtual water, in the form of agricultural products exported to the rest of China.  China imports 30% of its virtual water in the form of soybeans, beef, and similar products from other countries (Dalin et al. 2015).

An example of unconventional solutions comes from Peru.  Lima is essentially rainless, but very foggy (especially in winter), because of the cold water of the Humboldt Current just offshore.  In ancient times, this fog sustained lomas—areas of dense vegetation, even forests, inhabited by animals as large as deer.  Today, there is an attempt to restore these.  Large, dense nets have been set up, on which the fog congeals into water.  This is directed down to young trees.  When the trees are old, they will strain their own fog, thus restoring the old lomas forests.  The drought-tolerant local tree Caesalpinia spinosa is being tried, because of its useful fruit and timber (Vince 2010).  This idea could be used in many other places where cold currents run along desert shores:  Baja California, Morocco, South Africa and elsewhere.

 

Governments mismanage water because of incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic paralysis (see Ascher 1999 for the best discussion of the general problem of government mismanagement of resources).

Mismanagement of water resources not only leads to loss of water; it leads to poisoned soil.  Salts of all kinds leach out from upstream or leach upward from deep in the earth.  I have seen thousands of acres in Australia rendered unusable because farmers cleared off the forest and planted wheat.  Without the deep roots of the trees, the groundwater from deep underground moved upward, carrying salt.  The ground over millions of acres of Australia is now white with salt and will be unusable for millennia.

Public relations campaigns endlessly “spin” the benefits of pollution, the need for rampant and unregulated economic growth, and the inexhaustibility of fresh water and other resources (Stauber and Rampton 1996).  The western United States has been repeatedly fooled by inflated figures, using, for instance, far-above-average river flows as baselines.  Agriculture has changed from careful management of water to considerable waste, partly due to the rise of big agribusiness (see Monks 1998 for a rare critique of this).  There is some hope of changing back.  Meanwhile, Arizona and California cities buy water rights from farmers.

 

The poster child for water mismanagement is the Aral Sea (Kobori and Glantz 1998; Micklin and Aladin 2008; Varis 2014).  The Aral Sea is a vast lake in a closed basin in central Asia.  For millennia, it was sustained by model water management.  Some of this management was developed by unlikely heroes, including Genghis Khan and Tamerlane the Conqueror.  A rich economy producing wheat, barley, silk, melons, vegetables, and livestock developed along the Amu and Syr Rivers.

The Soviets changed all that.  They planned to turn the whole basin into a vast cotton source.  The resulting monocrop agriculture has been a disaster.  It takes many times as much water as the old economy did.  Also, cotton uses more artificial chemicals than any other crop; one-third of all the pesticides in the world are used on cotton.  Wheat is also intensively irrigated.  The result is that the nations in question use more water per capita than any others on earth; Turkmenistan is far ahead of others, followed by Iraq and rice-growing Guyana and then by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, the United States,Tajikistan, Estonia, Canada (water-rich), Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (Varis 2014).  In water use per dollar of GNP, the situation is even more extreme.  The nations that use the most water per dollar of GNP are, in order, Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Madagascar, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan.  All are central Asian and dependent on the Amu Darya drainage, except for rice-dependent, impoverished Madagascar.

The Amu Darya now does not get even close to its former mouth into the Aral Sea.  A toxic mix of natural salts and accumulated pesticides and fertilizers blew over the desert plains.  Infant mortality in the Amu delta reached 10% and locally 50% (Micklin and Aladin 2008; Paul Buell, pers. comm. on basis of wide reading of the Uzbekistan press).  The huge fishery of the Aral Sea disappeared as the sea dried.

There remains a small salty puddle in the lake basin.  Most of the basin is now owned by Uzbekistan, which is trapped in a vicious circle:  it cannot stop growing cotton, the source of most of its income, and cannot make enough from cotton to do much.  The north end of the Aral Sea is more fortunate; it is owned by Kazakhstan, which is richer and has a more diverse economy.  Kazakhstan has dyked off its end, which includes the Syr River delta, and is slowly restoring that end of the sea (Micklin and Aladin 2008).  But there is no hope of real restoration.  The Aral basin is ruined forever, and will never produce more than a tiny fraction of the wealth it produced in Tamerlane’s time.  Meanwhile, the irrigated lands become ever more salty and poisoned by pesticides, so they will soon go out of production permanently.  The other rivers that water Turkmenistan and Afghanistan are in the same situation.  How long irrigation will last in these formerly rich lands is an open question.

Lake Urmia, in northwest Iran, is rapidly following the Aral Sea into oblivion.  Only 10% of it is left.  The irrigation is this case is for sunflowers and other water-demanding crops.  These replaced water-sparing vineyards when Iran’s extremist government banned wine production in 1979.  Religion has strange side effects, and, as will appear, it is particularly strange when Islam is the religion in the case.

Humans not only tolerate large amounts of salt but must have it to live. Plants, however, cannot stand more than tiny traces of it in the soil, with the exceptions of certain highly specialized forms.  The only major cultivated crops that tolerates much salt are barley and sugar beets, and even they do not tolerate much.  The world needs to think seriously about domesticating edible forms of saltbush, salicornia, and other marginally-edible salt-loving plant species.

Arizona’s current scene has an unpleasantly suggestive antecedent in the fall of the Hohokam civilization.  The Hohokam and their neighbors constructed an incredible network of canals in the Gila and Salt drainages.  Some of these were as large and long as major modern irrigation canals.  They fed an intensive agriculture based on maize, beans, squash, agaves, and many other crops.  Sophisticated terracing and check-damming added to the water management picture.  Yet, after devastating droughts in the 1200s, the Hohokam fields dried up or salted up (Abbott 2003; Redman 1999).  The Salt River deserves its name, and thus was not a good river to use for irrigation.

The Little Ice Age came, and the rivers refilled.  The Pima arrived and made the land fertile and well-irrigated again.  Unfortunately, the Spanish and then the Anglo-American settlers devastated this blissful scene by developing intensive irrigated agriculture, with increasingly severe water drafts.  As in the Aral Sea case, the Pima had been using the land carefully and sustainably, with drought-tolerant crops.  The early-day anthropologist Frank Russell and the contemporary botanist Amadeo Rea have provided possibly the best accounts of traditional small-scale plant and water management in the entire world (Rea 1983, 1997; Russell 1975).  Thus we have a solid baseline of knowledge here.  The Anglo-Americans planted a great deal of moncrop cotton.  Finally,

the Gila River went dry from Phoenix onward (Dobyns 1981; Rea 1983; Webb et al 2007).  The Pima were left high and very, very dry, in violation of treaties as well as common decency (Russell 1975).  Ironically, Phoenix takes its name from the Hohokam ruins.  The English developer and “character” Darrell Duppa, seeing huge ruins there, planned a city that would rise as the phoenix bird rose from its own ashes.  The settlers were better prophets than they knew.  The phoenix cyclically burns up and has to rise again.  We are about to witness the next fire.

An even more incredible part of the story of water mismanagement is the great beaver massacre.  Hats made of beaver-fur felt were the fad in 1820s England.  It is estimated that as many as a million beaver were taken out of the lower Colorado drainage (including the Gila drainage) in the early 19th century (see e.g. Hilfiker 1991; Pattie 1962 [1831]; Rea 1983).  The result was arroyo cutting, floods, and general disaster.  The Gila and its tributaries had been sluggish streams draining through vast beaver ponds, sloughs, and water meadows, with scattered trees growing from lush mesquite, rushes, grasses, and sedges (Rea 1983).  Much of the damage to Arizona’s hydrology and soils that has been blamed on overgrazing, climate change, and so forth was actually done by beaver trapping.  The beavers had controlled flooding by their thousands of dams.  The damage each year from flooding alone, let alone loss of water conservation, in Arizona is probably greater than the value of all the beaver skins.  There is now no going back; the rivers are dry and the land is urbanized.

Peter Skene Ogden was paid to wipe out the beaver totally in eastern Washington and Oregon, so as to deny the resource to American trappers (Ogden 1987 [1827]).  Of course the result was billions of dollars in damage every year in most years since, though at least the beavers are coming back in some of that area.  Similar things happened in Colorado’s Front Range (Wohl 2005).  And all this so some rich men could wear funny hats for a few years, until the style changed to sustainable silk.

Beavers are incredible water engineers (Hilfiker 1991; Morgan 1868). If people were as good at water management as beavers, there would be no world water problem.  The 18th-century French zoologist Charles Bonnet half-seriously and half-wistfully expected that evolution would produce beaver architects as great as Vauban, the leading architect in Bonnet’s time (Foucault 1971:153).

Lewis Henry Morgan, who invented modern anthropology, also in his spare time invented modern animal behavior studies.  He got interested in beavers and produced what is still the best monograph on their behavior (Morgan 1868).  Of course he did not fail to compare them to humans.  He pointed out that they are not very bright; instinct guides them.  Modern studies confirm this.  At least according to biologist folklore I have heard, biologist tested a beaver by playing the sound of running water.  The beaver carefully covered the sound-system speakers with mud.  This must have been cute to watch, but it certainly shows blind instinct rather than rational calculation.  Still, I have seen beavers show considerable ingenuity at working sticks into their dams.

The point is that simple beavers manage water infinitely better than smart but foolish humans.  Humans that make dams frequently make a bad job of it (Chamberlain 2008; Giles 2006; Scudder 2005; Stone 2008).  Ellen Wohl has done a particularly superb, sensitive, and historically sophisticated account of the superiority of beavers and the idiocy of humans in managing Colorado’s water (Wohl 2005).

The Aswan high dam brought schistosomiasis to all Egypt, wiped out the fisheries of the Nile and the eastern Mediterranean, and loses 25 to 40% of its water to evaporation (Chamberlain 2008:96). Most desert-country dams are similarly wasteful.  It is doubtful if any big dams in the Third World have positive cost-benefit accounts (Scudder 2005; W. Partridge, pers. comm.).  They drown good farmland, displace millions of farmers and other productive citizens, spread disease, waste water, and destroy fisheries.  The benefits they supply are often illusory, or confined to the rich.  Benefits of undammed water can range from 50 to 400 times as high as those from the same water, dammed (Katz 2006:41).  These are probably extreme cases, but, in the Third World, no clear cases of even slight advantages for big dams have been reported to balance them out.  In the First World, many dams are now clearly costly rather than beneficial, and many older and smaller dams are being removed.

The fashion for large dams owes everything to one man, John “Jack” Savage.  A Wisconsin farm boy who rose to become the world’s expert on dams, he designed the Hoover…, Grand Coulee, Parker, and Shasta Dams and the All American Canal system” (Sneddon 2015:29), and then went on to further designs and to world efforts when the “Cold War” between the US and the USSR made it expedient for the US to “help” other countries by building big dams (Sneddon 2015).  Fortunately, in those days the US had a conscience, so few of these were actually built; the social and economic costs were actually taken into account (as they have rarely been since).  Savage’s dams in the US were in fact seriously needed for flood control and irrigation, did not displace many people (none in most cases), and did not cause huge immediate effects (though the Colorado in Mexico was ultimately dried up).  The next great step in dambuilding was the TVA, far more ambitious, organized, and region-wide; it has had a mixed legacy.  It initially paid, in flood control, electricity generation, and transportation (allowing rivers-turned-lakes to bear heavy shipping traffic), but at current prices the value of the enormous amounts of prime farmland and world-class hardwood forests drowned would probably outweigh the benefits.

Unfortunately, the US found it expedient to design and build more and more dams, and many of the countries where the US pulled out found other backers to do the dubious work.  Thus vast numbers of countries now have huge dams inspired by US efforts, but not judged by US standards of cost-accounting.  Whether any of these dams are a benefit is a very open question.  The politics behind them, and the whole political economy of dams, is a complex and involved subject (Sneddon 2015).

Perhaps we should take the big dams out and bring the beavers back.  They have been reintroduced to Scotland—the first beavers in Britain since the 17th century.  The common name Beverly means “beaver meadow,” and was originally the name of an estate based on one such in England.  That estate now has no beavers.  Hopefully there will soon be as many real beverleys as girls bearing the name.

Fish, of course, suffer even more than beavers.  Wild salmon are now a rapidly disappearing resource everywhere except Alaska.  The steelhead runs of southern California are down to a few fish; the only one south of Los Angeles is in San Mateo Creek, and it was down to one female fish in a recent drought (Hovey 2001; this run will surely not survive the current droughts).  Many, if not most, of the freshwater fish, amphibia, and shellfish of America are threatened or endangered.  Caviare will soon be a thing of the past; fishing for it is out of control, and sturgeons are succumbing to pollution and dams even where they are not fished.  The only healthy sturgeon populations in the world are in the major rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and even here they are declining fast.  Aquatic birds are also declining fast.

 

However, anthropologists and other social scientists have recorded many success stories in water management around the world.  They reveal very clearly what is wrong with our system in the world today, and what we can do about it.

Most of the interesting work has revolved around questions of common property resource management.  Water, by its very nature, is usually owned in common.  One would think that it would be thus wasted, because people so often treat a common property resource as something to use without care—Garrett Hardin’s classic “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968).  However, as Hardin saw (Hardin 1991), if a common resource is owned by the group as a corporate entity, and managed by them, it can be excellently managed and sustainably used.

Water is an open-access free good only in situations of extremely low and transient population.  Otherwise, water is almost always owned by communities—tribes, villages, cities, states.  In the ancient Near East, irrigation was life, and thus many excellent irrigation systems and methods were developed (Drower 1954—still an excellent source).  Mesopotamia had to build canals, some hundreds of miles long.  Egypt could simply wait for the Nile flood, but it varied from very low to very high.  The ideal was a 16-cubit rise as measured at Memphis.  There is “a Hellenistic statue of the Nile god in the Vatican” with 16 children, each 1 cubit high (Drower 1954:539).  Under 12 cubits—a cubit is about 32 cm—meant devastating famine; over 18 meant devastating flood.  Yet, normally, the Nile was reliable, and made canal irrigation necessary only in small, marginal areas.  In China, most agriculture was rainfed or fed by very local streams, but eventually—once the empire was established, and locally even before—large canal systems were developed to control whole river systems.

Governments and rulers worked out various bureaucratic systems for managing all this.  All had to have specialized water managers.  In sharp contrast to the famous “irrigation hypothesis” of Wittfogel, this rarely led to absolutism.  Irrigation has to be managed locally, and top-down control of anything except major basic canals merely interferes with necessary local decisions.  In Mesopotamia, China, and the Indian subcontinent, absolutism really came from conquest of irrigation societies by hordes sweeping down from rainfed or very locally irrigated areas.  In China, conquests and absolutism were more apt to come from nomadic herding societies.  In Egypt, absolutism developed within an irrigation society, but the pharaoh had little real control over the river.

In the Middle Ages and locally since then, lords owned streams and lakes, but they could be said to be owning them as feudal lords—that is, administrators—rather than as private citizens.  Recently, a drive to privatize water has allowed corporations, large and small, to control water sources as well as sales, but this is an unusual development from the point of view of history.  It is an exceedingly ominous development (Chamberlain 2008).  It often drives up the cost of water severalfold, while lowering availability.  If there were actual competition this might not be the case, but such schemes involve governments cutting deals with big firms to have local monopolies.  Corruption is endemic.  All the abuses of monopolies and mercantilism immediately surface.

Thus, water has been prudently maintained as a common-property good until now, even in the most capitalistic societies, and especially in the Middle East.  Water thus becomes a fascinating study.  Traditional and more recent Jewish spiritual attitudes toward water, and the world in general, have been introduced in the service of water management in a brilliant article by Aaron Wolf (2012).

Some of the most interesting researches on water in the Middle East refer to Muslim or Muslim-influenced local irrigation systems.  This is in large part because Muslim law, developed in arid lands, is quite specific about water.  Gary Chamberlain, synthesizing a number of sources, reports:  “Muslim law codes…forbid private ownership of water, at least in its natural state.  There is a hierarchy of uses…first is the right of thirst…no one can be denied the water necessary to drink…then all are allowed water for their daily needs of bathing, cleaning, cooking, and so forth.”

This is a priority partly because Islam enjoins cleanliness, making thorough washup and bathing a religious duty.  However, even ritual cleaning must not be wasteful.  Muhammad once saw his early follower Sa’ad “performing the ablutions…using a lot of water, he intervened, saying:  ‘What is this?  You are wasting water.’  Sa’ad replied asking: ‘Can there be wastefulness while performing the ablutions?’  To which God’s Messenger replied:  ‘Yes, even if you perform them on the bank of a rushing river.’”  (Cited Özdemir 2003:14.)

Then “next comes the right to provide water to livestock; and last comes the irrigation of crops, which consumes the most water.  Only when water has been placed in a vessel…is water considered a private good” (Chamberlain 2008:54).  “Water distribution has very clear-cut legislation in Islam.  In general terms its rules are based on the principle of benefiting all those who share its watercourse” (Dien 2003:116; details following).  The duty to provide water for livestock is taken very seriously, Islam having originated among desert travelers.  Accounts describe careful management of flocks at the wells, with the most water-needing animals drinking first.

This emphasis on common property led to intricate but efficient and enforceable common property regimes being established in Muslim lands.  The Muslims could build on earlier systems that were often extremely intricate and highly developed.  South Arabia—today’s Yemen—had a vast system involving a huge dam across the major wadi; this system died when weather patterns shifted, drying the wadi except for occasional damaging floods (Scarborough 2003).  The Nabatean system in the Negev Desert had harvested water by incredibly sophisticated means in Roman and pre-Roman times.

Most spectacular of all were the qanat systems of Iran and neighboring areas, including the slopes around Mesopotamia.  A qanat is a long tunnel dug back into an alluvial fan.  It is set at a very slight upward slope.  Water percolates in from the alluvial material, so the qanat produces a live stream that can be directed to irrigation.  Otherwise, the water would evaporate through the porous fan material and be lost.  Qanat systems extend east as far as west China (Xinjiang), where they are called karez.  Major innovations in qanat irrigation, dam-building, and integrated irrigation system engineering were made in Central Asia in the medieval period (Hill 2000).  This was a little-known golden age of engineering innovation, especially in systems design.  The Persians and Mongols introduced this technology to the western world, and it may lie behind some of our modern “systems thinking.”

The Arabs brought them to Spain, Italy, and elsewhere.  They grade into ordinary water tunnels that merely convey water to cities with minimal evaporation.  Qanat systems are maintained by local communities.  A fee is charged for the water.  Specialists maintain the water tunnels.  It is a dangerous job, since cave-ins are hard to prevent and generally fatal.

Arab systems survive everywhere in the Middle East and in much of North Africa.  I have observed them in Morocco, where they have blended over many centuries with indigenous, related Berber traditional systems.  The latter in turn may go back to the Roman Empire, when North Africa was a key part of the empire, producing agricultural products of all kinds.

Excellent systems survived till late.  The Arab irrigation systems of Yemen (Varisco 1996) and elsewhere are legendary.  Egypt’s superb irrigation system long predated the Arabs, having been developed in ancient Egypt (see Butzer 1976), but it was continued by the Arabs, later by the Ottomans (Mikhail 2011), and finally by independent Egypt, up until the extremely ill-advised Aswan Dam destroyed the old system.  Today, slow but sure salinization is adding to global warming, delta subsidence, and other ills.

The Arabs supplied Palermo, Sicily, through aqueducts cut into rock in the 9th and 10th centuries (Maurici 2006); these still supply Palermo today.  Sicily still uses them to irrigate crops, especially those the Arabs brought, such as lemons, sugarcane, eggplants, and high-quality melons (Pizzuto 2002).

In Spain, the “Reconquista” conquered Spain from the Moors after 800 years of Moorish rule.  Most of the Moors were expelled, to Spain’s permanent and major loss.  However, a few villages hung on in areas so remote that they could avoid exile by superficial conversion to Christianity.  The most significant of these for our purposes were in the Sierra de la Contraviesa area southeast of Grenada, studied by Gaston Remmers (1998) among others.  Remmers describes an incredibly sophisticated system for making sure that everybody has fair access to irrigation water, no matter how wet or dry the year.  The village social organization is based on water management.  (Spain has other successful irrigation systems without obvious Moorish ancestry, too; Grove and Rackham 2001, Guillet 2006.)  Another important study, from Morocco, was carried out by Hsain Ilaihine on the Ziz River (Ilaihine 2004).  It describes careful maintenance of canals and allocation of water in a dry drainage from the Atlas Mountains.  I have examined almost exactly similar systems above Marrakech.

Many of the Moors converted to Christianity but were not quite trusted, and were sent to remote parts of Mexico, where they could not do much damage by rebelling. Converted Moors and Spanish who learned from them gave us qanats in Tehuacan, where they flourish—or did when I was there in 1996—in the dry Tehuacan Valley.

From here they were introduced to San Bernardino, California, and until not long ago San Bernardino was supplied by this ancient Iranian technology. The ditch that brings water to Redlands, California, is still called “the Zanja” (the old Moorish term), and the city water manager is officially the Zanjero.

San Bernardino, the neighboring city, also benefited from ancient Chinese technology, via “Pedley dams,” huge sausage-shaped bundles of rocks done up in ropework (or wire) and used for instant levees.  Pedley was a 19th-century water engineer.  He had seen them in China, where they were invented in the far past.  (At least this is what locals told me when I was young.)

In New Mexico and extreme south Colorado, Arab systems flourish.  A local farmer turned anthropologist, Devon Peña, is not only studying them anthropologically but also using them to irrigate his own farm in a Hispanic community there.  He has used water management as a natural symbol, or entry point, for his excellent discussions of environmental justice (Peña 1998, 2000).

Perhaps the most remote extension is into Zuni Pueblo.  The famous waffle gardens of Zuni are indistinguishable to my eyes from those of Sicily, and are often used to grow the same crops (melons, cucumbers, etc.).  The Zuni are creative and brilliant gardeners and water engineers in their own right, and surely there is some parallel innovation here; one wonders if the Zuni gardens were influenced by conversos—converted Moors—in northern New Mexico.

Moorish systems also went to South America, where they fused with the ancient and formidably competent systems of the Quechua and Aymara.  The Incas and their predecessors in Peru had constructed canals up to dozens of miles long, through some of the harshest and most difficult country in the world.  They had terraced mountain slopes up to two miles high, and run irrigation systems throughout these terraces, perfectly controlling the flow of water on slopes up to 45% or so.  They had integrated water systems all the way from glacier snouts 18,000’ above sea level down to the edge of the Pacifc.  The Nazca, around 500 CE, constructed systems to tap groundwater, similar to Old World qanats, but with the added sophistication that they built spiral excavations that caused the wind to spin round, creating a low-pressure zone that brought water to the surface (see Proulx 2008).  These nonliterate people, with little metal, no wheeled vehicles, and limited animal power, had carried out some of the most spectacular water engineering jobs in the world.

Naturally, they quickly saw the value of metal tools and European draft animals.

They also saw the value of  Moorish technology and organization (Gelles 1995, 2000; Trawick 2001a, 2001b, 2002).  Traditional Quechua society is organized dualistically:  there is an uphill group and a downhill group, or some comparable split, in every village.  This has had a real but uncertain amount of influence from Moorish and Spanish customs.  The water hierarchy in a village is more clearly influenced by Moorish-Spanish usage, with water officials and titles similar to those elsewhere in the Hispanic world.  Each half of the village has its water organization, and the two must cooperate and distribute water fairly.  They tend to keep each other honest.  Also, typically, the two halves of the village are not really separated; plots belonging to members of the uphill half are scattered through the downhill side, and vice versa.  This is partly a matter of inheritance and marriage, but partly also a matter of geographic necessity.  Warm-weather crops have to be downhill, cold-weather crops uphill, in canyon villages.  Some villages have fields extend for a vertical mile, for instance in the Colca Valley, a canyon twice as deep as Grand Canyon (Gelles 2000).

Critical to the operation of the system are the fiestas.  Every village has, or had, its huge party, usually in the summer.  This brought everyone together and allowed everyone to have a good time.  It also allowed some working out of conflicts, because both sanctioned competitions and unsanctioned fights naturally occur at fiestas.  Occurring in a public, mostly happy gathering, such fights are quickly stopped and mediated.  This would not be the case if the fights occurred on a dark night out in the watershed.  Better have them in the open, at the fiesta.

The astonishing level of honesty in these village systems would certainly be devastating to any disciples of Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century Englishman who saw humans as individuals in permanent conflict.  Honesty depends on several factors.  First, the water managers are vigilant.  Second, neighbors too are vigilant.  However, all a water thief needs is a dark night and a spade.  It is very easy to turn the village canal into one’s own fields for a couple of hours.  This can help one’s own prospects greatly, but, of course, at the expense of others’.  Yet people rarely do it—intimidated not only by popular opinion and the revenge of gods and spirits, but also by their consciences.  Humans want to cooperate, and will sacrifice a lot to do so.

Paul Gelles’ village had to cooperate beyond usual levels back in the 1990s (Gelles 1995, 2000).  The Peruvian government built a water project that brought water to lowland cities, but, apparently inadvertently, preempted the water supply the village.  The town faced disaster.  So the most intrepid young men went out and tore a hole in the water project canal, directing the village’s proper flow back to it.  They did not wreck the whole project or the canal.  The government came with warrants and police, but the entire village stood up against them.  Arrests, threats, cajoling, and bureaucratic foot-dragging all failed.  The village got its water back.  Quite a few similar stories could be told, from Spain to New Mexico (see e.g. Chamberlain 2008).

Another system maintained by religious organization holds in Bali.  Stephen Lansing studied this system over many years (Lansing 1987, 1991, 2006).  Irrigation on that Indonesian island is derived from water coming from the crater lake at the top of the island, which is a single giant inactive volcano.  The water is sacred.  The head priest of the island, the jero gde, lives at the lake outlet, and oversees the water system.  Apparently he is appointed more for his hydrological expertise than for his religious devotions.  A hierarchy of priests, progressively farther and farther downstream, oversees the breakup of this stream into tens, hundreds, and finally tens of thousands of channels.  These feed a vast system of rice paddies; the island is one huge farm, growing mainly rice but also dozens of tropical crops.  Water is timed so that there is no one pulse of irrigation.  That would not only take too much water; it would allow insect pests to multiply out of control.  Instead, each field has its schedule of irrigating and drying off.  The World Bank came in with sophisticated technology in the late 1980s to improve this system, and promptly caused disaster.  Their computer-assisted plans led to water shortages, local floods, and insect outbreaks.  Control promptly went back to the jero gde.  Lansing modeled the traditional system with his own computers, and found it to be about as perfect as could be achieved in the real world.  (Criticisms of his scenario exist [Vayda 2008], but are sufficiently refuted by Lansing’s material.)

Similar, if less comprehensive and perfect, local systems of terracing and water control are well documented from elsewhere in Indonesia, as well as from the Philippines, pre-American Hawaii, New Guinea, and indeed most of Oceania and the rest of the montane tropical and subtropical world (Scarborough 2003).  Usually, religion is marshalled to help maintain them.  Often they are also maintained through kinship systems, as in Luzon and among the Toba Batak of Sumatera (studied by my former student, the late Richard Lando, in the 1970s).  Often they produce fish and other animal protein as well as staple plant foods.  India has countless religiously maintained irrigation systems too (a particularly superb account is by David Mosse, 2003, 2006).

The irrigation systems of south China are well known (the best descriptions are in Marks 1998 and Ruddle and Zhong 1988, but see also Anderson and Anderson 1973 and Wen and Pimentel 1986a, 1986b).  They too have religious representation, via the guardian spirits and gods of the localities involved, though they are largely secular concerns.  They are usually administered by village elders.

Typical in this area are lineage villages, where all males are related by direct descent from a single founding ancestor.  The lineage elders are then all kin.  Such villages can have thousands of people and be hundreds of years old.  They can thus manage irrigation on a substantial scale.  However, much more impressive were the vast water systems that the Imperial governments maintained.  The most famous was the one in the Chengdu Plain of Sichuan, designed by the Li family of engineers more than two thousand years ago.  Their advice—“keep the dykes low and the channels deep”—should be learned by every water manager.  They split the Min River into three channels, so that the river could be directed into two of the channels in order to allow local people to clear rocks and silt out of the other one to keep it deep.  This system has been maintained and repaired over the centuries, and is still in use.  A fine and very old temple to the Li engineers has survived even Communist abuses.

Where water fails, people are incredibly innovative about doing without it.  The Chinese of dry north China were as sophisticated in water harvest as the south Chinese were in water management, and many incredibly sophisticated techniques were known more than 2000 years ago (Anderson 1988).   We of western North America have a lot to learn.  Some of my colleagues at the University of California, Riverside proudly and helpfully told a group of West Africans, many years ago, that UCR had developed crops that could grow on 12 inches of rain.  The West Africans calmly answered that their crops grew on four inches of rain.  We of UCR thought we would be the teachers, but we became the learners.

Among Native Americans, the Tohono Oodham of Arizona also had crops that grew on four inches of rain.  They also shared with the West Africans a trick of following recent runoff channels, making fields in areas recently flooded.  By the time the water has dried up and the soil is dry, fast-growing crops have yielded a harvest.  The Hopi had varieties of maize that were planted a foot deep to take advantage of soil moisture.  The Hopi and most other traditional maize cultivators hilled up soil around the growing stalks, saving yet more water.  The ancient cultivators of the Muddy and Virgin River area of Nevada allocated and managed water carefully, maintaining a dense population without salination (Haines 2010); they were probably the ancestors of the Southern Paiute, who maintained successful intensive agriculture in that area well into the historic period.  Haines compares their water management with Near Eastern systems noted above.

This sort of agriculture did not develop in a laboratory.  Like other traditional, efficient management strategies for water, it required people to take water and crops very seriously.  It was religiously represented.  The Hopi, like almost all other Native American corn farmers, worshiped the maize god.  Saving water requires reverence for water, for the irrigation process, and for crops.  It will require planning based on respect for people and for water resources.

Common property management works in today’s world.  Elinor Ostrom (1990) studied water management in my home area, the Los Angeles basin.  She found that the dozens of cities sharing the basin had been forced to work together to manage the small rivers that provide water and carry away sewage.  I well recall the days when Riverside’s water was unsafe to drink and the city sewered into the Santa Ana River.  Orange County cities were richer and more powerful, however, and thus forced more and more treatment on Riverside, till its sewage is now safer than its drinking water used to be!

Without such powerful downstream users, however, upstream users can progressively degrade the water resource (Murphy 1967), and by ruining the downstream users they can de-fang their political power, and thus prevent any recourse from affecting them (Wilkinson 1992).  Elinor Ostrom also studied the Mojave River, just outside the Los Angeles Basin.  Here, powerful mining interests control the headwaters.  Next downriver are the relatively well-off towns of Hesperia and Victorville.  The river dies in the desert just past Barstow.  This unfortunate town, always poor, has become poorer and poorer as its water source is sucked away.  Having less and less political-economic clout, it progressively loses to the mines and the richer towns.  Barstow is slowly strangling to death.

Even people who do not plant or irrigate may have an important and valuable water ideology, religiously supported.  Katherine Metzo (2005) reports on the ideals of pure water among the indigenous peoples of the area around Lake Baikal in Siberia.  These ideals are now the main thing standing between this deepest and most copious of all lakes and its ruin by Russian pollution.

 

It is, indeed, hard to avoid worshiping water if one has any religious regard for nature.  One of the striking facts about humans is that, everywhere, they seem to honor and revere waterfalls.  Major falls are parks and pilgrimage spots in the United States and China and elsewhere.  Traditional small-scale societies everywhere seem to have worshiped them.  The Shuar (“Jivaro”) people of Ecuador and Peru call themselves the “people of the sacred waterfalls” (Harner 1972).  In my research in China and with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest I found that these disparate peoples still have high religious regard for waterfalls, eddies, rapids, and other areas where the power of water is evident.  Native Americans often went on vision quests at such places.

The sheer force of the water at such points is hypnotizing.  One can stand looking in a sort of trance for minutes or even hours.  Lakes and deep pools, and above all the vast ocean, have a different kind of spiritual sense:  peaceful and calm, yet evidently extremely powerful.  The power is latent.  One knows that a storm or a break in a water barrier could unleash it at any moment.  Legends of lake monsters, maelstroms, and bottomless pools seem to express some of this feeling.  The Greek god Triton and the Roman Neptune are more explicit statements of it.  Yemaja, the mother goddess of the Yoruba of West Africa (and many of their descendants in Brazil), is a sea goddess and can be stormy at times.

The Chinese see the ocean not so much as a god but as a vast universe in which or on which gods, dragons, and other supernatural beings play.  The Chinese were aware from very early times of islands forming from deltas, and of fossil seashells on mountaintops, so they early developed a story that the seas and lands had changed places many times.  The seas had been mulberry fields, as they expressed it.  They were aware that life-giving rains came from the sea, and were all too aware that these could come in the wake of typhoons (ta fung, “great wind” or “striking wind” depending on what character is used). The Chinese thought that dragons caused these storms.  Some of my fishermen friends had seen dragons in the rolling, boiling stormclouds.  Indeed, in the dim light and driving rain of a typhoon, one can easily imagine one sees these giant reptilian beings riding the wild winds.

It is also hard to avoid seeing the contrast of land and water, or land and sea, as one of those basic dichotomies around which people love to organize their thought.  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1963, 1964-1972) discussed this in great detail.  Often, such dichotomies symbolize the dichotomy of male and female, which in turn may involve wife-giving and wife-accepting groups.  The Northwest Coast peoples contrasted land and sea, and many of their stories turn on progress from one to the other.  This can symbolize creation, or marriage, or a hero’s journey to wisdom, or tribal trade and interaction, or anything else involving such moving through landscapes.  Of course, salmon and other sea-run fish are the staple of subsistence there, and they run from fresh waters to the sea and then back again.

Animals that easily cross the boundary between water and land, like river otters, are sacred and powerful.  Otters are believed to lure humans to come into the water with them; the people then drown and are converted into otter-men, as scary to the Haida as werewolves were to medieval Europe.  The fear of otter-men (gagitx or “gogeet”) has actually spread to some Whites on Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands; I discovered this during my research there).  Otters are playful creatures, and do, in fact, try to lure humans into the water to play with them.  There is no mistaking their intent; they are as obvious about it as any puppy.  I have personally observed this several times.  I resisted the temptation.

Most powerful are those beings that can interact between water, land, and air:  the raven, eagle, and kingfisher (Jonaitis 1981).  The kingfisher nests in a burrow in the underground—or underworld, flies in the air, and fishes in the water.

Not only the Northwest Coast peoples attribute special power to anomalous creatures that are able to live in two different worlds.  It is a worldwide characteristic.  Consider the scary, uncanny nature of frogs, toads, and newts in Shakespeare.  African and South American peoples have similar attitudes toward lungfish.  And scientists show great fascination with the perfect intermediates between fish and land life-forms that have recently emerged from Chinese fossil beds.

Whales and porpoises are naturally uncanny, since they look and act like fish but breathe air and are obviously intelligent.  My fishermen friends on the Hong Kong waterfront would not touch them, for these reasons.  A recent fascinating book, Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett (2007), tells of a trial in New York in 1818.  New York State enacted an inspection fee on fish oil.  Inevitably, a shrewd New York fish-oil dealer refused to pay on whale oil, since the whale had recently been declared by science to be a mammal.  This led to a trial.  The dealer called to witness the leading American ichthyologist, Samuel Mitchill, a genuinely great scientist.  However, the trial went against him, since it was pretty clear that the law had been intended to cover whale oil as well as other “fish” oils.  The law was, however, subsequently rewritten.

In any case, the controversy was not easy to settle.  This was long before Darwin, and there was really no obvious reason to privilege lungs and live birth over fins and aquatic lifestyle.  The trial played ordinary people, with their functional view of the world, over laboratory scientists, with their structural and abstract view.

The whale remains anomalous among water creatures.  Americans want to save whales because they are intelligent mammals.  Many Japanese still see whales as essentially fish, and see American attempts to stop whaling as an imposition on fish-eating peoples.  It is, however, worth noting that most Japanese will not touch whale meat any more, and the government has to store in freezers the whale meat its fleets bring home.

 

It would be very hard to imagine a moral or religious code that denied water to those dying of thirst.  Yet, modern governments do exactly that, by wasteful and corrupt development schemes, privatization of water, permitting contamination, displacement of impoverished people, and many other practices.

Gary Chamberlain (2008) reviews the status of water in all the world’s major religions, and finds that all of them are quite specific about enjoining us to treat water as a common good to share with all who need it.  Certainly, of all human needs, water is second in immediate importance only to oxygen.  Water is needed every day, in fairly large quantities, by every human.  It is needed directly for drinking and washing, indirectly in much greater quantities for food production and manufacturing.  It is irreplaceable; the economists’ notion of “infinite substitutability” breaks down totally here.  Water has to be reasonably pure to be useful—the purer the better.

This being the case, all religions have made a point of insisting that water be made available.  All seem, also, to have used it as a symbol.  Water is soft and flowing, yet wears away rock.  It is pure, yet can be contaminated.  It is meek and unprotesting and always ready to serve, yet it is arguably the most valuable thing in the world.  It is often ignored and devalued, yet is absolutely necessary to life—every faith seems to have made the obvious comparison with religion here!  Probably nothing else has been such a universally used symbol and metaphor, for so many things.  Rivers are goddesses in India, and had a human feminine form before they descended to earth.  (Chamberlain quotes a wonderful story of the sea and the Ganges on p. 17.)  In Indian art, rivers such as the Ganges, Narbada and other rivers are beautiful women in the prime of life.   Their long, flowing hair and supple bodies recall the flow of the rivers.  In Bangladesh, Islamic norms prevail, but local water culture involves much management and associated ideology about water (Hanchett et al. 2014).

Water is most notable in religion for its cleanness and its purifying qualities and for its tremendous power, but Zena Kamash (2008) has recently emphasized its terrifying aspects.  Floods, whirlpools and fast rivers kill countless people.  Religions recognize this, and pray for protection, but also see water and the water surface as liminal.  They are boundaries between life and death, and water is both lifegiver and deathbringer.  Kamash’s own work is on the Roman Empire, and from Anatolia to England she has found Roman shrines that link these two aspects.  She finds similarities elsewhere, and I certainly saw plenty of this in China, where my fishermen friends lived by the sea but often died by it.  They loved it and feared it.  Cultivators in land villages had a similar view of fresh water; it kept them alive and irrigated their crops, but floods were frequent, and killed millions by starvation as well as hundreds by direct drowning.  Temples took full note of this, and so did prayers and ceremonies.

Religions have also insisted on the moral necessity of giving water to those who need it. Chamberlain reviews a wide range of sources.  I have mentioned the most graphic—the Islamic injunctions—above.  Chamberlain goes on to give us a powerful call to renew our faiths, whatever they may be, and work to make water freely and universally available in today’s world.

Even if one is not religious, any concern for anything outside one’s own narrowest self-interest simply has to include concern for water.  Even one’s narrowest self-interest, in fact.  The future for all of us is bleak unless immediate action is taken on a global scale.

Indeed, we need to bring religion and ethics into the picture.  At the very least, we need to see that water is literally and figuratively the water of life.  Denying it is murder.  Polluting and wasting it are potential murder.  I doubt if anything short of a concerted effort by all religions will save the world from a water shortage that will be catastrophic beyond imagining.

 

 

 

Based on a talk at the Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, AZ, 2008; amended since.  Thanks to Sandy Lynch and Gary Chamberlain for help.

 

 

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Appendix

“…On average, the water we use in our households is about 98 gallons a day, says a U.S. Geological Survey. The industrial goods we use — paper, cotton, clothes — that’s about another 44 gallons a day. But it takes more than 1,000 gallons of water a day per person to produce the food (and drinks) in the average U.S. diet, according to several sources. More than 53 gallons of water go into making 1 cup of orange juice, for example.

Just to get a sense of how much water goes into growing and processing what we eat, here’s a list of the water footprint for some common foods, via National Geographic:

A 1/3-pound burger requires 660 gallons of water. Most of this water is for producing beef (see below).

1 pound of beef requires 1,799 gallons of water, which includes irrigation of the grains and grasses in feed, plus water for drinking and processing.

1 slice of bread requires 11 gallons of water. Most of this water is for producing wheat (see below).

1 pound of wheat requires 132 gallons of water.

1 gallon of beer requires 68 gallons of water, or 19.8 gallons of water for 1 cup. Most of that water is for growing barley (see below).

1 pound of barley requires 198 gallons of water.

1 gallon of wine requires 1,008 gallons of water (mostly for growing the grapes), or 63.4 gallons of water for 1 cup.

1 apple requires 18 gallons of water. It takes 59.4 gallons of water to produce 1 cup of apple juice.

1 orange requires 13 gallons of water. It takes 53.1 gallons of water for 1 cup of orange juice.

1 pound of chicken requires 468 gallons of water.

1 pound of pork requires 576 gallons of water.1 pound of rice requires 449 gallons of water.

1 pound of sheep requires 731 gallons of water.

1 pound of goat requires 127 gallons of water.

1 pound of corn requires 108 gallons of water.

1 pound of soybeans requires 216 gallons of water.

1 pound of rice requires 449 gallons of water.

1 pound of potatoes requires 119 gallons of water.

1 egg requires 53 gallons of water.

1 gallon of milk requires 880 gallons of water, or 54.9 gallons of water for 1 cup. That includes water for raising and grazing cattle, and bottling and processing.

1 pound of cheese requires 600 gallons of water. On average it requires 1.2 gallons of milk to make 1 pound of cheese.

1 pound of chocolate requires 3,170 gallons of water.

1 pound of refined sugar requires 198 gallons of water.

1 gallon of tea requires 128 gallons of water, or 7.9 gallons of water for 1 cup.

1 gallon of coffee requires 880 gallons of water, or 37 gallons of water for 1 cup. ‘If everyone in the world drank a cup of coffee each morning, it would ‘cost’ about 32 trillion gallons of water a year,’ National Geographic notes” (Hallock 2014).

 

A Power of Good, Gone Bad

April 29th, 2016

A POWER OF GOOD, GONE BAD

 

Rough expressions carefully excluded by my modest wife from our book A POWER OF GOOD.

TRIGGER WARNING:  NOT SUITABLE FOR ANYONE UNDER 18 OR EASILY OFFENDED BY OBSCENE MATERIAL!

 

 

 

Putdowns and general negatives

 

Full of beans.  (Usually, angry, as if from indigestion; also, full of energy; can also be a euphemism for “full of shit.”)

 

I don’t take no shit.

 

Shit fire!  (All purpose exclamation.)

 

Screwed the pooch.  (Totally messed up.  As in “so-and-so screwed the pooch.”)

 

Cold as a witch’s tit

 

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass baboon (or “monkey”)

 

Colder than a welldigger’s ass (thanks to Chris Chase-Dunn for this one)

 

They’d steal Christ off the cross if He weren’t nailed down.  (Said of chronic shoplifter types, of employees who “liberate” supplies from the company, etc.)

 

Up shit creek without a paddle

 

RF  (Short for “rat fuck”; means a practical joke or similar goofy action—as in “I RF’d the psychologists’ questionnaire by answering the craziest way I could.”)

 

He’s so low he’d have to stand up on his hind legs to kiss a snake’s ass.

From an Okie ex-Marine friend of mine.

 

He’s so low he’d have to use a ladder to harvest potatoes.

 

He’s so low he sucks earthworm dicks.

He’s got a wild hair up his ass.  (He has an attitude–i.e. he is being irrationally negative or aggressive.)

He’s lower than a snake’s navel.  (Classic putdown, leading to the use of “Snakenavel” to mean “the middle of nowhere,” as in “I was offered a job but it was in Snakenavel, Idaho, so I turned it down.”  Compare the use of Podunk—a real town in Iowa—and the academic equivalent, Slippery Rock State, to mean “nowheresville.”  Slippery Rock State is actually quite a good school, and the term is dropping out of use.  Spanish equivalents include “en las Batuecas” in peninsula Spain—the Batuecas are a group of insignificant towns in a backwoods region.  In Mexico, it’s donde no va el Coca—“where even the Coca-Cola truck doesn’t go”; such a place is almost unimaginably remote in that soft-drink-dependent country.)

 

Kiss my ass and growl like a fox.  (our student Matt Des Lauriers quoted this from his grandfather’s usage)

 

Every little bit helps, as the whore said when she pissed in the ocean.

 

Feisty.  (Full of fight, from “feisting,” an old word for farting.  Similarly, a small mutt was called a “feist dog” or just “fice,” especially if it had an attitude.)

 

Brown-nosing.  (Kissing ass.)

 

Snafu.  (Acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up.”  Military slang, satirizing the military’s fondness for acronyms.)

 

That ain’t worth a pee-hole in the snow.  (Very common.)

 

“My daughter thinks the world of him, but, to me, he’s a sluffed-up sack of Siberian sheep shit.”  (Recorded by a folklorist in Texas.  Typical Texan putdown.)

 

I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my balls if you was dyin’ in the desert.  (Learned from my dorm neighbor Richard Sylla in college; he used it as his comprehensive summary of economic theory.  He was summa cum laude in Economics and became a very eminent historian of economics.)

 

Can’t tell shit from Shinola.  (Proverbial stupidity; a phrase notably associated with the military, who had to shine their shoes regularly)

 

Doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.  (Possibly the commonest term in my youth for incompetence and stupidity.)

 

So dumb / incompetent he can’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight.

 

I’m gonna tear him a new asshole.  (Common threat.)

 

A German story too good to miss, and known in the Midwest where there was German settlement:

The soldier Götz von Berlichingen, a real person who lived from 1482 to 1562, was trapped in a house surrounded by his enemies.  History (not totally unquestioned…but at least written) records that they called to him that his situation was hopeless and he should surrender.  He hung his bare ass out the window and said “Leck mich in arsch” (lick my ass)…and proceeded to fight his way out, single-handed, and survive to fight again.  He became the German national hero, and his line is the German national putdown.  (See Alan Dundes, Life Is a Chicken Coop Ladder, for more.)

 

 

Animal Metaphors

 

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you set out to drain the swamp.  (I prefer to say “…to conserve the wetland.”)

 

Chickenshit   (a common extension of “chicken.”  This is a word used focally for a very common and typical state of mind, the results of childhood abuse, VERY common in the old Midwest.  The abused kid was often weak, isolated, resentful, cowardly, and alternating between placating and nastiness.  With maturing, this often took the form of touchy defensiveness and excessive concern for “honor.”)

 

To goose someone  (to strike at the genital region, as an angry goose does to drive people away from its young)

 

Smells like two skunks fucking in an onion patch.  (Black American—at least in so far as I know it—but probably more widespread; alternatively “fighting in an onion patch”)

 

In a pig’s ass.  (I.e. something that won’t happen, or something that’s bullshit.  Bars used to post signs saying “your credit is good here” –with a pointer pointing to the back end of a pig.  Cleaned-up variants:  In a pig’s ear; in a pig’s eye, when pigs fly; when pigs fly to the moon.  “Ears” was and sometimes still is a standard euphemism for “ass,” dating back to the 18th century, when ass was still “arse” and “ears” was pronounced “airs,” so the words were near-homonyms.)

 

Up a pig’s ass:  same as “up shit crick.”  In a hopeless position.  Note that “crick,” not creek, was and is the universal Midwestern pronunciation.

 

Piss like a racehorse  (copiously)

 

Faster than a cat can lick its ass.  (Usually said of unpleasant things, as in “If he gets mad he’ll be on you faster than…”).

 

Hotter’n a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.  (Texanism.)

 

I don’t give a rat’s ass.

 

About as much use as tits on a boar.

 

(Not from our childhood, but too good to miss, is a Malay proverb:  “Even if ten ships come, the dogs have no loincloths but their tails.”  [The ships are understood to be bringing fancy imported fabrics, the Great Luxury of old Malaysia.  The proverb is a comment on the hopelessness of the poor.])

 

 

Euphemisms

 

Today’s forthright speech has cost the English language a vast range of ridiculously creative euphemisms.  Midwesterners needed strong and pungent speech to express their emotions, but were too inhibited to use the blunt words, at least in mixed company.  Children actually got their mouths washed out with soap for “cussin.’”  I was threatened with this periodically, but I was usually too careful to get the actual washing.  This resistance to blunt verbiage led to a lot of nonsense.

Besides the obvious “Gosh!” “Golly!” “Jeez!” “Darn!” and so on, there were more arcane ways to modify taboo words:  “Bushwah!” for “bullshit”; “shucks” and “shoot” for “shit”; “asset” and “yes-yes” (pron. “yas-yas”) for “ass” (“arse”); “for cryin’ out loud” for “for Christ’s sake”; “foot” for “fuck” as an expletive (oh foot!); “Lor’ love a duck” for “fuck” (this is a Cockney one); “peter” for “penis”; and so on.  “Spend a penny” was universal British slang in the first 2/3 of the 20th century for “go to the toilet,” with reference to the cost of the pay toilets in old-time London.  A toilet is a “loo” in England, from French l’eau, “the water.”   The name “John” developed unfortunate connotations, first in French, especially in the nickname form Jacques, whence English “Jack” and Scottish “Jock.”  So “jakes” (from Jacques) and later “John” was used for the toilet.

“John” and “jock” also became standard euphemisms for the penis, whence “jockstrap” as slang for a supporter strap to protect a man’s groin.  “John” was lengthened to “Johnson” for a while in the mid-20th century (when “-son” was a slangy lengthening of anything—“Jack” and “Jackson” were slangy terms of address to men).  “Johnson” inspired a line of double entendre T-shirts (the “Big Johnson” line) that were, for a change, really witty rather than just gross.  “John” gave way to “Dick” (from rhyming slang for “prick,” and not so much euphemistic as universal, in many American dialects).  It seems that the English language requires a boy’s name for the organ in question; I have heard “Aleck,” “Tom,” etc.  (British slang includes excusing oneself to go take a leak by saying “Must go point Percy at the porcelain,” etc.)  And “to roger” was a very standard euphemism for sexual intercourse.

The general lack of intelligence, taste, and good judgement of the organ in question has caused “dick,” “dork,” etc. to be words for a stupid person, like “pendejo” (thing that hangs on) in Spanish.  However, the male genitalia were very commonly referred to as “the family jewels,” so clearly there were more favorable judgments out there.

Other common terms for the penis included dong, tool, joystick, rod, and so on.  In addition, almost anything can be used, as limericks and dirty jokes prove.  There was a similarly vast corpus of euphemisms for sexual intercourse, but most of the ones that were widely used are still around.  Anal intercourse in the Midwest was “cornholing,” from “corn hole” for anus.

There is a whole genre of English and American folksong that uses rural metaphors for sexual intercourse, beginning with a medieval one in which our hero grafts his pear tree for his ladylove, and more recently a song in which “I showed her the works of my threshing machine” (an implement of modern invention).  Studies show that metaphors involving tools and weapons can be constructed right back to Proto-Indo-European.  Other languages (notably Spanish and Cantonese, from my experience) have equally complex vocabularies and metaphors.

“Cock” was never a euphemism.  It is a translation gloss from various European languages.  Several languages over the world use the male chicken as a metaphor.  The euphemism came in when Americans coined “rooster” for the bird!  The British really laugh at us for that one.

Meanwhile, in deep southern US English, “cock” means the female genitalia, not the male; it’s a completely different word, from French coquille, “shell,” via New Orleans French.  “Poontang” is another southern localism for the female parts.  I know it only from Virginia and the Appalachians, but it may be elsewhere in the south.  It centers on Black English, so is probably an African word originally.

Another set of euphemisms surrounded teaching kids about sex.  Parents were often too ashamed to discuss human sexuality directly, so referred to it as “the facts of life.”  They had recourse to explaining the sex lives of animals first.  This gave rise to the expression “tell them about the birds and the bees,” and thus to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for human sex in general.

Yet more terms referred to courting (itself a term covering a wide range of activities).  Most of these were teenage slang referring to stages of intimacy.  “Necking” was kissing and other above-the-neck action.  “Petting” and “spooning” covered more bodily contact.  “Making out” was definitely more serious: foreplay-like activity that could, and often did, lead to what was known in that euphemistic age as “going all the way.”  Somewhat similar, later in time (somewhat after our day), were baseball images—variously defined, but the following seems fairly typical:  “first base” for kissing and the like, “second base” for fondling breasts (these days it covers fellatio too), “third base” for genital touching or digital sex, and, significantly, “home base” or “getting home” for sexual intercourse.

Not so much euphemisms as folk speech were various words for male erections (bone, boner, hard-on, rod-on, stiff, etc.) and words for masturbation.  Teenaged boys being often fascinated with both masturbation and colorful speech, there were plenty of phrases.  Standard was “jacking off” (equivalent to British “frigging” and “wanking” or “whanking,” which can be either male or female).  “Jerking off” was also heard, but “jacking off” comes from “Jack” for penis (see above) rather than from “jerk.”  More poetic were “beat your meat” (as common as “jacking off”) and  “flog your log.”  Some Southernisms that I never heard in youth, but learned in early adulthood, were “jerk your jewels,” “slam your ham” and “choke your chicken” (as in “chokin’ his chicken”; there was actually a blue grass band called the Blue Ridge Chicken Chokers).  Masturbating was not considered particularly intelligent, hence use of “jerk,” “wanker,” etc. to mean a dumb person.  Compare Spanish “freguer” and “joder” (rub, i.e. masturbate or, sometimes, have sex) and the countless phrases derived from it, e.g. the folk rhyme “La ley de Herodes: o te fregues o te jodes” (“the law of Herod: either you fuck up or you screw up”—one of a vast number of Spanish rhyming “laws,” but in this case one that achieved immortality when “La Ley de Herodes” became the title of a short story that was made into a successful film).

Prostitutes were “ladies of the evening,” “soiled doves,” “in the trade,” “in the oldest profession” (incidentally a wildly inaccurate claim), or just “professionals.”  “Floozy” could mean a prostitute or just a loose woman who looked or acted like one.

Pissing and shitting got their share: taking a leak, taking a crap, taking a squat, etc.

There is also “I’ve got to see a man about a horse” (said to excuse self from present company, usually to go to the toilet).  Another was “Gotta drain the water off the potatoes.”  Another common politeness (if such it can be called) was “Your barn door is open,” meaning your fly is unzipped.  Of course, all these were man talk or boy talk.  I confess to ignorance of specialized female terms.

In addition to the above, there were the usual obscenities and ethnic, religious, and other insults and offensive words, but most are still around, and to list them would be tedious and unedifying.

 

There were literally thousands of dirty jokes, songs, and limericks in circulation.  Most of them, but not the rawest, were captured by Gerson Legman in his series of books of erotic folklore and in Vance Randolph’s book Pissing in the Snow.  Good dirty song collections include Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse, and the pseudonymous Snatches and Lays for British/Australian material.  I fear the heavy-duty stuff I know is so raw that I would never repeat it even in unmixed company.  I have even, alas, found it necessary to remove some wonderfully colorful short standard phrases from the above list.

A POWER OF GOOD, GONE BAD

Rough expressions carefully excluded by my modest wife from our book A POWER OF GOOD.
Putdowns and general negatives

Full of beans. (Usually, angry, as if from indigestion; also, full of energy; can also be a euphemism for “full of shit.”)

I don’t take no shit.

Shit fire! (All purpose exclamation.)

Screwed the pooch. (Totally messed up. As in “so-and-so screwed the pooch.”)

Cold as a witch’s tit

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass baboon (or “monkey”)

Colder than a welldigger’s ass (thanks to Chris Chase-Dunn for this one)

They’d steal Christ off the cross if He weren’t nailed down. (Said of chronic shoplifter types, of employees who “liberate” supplies from the company, etc.)

Up shit creek without a paddle

RF (Short for “rat fuck”; means a practical joke or similar goofy action—as in “I RF’d the psychologists’ questionnaire by answering the craziest way I could.”)

He’s so low he’d have to stand up on his hind legs to kiss a snake’s ass.
From an Okie ex-Marine friend of mine.

He’s so low he’d have to use a ladder to harvest potatoes.

He’s so low he sucks earthworm dicks.

He’s lower than a snake’s navel. (Classic putdown, leading to the use of “Snakenavel” to mean “the middle of nowhere,” as in “I was offered a job but it was in Snakenavel, Idaho, so I turned it down.” Compare the use of Podunk—a real town in Iowa—and the academic equivalent, Slippery Rock State, to mean “nowheresville.” Slippery Rock State is actually quite a good school, and the term is dropping out of use. Spanish equivalents include “en las Batuecas” in peninsula Spain—the Batuecas are a group of insignificant towns in a backwoods region. In Mexico, it’s donde no va el Coca—“where even the Coca-Cola truck doesn’t go”; such a place is almost unimaginably remote in that soft-drink-dependent country.)

Kiss my ass and growl like a fox. (our student Matt Des Lauriers quoted this from his grandfather’s usage)

Every little bit helps, as the whore said when she pissed in the ocean.

Feisty. (Full of fight, from “feisting,” an old word for farting. Similarly, a small mutt was called a “feist dog” or just “fice,” especially if it had an attitude.)

Brown-nosing. (Kissing ass.)

Snafu. (Acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up.” Military slang, satirizing the military’s fondness for acronyms.)

That ain’t worth a pee-hole in the snow. (Very common.)

“My daughter thinks the world of him, but, to me, he’s a sluffed-up sack of Siberian sheep shit.” (Recorded by a folklorist in Texas. Typical Texan putdown.)

I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my balls if you was dyin’ in the desert. (Learned from my dorm neighbor Richard Sylla in college; he used it as his comprehensive summary of economic theory. He was summa cum laude in Economics and became a very eminent historian of economics.)

Can’t tell shit from Shinola. (Proverbial stupidity; a phrase notably associated with the military, who had to shine their shoes regularly)

Doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. (Possibly the commonest term in my youth for incompetence and stupidity.)

So dumb / incompetent he can’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight.

I’m gonna tear him a new asshole. (Common threat.)

A German story too good to miss, and known in the Midwest where there was German settlement:
The soldier Götz von Berlichingen, a real person who lived from 1482 to 1562, was trapped in a house surrounded by his enemies. History (not totally unquestioned…but at least written) records that they called to him that his situation was hopeless and he should surrender. He hung his bare ass out the window and said “Leck mich in arsch” (lick my ass)…and proceeded to fight his way out, single-handed, and survive to fight again. He became the German national hero, and his line is the German national putdown. (See Alan Dundes, Life Is a Chicken Coop Ladder, for more.)
Animal Metaphors

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you set out to drain the swamp. (I prefer to say “…to conserve the wetland.”)

Chickenshit (a common extension of “chicken.” This is a word used focally for a very common and typical state of mind, the results of childhood abuse, VERY common in the old Midwest. The abused kid was often weak, isolated, resentful, cowardly, and alternating between placating and nastiness. With maturing, this often took the form of touchy defensiveness and excessive concern for “honor.”)

To goose someone (to strike at the genital region, as an angry goose does to drive people away from its young)

Smells like two skunks fucking in an onion patch. (Black American—at least in so far as I know it—but probably more widespread; alternatively “fighting in an onion patch”)

In a pig’s ass. (I.e. something that won’t happen, or something that’s bullshit. Bars used to post signs saying “your credit is good here” –with a pointer pointing to the back end of a pig. Cleaned-up variants: In a pig’s ear; in a pig’s eye, when pigs fly; when pigs fly to the moon. “Ears” was and sometimes still is a standard euphemism for “ass,” dating back to the 18th century, when ass was still “arse” and “ears” was pronounced “airs,” so the words were near-homonyms.)

Up a pig’s ass: same as “up shit crick.” In a hopeless position. Note that “crick,” not creek, was and is the universal Midwestern pronunciation.

Piss like a racehorse (copiously)

Faster than a cat can lick its ass. (Usually said of unpleasant things, as in “If he gets mad he’ll be on you faster than…”).

Hotter’n a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire. (Texanism.)

I don’t give a rat’s ass.

About as much use as tits on a boar.

(Not from our childhood, but too good to miss, is a Malay proverb: “Even if ten ships come, the dogs have no loincloths but their tails.” [The ships are understood to be bringing fancy imported fabrics, the Great Luxury of old Malaysia. The proverb is a comment on the hopelessness of the poor.])
Euphemisms

Today’s forthright speech has cost the English language a vast range of ridiculously creative euphemisms. Midwesterners needed strong and pungent speech to express their emotions, but were too inhibited to use the blunt words, at least in mixed company. Children actually got their mouths washed out with soap for “cussin.’” I was threatened with this periodically, but I was usually too careful to get the actual washing. This resistance to blunt verbiage led to a lot of nonsense.
Besides the obvious “Gosh!” “Golly!” “Jeez!” “Darn!” and so on, there were more arcane ways to modify taboo words: “Bushwah!” for “bullshit”; “shucks” and “shoot” for “shit”; “asset” and “yes-yes” (pron. “yas-yas”) for “ass” (“arse”); “for cryin’ out loud” for “for Christ’s sake”; “foot” for “fuck” as an expletive (oh foot!); “Lor’ love a duck” for “fuck” (this is a Cockney one); “peter” for “penis”; and so on. “Spend a penny” was universal British slang in the first 2/3 of the 20th century for “go to the toilet,” with reference to the cost of the pay toilets in old-time London. A toilet is a “loo” in England, from French l’eau, “the water.” The name “John” developed unfortunate connotations, first in French, especially in the nickname form Jacques, whence English “Jack” and Scottish “Jock.” So “jakes” (from Jacques) and later “John” was used for the toilet.
“John” and “jock” also became standard euphemisms for the penis, whence “jockstrap” as slang for a supporter strap to protect a man’s groin. “John” was lengthened to “Johnson” for a while in the mid-20th century (when “-son” was a slangy lengthening of anything—“Jack” and “Jackson” were slangy terms of address to men). “Johnson” inspired a line of double entendre T-shirts (the “Big Johnson” line) that were, for a change, really witty rather than just gross. “John” gave way to “Dick” (from rhyming slang for “prick,” and not so much euphemistic as universal, in many American dialects). It seems that the English language requires a boy’s name for the organ in question; I have heard “Aleck,” “Tom,” etc. (British slang includes excusing oneself to go take a leak by saying “Must go point Percy at the porcelain,” etc.) And “to roger” was a very standard euphemism for sexual intercourse.
The general lack of intelligence, taste, and good judgement of the organ in question has caused “dick,” “dork,” etc. to be words for a stupid person, like “pendejo” (thing that hangs on) in Spanish. However, the male genitalia were very commonly referred to as “the family jewels,” so clearly there were more favorable judgments out there.
Other common terms for the penis included dong, tool, joystick, rod, and so on. In addition, almost anything can be used, as limericks and dirty jokes prove. There was a similarly vast corpus of euphemisms for sexual intercourse, but most of the ones that were widely used are still around. Anal intercourse in the Midwest was “cornholing,” from “corn hole” for anus.
There is a whole genre of English and American folksong that uses rural metaphors for sexual intercourse, beginning with a medieval one in which our hero grafts his pear tree for his ladylove, and more recently a song in which “I showed her the works of my threshing machine” (an implement of modern invention). Studies show that metaphors involving tools and weapons can be constructed right back to Proto-Indo-European. Other languages (notably Spanish and Cantonese, from my experience) have equally complex vocabularies and metaphors.
“Cock” was never a euphemism. It is a translation gloss from various European languages. Several languages over the world use the male chicken as a metaphor. The euphemism came in when Americans coined “rooster” for the bird! The British really laugh at us for that one.
Meanwhile, in deep southern US English, “cock” means the female genitalia, not the male; it’s a completely different word, from French coquille, “shell,” via New Orleans French. “Poontang” is another southern localism for the female parts. I know it only from Virginia and the Appalachians, but it may be elsewhere in the south. It centers on Black English, so is probably an African word originally.
Another set of euphemisms surrounded teaching kids about sex. Parents were often too ashamed to discuss human sexuality directly, so referred to it as “the facts of life.” They had recourse to explaining the sex lives of animals first. This gave rise to the expression “tell them about the birds and the bees,” and thus to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for human sex in general.
Yet more terms referred to courting (itself a term covering a wide range of activities). Most of these were teenage slang referring to stages of intimacy. “Necking” was kissing and other above-the-neck action. “Petting” and “spooning” covered more bodily contact. “Making out” was definitely more serious: foreplay-like activity that could, and often did, lead to what was known in that euphemistic age as “going all the way.” Somewhat similar, later in time (somewhat after our day), were baseball images—variously defined, but the following seems fairly typical: “first base” for kissing and the like, “second base” for fondling breasts (these days it covers fellatio too), “third base” for genital touching or digital sex, and, significantly, “home base” or “getting home” for sexual intercourse.
Not so much euphemisms as folk speech were various words for male erections (bone, boner, hard-on, rod-on, stiff, etc.) and words for masturbation. Teenaged boys being often fascinated with both masturbation and colorful speech, there were plenty of phrases. Standard was “jacking off” (equivalent to British “frigging” and “wanking” or “whanking,” which can be either male or female). “Jerking off” was also heard, but “jacking off” comes from “Jack” for penis (see above) rather than from “jerk.” More poetic were “beat your meat” (as common as “jacking off”) and “flog your log.” Some Southernisms that I never heard in youth, but learned in early adulthood, were “jerk your jewels,” “slam your ham” and “choke your chicken” (as in “chokin’ his chicken”; there was actually a blue grass band called the Blue Ridge Chicken Chokers). Masturbating was not considered particularly intelligent, hence use of “jerk,” “wanker,” etc. to mean a dumb person. Compare Spanish “freguer” and “joder” (rub, i.e. masturbate or, sometimes, have sex) and the countless phrases derived from it, e.g. the folk rhyme “La ley de Herodes: o te fregues o te jodes” (“the law of Herod: either you fuck up or you screw up”—one of a vast number of Spanish rhyming “laws,” but in this case one that achieved immortality when “La Ley de Herodes” became the title of a short story that was made into a successful film).
Prostitutes were “ladies of the evening,” “soiled doves,” “in the trade,” “in the oldest profession” (incidentally a wildly inaccurate claim), or just “professionals.” “Floozy” could mean a prostitute or just a loose woman who looked or acted like one.
Pissing and shitting got their share: taking a leak, taking a crap, taking a squat, etc.
There is also “I’ve got to see a man about a horse” (said to excuse self from present company, usually to go to the toilet). Another was “Gotta drain the water off the potatoes.” Another common politeness (if such it can be called) was “Your barn door is open,” meaning your fly is unzipped. Of course, all these were man talk or boy talk. I confess to ignorance of specialized female terms.
In addition to the above, there were the usual obscenities and ethnic, religious, and other insults and offensive words, but most are still around, and to list them would be tedious and unedifying.

There were literally thousands of dirty jokes, songs, and limericks in circulation. Most of them, but not the rawest, were captured by Gerson Legman in his series of books of erotic folklore and in Vance Randolph’s book Pissing in the Snow. Good dirty song collections include Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse, and the pseudonymous Snatches and Lays for British/Australian material. I fear the heavy-duty stuff I know is so raw that I would never repeat it even in unmixed company. I have even, alas, found it necessary to remove some wonderfully colorful short standard phrases from the above list.

Floating World Lost

September 18th, 2015

 

FLOATING WORLD LOST:

A HONG KONG FISHING COMMUNITY

 

Eugene N. Anderson

 

Published by University Press of the South, New Orleans, LA, 2007

Copyright held by University Press of the South;

any reproduction of this work, or part of it, requires their written permission.

 

 

For my children:

Laura, Alan and Tamar, who were there

Amanda and Robert, whom I wish had been.

 

 

 

Acknowledgements:  I remain always deeply grateful to the people of Castle Peak Bay, especially Choi Kwok-Tai, Cecilia Choi, and Chow Hung-fai, and to Marja L. Anderson and to Laura, Alan and Tamar.  A long list of friends and scholars who contributed to this effort includes Hugh Baker, Stanley Bedlington, Paul Buell, William Chan (special thanks for identifying the fish), Louis Cheung, Wolfram Eberhard, George Foster, Hill Gates, Greg Guldin, Ho Kaak-yan, Dell Hymes, William Jankowiak, Graham and Betsy Johnson, Hiroaki Kani, Arthur Kleinman, Rance Lee, John McCoy, James and Helen McGough, Jack Potter, Edward Schafer, G. William Skinner, Ambrose Tse, Barbara Ward, James and Rubie Watson, Arthur Wolf, Yan Yunxiang, and others.  David Akers-Jones, James Hayes, David Robertson, and Major and Mrs. A. M. McFarlane provided much help in the field.  Derek Davies and Nick Ludlow helped with photography.  Last but not least, research was supported by the U. S. National Institute of Mental Health, the World Health Organisation, and the University of California.  This book draws on an earlier work, The Floating World of Castle Peak Bay, about half of the present book being a reprint of that effort, and I am grateful to the American Anthropological Association (which published the earlier book) for granting permission.  That book was dedicated “to the boat people and those who have studied them,” and I wish here to make special note of the late Barbara Ward, superb ethnographer and wonderful colleague.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1.  PEOPLE ON THE WATER

 

1

Castle Peak Bay, in the Western Territories of Hong Kong, was once home to a teeming population of fishermen and cargo carriers who lived on their boats and rarely came on shore.  They made up a separate community, calling themselves seui seung yan, “people on the water.”  They, and the shore-dwellers around them, considered themselves to belong to a separate ethnic group, defined by residence on the water more than by language or culture.  They dwelt in boats, or in pile houses built over the water.  They were part of a vast array of boat-dwelling people who wandered widely over the rivers and seas of China.

Most human cultures are divided into subcultures, which may be defined by class, caste, occupation, or anything else important.  The boat way of life was based on a subculture was defined by ecology.  This book explores the structure of this subculture, and the practice of life by the people who were the bearers of it.  The subtitle Variations on Chinese Themes speaks to this focus.  I describe the ways in which boat life varied from life on land, and then explain what this all means for the study of Chinese culture.

Today, the boat community is no more.  The boat families moved on shore and merged with the general Cantonese population of Hong Kong.  The bay itself no longer exists.  It was filled in, providing level space for high-rise apartments.  Descendents of sea captains now live twenty floors above the rocky fill, and commute to jobs assembling electronics or programming computers.  The bay, formerly isolated, has become part of the vast urban agglomeration that is modern Hong Kong.

It has been the lot of most anthropologists to see their communities change.  Some communities even disappear.  Few ethnographers, however, have seen the disappearance of even the physical setting of their field experiences.

In 1965-66 and again in 1974-75, my family and I lived at Castle Peak Bay, studying the fishing community.  I return to Hong Kong every few years—most recently in 1999—and revisit the fate of the world I once shared.   Every year, more bays are filled, fewer boats go out.  The same transformations have now taken place in nearby parts of Guangdong Province.  Even more remote areas are seeing the fishermen come to shore, often encouraged or forced by government programs.

In Hong Kong as a whole, virtually no one still lives on the water.  Even by 1974, most had already gone on shore to work in local factories and shops.  Since then, fishing has succumbed to pollution and overharvesting.  Lightering—carrying cargo from large ships to shore—has disappeared with the construction of deepwater container port facilities.  A tiny group of people is still employed in fishing, local cargo carrying, and ferry work.  The floating restaurants of old are now tourist venues, piered to the sea floor and staffed by people of land origin.

This book, then, records a vanished way of life.  Boat-dwelling fishermen still number in the millions in China, southeast Asia, and elsewhere, but the boat people of the Hong Kong area had their own special ways of being human.  I became deeply involved in these.

A political scientist reading one part of this book dismissed it: why bother with a vanished way of life?  A student recently commented on one of my classes that the class wasted his time with discussions of “extinct, out-of-date societies.”  Such comments (even when phrased in a tactlessly biased manner, as in the latter case) require an answer.

The first part of the answer is that the boat people have much to teach us.  Their knowledge of fish and fishing was unsurpassed.  Their society was well-run in spite of lack of government and police.  Their social values and ethics were striking and original, and suggest to me important possibilities for the human future.  I have drawn at length on their social theory.  Their songs were beautiful, their food was exquisite, and their boats were superbly engineered.  All this they managed in the face of incredible poverty and uncertainty.

Simply knowing that humans could create so much beauty and happiness under such conditions is perhaps the most valuable lesson the boat people have to teach.  Any creation of the human spirit deserves serious consideration, simply because we are all human, and we need each other.  We need to know and understand.  Quite apart from the scientific merits of cross-cultural comparison, the human value of appreciating human achievement needs to be served.

Above all, the boat people recall to us the ancient virtue of humility.  The boat-dwellers created lives of beauty, glory, and satisfaction in the face of overwhelming challenges.  They “raised a Heaven in Hell’s despite.”  They deserve to be remembered.

I shall generally describe the bay as it was in 1965-66.  This will be a freeze-frame—a single picture in a long record of change, flux, and uncertainty.  I shall use information from 1974-75 only to supplement the picture—to flesh out the story, and sometimes to record the beginnings of basic change.

In 1965, Castle Peak Bay spread a flat sheet of shallow water over the mudflats and shallows that separated Castle Peak itself from the mainland.  The peak, with the ridge north of it, had formerly been an island.  Tang Dynasty travelers sailed through the channel between the island and the mainland.  It had shrunk to Castle Peak Bay in the south and Deep Bay in the north.  The rest of the channel had filled with alluvium, becoming some of the most fertile farmland in China.

The bay was fringed with small, traditional-style houses and shops, wherein lived fish-dealers, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants.  The town of Tuen Mun San Hui (“fortified strait’s new market”) at the head of the bay was already invaded by a few multistorey buildings, and there were unostentatious—but horribly polluting—factories there.  However, much of the town preserved the appearance and economic structure of a Qing Dynasty village.  A Buddhist college just north of it, and a major Taoist temple complex halfway up Castle Peak, provided ties with elite religious traditions.  Far more important to the local people were the countless temples and shrines that enshrined folk deities and folk conceptions of divinity.

The bay was home to several thousand boat people.  In 1965-66, most of these lived by small-scale artisanal fishing.    The larger boats were trawlers; medium-sized boats lived by long-line fishing, purse-seining, or gill-netting; the smallest practised local hook-and-line fishing.  The largest boats might hire a few hands, but almost all boats were strictly family operations.  A big boat might hold an extended family, while a small one was normally a nuclear-family operation.  Brothers who owned separate boats typically cooperated, operating what were in effect family fleets of two, three or four boats.

Major fish and shellfish caught included groupers, soles, pomfrets, croakers, sharks, shrimp, squid, and crabs (see Anderson 1972 for the whole list).  The inordinate fondness of Cantonese for sea food guaranteed high prices, at least for good quality products, and made fishing a highly lucrative occupation for the fortunate.  However, it was difficult and dangerous.  Nets and lines were still drawn by hand.  Many boats were nonmotorized; handling the gear and rigging was a major task.  The boats were extremely well-built and seaworthy, but managing them in a winter storm on the open sea required both great strength and great skill.

Moreover, a long spell of poor luck or stormy weather could wipe out a family.  Most people were in debt to fish-dealers.  The government had introduced cooperatives that worked well and eliminated the worst of the economic danger.  However, all older fishers could remember times when debt burdens had been crushing.  Indeed, in 1965-66, many families had been ruined, and had moored their boats for good and sought shore jobs.  Elders remembered World War II as the most difficult time in their lives; many people, especially children, had starved to death.

Difficult times and demanding work bred independence and resourcefulness.  Also, fishing, unlike at least some kinds of farming, requires major decisions on a day-to-day basis.  A boat captain (invariably also the father of the family) had to decide whether to put out in rough weather; where to go; how many times to cast the gear; when to pull in; and much else.  He has to make life-and-death decisions on a regular basis.  A captain could not stay in port on every rough day, since that would court economic suicide; but going out in clearly worsening weather was even more dangerous.   He would therefore consult all adults in the family.  They would help with any decision.  This meant that women were sharers not only of all work activities but also of all major decision-making, and gave them a degree of equality and power very different from that typical of the local land-dwellers.  This, in turn, led to major differences in family and child-rearing behavior (Anderson 1970b, 1992, 1998; Ward 1965, 1966, 1969).

Inevitably, families operated as independent units.  Lineages did not exist; they could not be maintained.  Leadership in the boat communities was informal and weakly developed (Anderson 1970b).  Individuals emerged as local leaders in so far as they could resolve disputes, deal with shore authorities, and organize community activities; such people enjoyed informal power in proportion to their success in these activities.  Life on the water was thus notably libertarian–in some contrast to the more tightly organized life on shore, controlled as it was by lineage and government.

These environmental and social factors lie behind many of the cultural and religious practices of the boat people.  They faced an uncertain and risky world, a scattered population organized largely at the family level, and a terribly hard and demanding life.  Common sense would lead one to expect that religion would address those issues, and that they would find solace in active, devout religious practice.  Such was indeed the case.

 

2

Over the last several years, I have been reanalysing data from this field work.         My interaction with the boat people and their world is somewhat significant to this analysis.  Though I am rarely excited by “reflexive” ethnography, most of which strikes me as narcissism, I have to establish some bare facts at the beginning.

In 1965-66, I was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.  I spent 14 months in the field.  My interest in all aspects of Chinese life went back to my parents, who had talked to missionaries and other travelers.  I wanted to look especially at fisheries development and at knowledge of fish and marine life—what we now call “traditional ecological knowledge.”  In the field, I learned most about fish, fishing methods, fisheries development, and the fishing business, but religion came in a close second.  Boat religion was fascinating to me.  Moreover, more than any other aspect of boat life, it challenged my rather simple paradigms of social structure.  Medicine and medical problems, food, and nutrition came into the picture too, and dominated later field work.

I went into the field with my wife, Marja Anderson, who worked with me on nutrition and medicine (Anderson and Anderson 1973, 1975, 1977; Ho, Anderson and Anderson 1978).  Thanks to her tireless energy, we were able to find out a considerable amount about these matters, and also about women’s lives, so often unstudied in those days.  The first year, we had with us our baby daughter Laura.  We all returned in 1974 with two more children, Alan and Tamar.  Everyone was delighted that we had had a son.  The boat people were about equally delighted with the girls, but the land-dwellers sometimes esteemed sons well above daughters in the scheme of things.  Everyone, however, adored all three of our children.  The children themselves were happier and healthier in the field than at home, a tribute to this caring environment as well as to outdoor living and good food.

I was not a totally green hand at field work, having done short field research projects in Panama, Tahiti, and California.  However, I was inexperienced, and had not been in East Asia before.  I made the usual mistakes, and had some minor adventures.  One of the more printable mistakes I made in Cantonese was asking the “name” of a fish.  The people I questioned looked at me as if I were insane, and I quickly learned that the word for “name” (Cantonese meng) applied only to personal given names.  I had to ask:  “What fish is that?”  Also, I started off wrong by using the textbook greeting “Are you well?” (nei hou ma in Cantonese, ni hao ma in Putonghua.)  Older people were offended.  I learned the greeting was a translation from English, and was offensive to traditionalists, since the Chinese implication was “Are you all right!?”—implying that you look sick.  I learned that the proper Cantonese greeting was “Have you eaten?” around mealtimes, or “Where are you going?” to people moving around.  This last had its own pitfalls.  We had to buy water at a standpipe well.  So, when asked the question, I at first sometimes answered “I’m going to buy water.”  Again I got The Look.  It turned out that one uses the two words “buy water” (maai seui) only when getting water to wash the corpse of a deceased family member!  Just one of those idioms….

Our living conditions were not easy.  In 1965-66, after an initial pleasant but detached period in a house on land, we moved down into the midst of things.  We lived on a sampan, a small residential boat.  We never went far; the boat usually remained moored to a fish dealer’s floating business.  The fish dealer and his family became fast friends and great helpers.  In 1974-75 we lived on shore.

Sam paan means “three boards,” and a sampan is a boat built up three boards from the waterline—in other words, a very small boat indeed.  Ours was 15’ long and about 7 wide, with a cabin not quite 5’ high.  It was by no means the smallest inhabited boat—far from it.  We slept, dressed, and wrote in the cabin, cooked and laundered on the deck, but otherwise spent most of our time off the boat.  We bought food every day at the local markets, and cooked for ourselves on the boat’s built-up stern.

Both practicality and personal taste made us live strictly local style, learning from those around us how to cook, dress, wash, and care for the boat.  Marja became a superb Chinese cook.  We took baths in a basin in the cabin, heating the water over the little kerosene stove on which we cooked.  We had a tape recorder, useful for field work but also useful for playing music from home.  Marja soon adopted the loose black cotton clothes of the boat women, which proved the only garments comfortable and tough enough to be serviceable on the boat.  Little Laura put up with it all, and reveled in the constant contact with us and our neighbors.  By the time we left, her Cantonese was better than her English, but she forgot it all when we left the field.

In general, life on the boat was comfortable, and the bay was so beautiful and fascinating that we rarely found the time wearing except when we were sick.  However, we had our problems.  We were living on limited means.  We were not fluent in Cantonese.  During prolonged rains, the boat was cramped and uncomfortable, and staying clean became difficult.  June 1966 brought history-making rains and floods, and we looked and felt like drowned rats.  Typhoons passed through; one in fall of 1965 drove us to a typhoon harbor and kept us awake all night.  I had to hold down the heavy cabin hatch and other portables.  We left the boat in July 1966, just in time to avoid another storm.

Such minor problems aside, we had successful field sessions at Castle Peak Bay.  This was thanks largely to our wonderful field assistants, Choi Kwok-Tai (and in 1974-5 his daughter Cecilia), and Chau Hung-fai.  They were always ready for anything, incredibly tough under field conditions, unfailingly helpful, and full of knowledge of boat and shore ways.  The boat people themselves were hospitable and supportive, and the few who tried, rather naively and innocently, to cheat me provided more humor than trouble.  (Minor cheating was a game in Hong Kong, and we would all have a good laugh over it, whether I won or lost.)  Some land people were not so friendly, since I was identified with the despised water folk, but unfriendliness never went beyond an occasional dirty look or refusal of minor help.  In general, we were well accepted—a fact made clear by the rapid fall in prices charged to us in the markets; we were paying local-customer prices after the first few months.

The food at Castle Peak Bay was truly memorable.  In those days, the waters were clean, and rich in fish and shellfish.  Fish were kept alive in well-smacks—small old rafts with the bottoms knocked out and replaced with wire.  These floated along the shore of the bay.  Diners—most of them city folk who came out on weekends to enjoy the seafood—would shop around, buy the fish they wanted, and take it at a run to the nearest good restaurant.  That seafood was incredible.  I have never tasted anything so good since, except among the Native Americans on the Northwest Coast, who are equally blessed with a combination of superb fish and superb cooking skills.  I have since eaten in some fine restaurants in Paris, Rome, and Los Angeles, but they could not touch Muk Choi’s Garden of Delight or any of a number of other places at Castle Peak.

In 1974-75, we rented a house from an old friend, a boat person who had moved on shore some years earlier.  It was a humble structure of boards and stone, informally built.  It consisted of a downstairs room and a sleeping loft.  Almost all our living was done on the covered patio.  Here we set up our tiny kerosene stove, washed food and clothes, and did most work.  We were viewed as returning locals, and welcomed accordingly.  We were out for a shorter time, and I spent a fair amount of it doing library research or research in other settlements, so the field situation was not quite as of old; but we had close friendships all the same.

A veteran field worker, or a more industrious one, would have gotten vastly more data than I did.  Still, we learned much, and we had a wonderful time.

 

2

Then as now, I was primarily interested in human ecology:  how people relate to their physical and cultural environments.  I am primarily interested in how people understand these environments.  Thus, in Hong Kong, I studied everything from catching methods and names for fish to the relationship of boat-dwelling and boat size to kinship and family structure.  I had to know something about cognitive psychology, and a good deal about wider social relationships, including relationships of power.

I was becoming involved in what later came to be called political ecology (Robbins 2004).  Basically, political ecology is the study of how the above-mentioned relationships of people and environment are structured and influenced by relations of power—by politics.  My research was largely on knowledge—on cognition and its relationship to practice—but a good deal of political ecology emerges in the present book.  Andrew Vayda and Bradley Walters (1999) have criticized political ecology for tending to be too much politics and too little ecology; I take a holistic approach, trying to look at economics, biology, politics, psychology, religion, and other anthropological categories without prejudging which one is most important.  Perhaps, in the end, they are not separable in communities like Castle Peak Bay.  One must simply look at how people get along.

And one must look at culture, as adaptive mechanism and as expressive form.

Anthropologists agree that culture is that which is learned and shared in groups.  As such, it is shared behavior.  In so far as humans can share knowledge, it is shared knowledge; it is the set of facts, ideas, and rules that people have to have to operate in their society and to be accepted as functioning members of it.

Beyond that minimalist definition, anthropologists have seen culture as many things.  Culture has been portrayed as a ragbag of traits, “a thing of shreds and patches” (Lowie 1947:441, quoting Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado; he later described the remark as a sour comment on modern civilization, not a generality about culture—Lowie 1947:x).  Culture has been regarded as an ironclad set of unchanging rules (White 1949).  Others see it as consensus, universally shared knowledge.  Alternatively, ecological anthropologists often see culture as adaptation (McElroy and Townsend 1996).  Others describe culture as a set of rules or structures that allow people to order their lives and anticipate what others will do (Lévi-Strauss 1958; Frake 1980).  Many of us now see culture as general patterns or apparent regularities arising in and from practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1990).

Anthropologists have also differed as to what constitute the wellsprings of culture.  Marvin Harris held that culture was entirely determined by the exigencies of making a living (Harris 1968).  Boas saw culture as mainly about communication, thus focally a matter of language, art, literature, and communicative ritual.  (He never quite said this, but it emerges clearly from studying his works.)   Clifford Geertz (1973) sees culture as about constructing and sharing interpretive meanings.  Marxists, functionalists, and other theorists all have their views.

Commonly, today, culture is interpreted rather than simply recorded.  Geertz and his followers see culture as a text or series of texts whose meanings must be understood (Geertz 1973).  For them, one cannot merely list “culture traits” or cultural knowledge points.  It is the web of meanings that matters.

For the boat people, the first three theories in the list above—ragbag, ironclad, and consensus—will not stand.  Boat culture was no ragbag; it was well integrated around fishing and around Chinese traditions.  It was not ironclad; rather, it was highly variable, each family posessing its own ways and truths.  Finally, consensus would have been disastrous, since life depended on having available a cultural knowledge base that was far greater than that which one person could possibly learn, and also on every captain (i.e., normally, every head of family) being able to sail—independently—his or her ship. Some individuals were knowledgeable or expert in one thing, some in another, and the community drew on these different sorts of expertise.

The last four theories, however, all apply.  Culture was most definitely a web of shared meanings, and interpretation is necessary if one is to make sense of life on the waterfront.  Culture was adaptive, as proved by its constant reconfiguration to meet economic and environmental circumstances.  Culture included sets of rules and expectations that allowed one to behave appropriately and to anticipate what others would do.  And it most definitely guided and emerged from practice.  It could not be reduced to that set of rules; it was renegotiated daily.

Charles Frake (1980) called for an ethnography that would allow one to behave appropriately in the society in question—or at least to anticipate what others would do and would think appropriate.  His model was linguistic; he was thinking of a good language textbook, which should teach the student to use the language correctly and more or less fluently, in order to get food and shelter and friendship.

An ethnologist may need more than that from an ethnography, but certainly the ethnologist will need at least that much. If one cannot use the ethnography as a guide to how to get along in the society, or at least what to expect in the segment of society analyzed, what value can it have?  A specialized ethnography may be a guide to only one specific aspect of life (kinship, fishing, ritual…), but at least it should be a guide to something.  The result can be minimalist—a brief ethnography, an introductory language book—or detailed and advanced.

Most anthropologists hope that an ethnography will do more; ideally, it will provide insights into the human condition, enabling us to advance the general theory of society.  Cross-cultural comparison and resultant theory-builiding (Harris 1968, arguing against Frake) needs to be done, to allow us to understand the deeper roots of behavior and extracting the “story behind the story.”  It may also be desirable to critique neocolonialism or globalization or other wider matters.  Some ethnographers simply aspire to produce literary work (presumably for entertainment; Clifford and Marcus 1986).  Others, “reflexive” ethnographers, write out their own angst with the “ethnographic subjects” there only for backdrop.  These last two goals seem beyond the pale of descriptive ethnography.  The other goals are more relevant here.

Returning from the field, I wrote a simple Frakian ethnography, one that would give the rules for behavior. It would let the reader act like a boat person, or at least would let the reader know what was going on if she was watching the excitement, confusion, and activity of a Hong Kong waterfront.  No one was interested in publishing such a vast creation, or even the short and summary version of it that eventually resulted.  The American Anthropological Association did eventually make that summary available (Anderson 1970b).  The present book, however, does more and less; it adds wider and more theoretical considerations, but does not tell the reader all.  There is no sense learning the rules for a world that no longer exists.

There are, however, reasons to continue to work within a broadly Frakian mode.  Culture is practice, but not all practice is culture.  The same can be said for meaning.   Everything we notice is meaningful for us in some way, and thus saying that culture is “meaning” is not really saying anything.  Culture is adaptation, but not every adaptive behavior is cultural.  Moreover, not every culture trait is adaptive, except in the trivial sense of marking the bearer as “one of us.”  Millions of rules for ordinary behavior are purely arbitrary—even if they were adaptive once.  In the western world, sleeve buttons on coats were once for glove attachment, but this has been forgotten for so long that an urban legend has arisen to the effect that they are there to discourage the young from wiping their noses on their coat sleeves.  Chinese culture has similar “vestiges” (and similar legends to explain them!).

Frake’s approach seems the best at capturing what culture really is and really does.  Culture is the knowledge that allows us to do what we have to do, should do, or should want to do, within our reference groups.  It is the knowledge that allows us to understand what others are doing in those groups—and why we cannot always do the same things that they can do.  A good deal of cultural knowledge is not clearly or directly related to this goal, but it can still be regarded the background knowledge needed to allow us to perform.  The boat people’s fish taxonomy, for instance, not only allowed them to identify and talk about fish, it also allowed them to deal with markets and marketing.  Culture is not just knowledge or meaning; it is knowledge that is useful, or at least could be useful in the right context.

This approach allows us to speculate on how knowledge, rules, and ethics enter a culture’s repertoire, and get stored and encoded there.

In my early field work, in spite of considerable awareness of history and process, I followed the tradition of synchronic structural-functional analysis in which I had been trained.  Synchronic analysis focuses on one point in time, abstracting it from ongoing processes.  Structural-functional analysis seeks to discover social structures, and if possible cognitive structures too.  It then analyzes them in terms of the functions they perform within the society being studied.   This, of course, assumes that there are structures—social institutions that can be neatly described and mapped, like crystal patterns.  Individual dynamics, emotion, dialogue, argument, negotiation, conflict, and creativity—all the exciting actions that makes human affairs so absorbing—tend to be dismissed as “noise” in the system.  Indeed, it is “noise,” but it is what the Chinese call “heat-and-noise” (re nao)—the stimulating intensity of a healthy social scene.  It is not what electronic engineers call “white noise.”

Hewing to a structural-functional line led me to produce a rather thin, even skeletal, account of the social structure of the Castle Peak Bay community.  It was not that I was unaware of the other issues; I simply did not have a good theoretical language to talk about them.  I made use of history in my analyses, but not as much as I might have done.  I also remarked on the free-wheeling, individualist quality of boat life (as had all other writers on them), but I had no way to work it into an analysis.

Since then, like many of my generation, I have fallen under the influence of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave (Rogoff and Lave 1984) and other theorists of practice, dialogue, and negotiation.  For Bourdieu, in particular, structure emerges from interacting individuals’ practice. Kabyle Berber culture as described by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1977) is very different from Castle Peak’s in many ways, but Bourdieu’s description of the ways that culture kept re-emerging from ongoing political and social game-playing is a perfect description of life on the Castle Peak waterfront.

Anthony Giddens’ concept of “structuration” (Giddens 1984) has also provided an extremely helpful guide to my thinking.  As all these scholars point out, human beings interact and engage in political (and other social) activity in pursuit of individual and family goals.  Overarching social institutions set boundaries but are themselves constantly being changed and reconstructed.  Instead of a smoothly running machine that magically keeps itself perfectly tuned (the structural-functional fallacy), society is a shifting, constantly varying “field” (Bourdieu’s term) in which individuals seek to maximize their welfare and success within the context they perceive.

Students of Chinese religion have been quick to apply practice models (often without explicitly saying so—e.g. Dean 1993).  Several recent studies of gifts and gift exchange (Yan 1996; Yang 1994), courtship (Jankowiak 1993), religion (Weller 1987), and other social institutions have incorporated practice theory, though not always making a point of it.

In particular, ethnicity has been analyzed by countless recent writers, almost all of whom contrast the shifting, flowing nature of ethnicity-in-practice with the rigid, essentialized categories beloved by bureaucrats, racists, and many earlier-day anthropologists.

I have thus re-examined boat-dwellers’ social patterns with this in mind (Anderson 1992, 1998; Anderson, Wong and Thomas 2000).

One problem with practice theory as presently found is that it is often thin on motivation.  Writers like Bourdieu and de Certeau were interested in establishing the approach.  Bourdieu’s motivational theory was simplistic; he seems to have felt that people act only to get wealth and power.  At least, he explained artistic taste, academic life, cultural reproduction, and similar phenomena from that point of view.  This gave his work a narrowly functionalist quality; institutions served the interests of power.  Art, for instance, was about snobbery, not about aesthetic experience (see the brilliant, highly critical review by Jon Elster, 1981).  Other practice theorists have simply not addressed the question; they seem generally to be interested in describing the practice, not in constructing broader theories of what lies behind it.

This does not give a satisfactory account of life on the water, where real-world concerns were immediate and often desperate.  One had to fish to survive, and one often faced life-or-death choices.  Motivation could not be ignored.  On a more broad theoretical level, practice is not done in a vacuum, and it is not always about power or wealth.  People want many things—social connectedness and security above all, and perhaps, now and then, a bit of fun as well.

One must thus draw on the literature describing culture as adaptation (see e.g. the review by Bates, 2004).  Humans need security first of all.  They must feel safe, and able to defend their group.  They must be able to make a living—to be reasonably sure they can get food without being killed in the process.  Once this is assured, they can go about the business of eating, sleeping, enjoying themselves, and dealing with everyday conflicts and problems.  But, also, to have an ongoing society, they must reproduce.  This involves far more than sex; children need care for many years.

Culture provides a storehouse of ways for doing all this.  It provides alternatives; humans are not locked into instinctive patterns.  Above and beyond that, culture typically integrates livelihood, group defense, emotional coping, and social rules into one system.  Usually, the system is loose and flexible, able to change fast when change is necessary.  This openness and flexibility is important.  The Chinese say that the flexible bamboo survives the storm that breaks the greatest pine.

Humans are creatures of emotion, and thus one cannot understand culture in purely rational terms (Milton 2002).  It is, among other things, a way of dealing with emotions.  Ideally, it can bring forth emotional harmony and satisfaction while providing ways of dealing with emotional clashes, tensions, and problems.  In the real world, where such tensions continually arise and shift, no culture can do more than provide some alternate possibilities for dealing with them.  No group reaches Émile Durkheim’s ideal of society as emotional union (Durkheim 1995).

Thus, any strong pressure from economic, military, emotional, or social factors can dynamically deform a cultural system and its social and cognitive structures.  This has happened to the boat people, as to others in this world.  Their history is a history of adapting to continual change.

 

Another thing one could learn on the Hong Kong waterfront is that culture is located in individuals.  Contra the classic Leslie White (1949) position, there was no ideal Culture floating in space (mental or otherwise).  As so often, Max Weber said it best:  “Interpretive sociology considers the individual and his action as the basic unit, as its ‘atom’…. [T]he individual is also the upper limit and the sole carrier of meaningful conduct….  [S]uch concepts as ‘state,’ ‘association,’ ‘feudalism,’ and the like, designate certain categories of human interaction.  Hence it is the task of sociology to reduce these concepts to ‘understandable’ action, that is, without exception, to the actions of participating individual men” (Gerth and Mills 1946:55; “men” is used, of course, in the old gender-neutral way, to mean “people”).

Each individual had his or her own take on Cantonese boat ways, was aware of it, and could get defensive about it when challenged.  Culture was shared understandings, shared meanings, shared rules—but the sharing was never 100%.  No one knew all the rules, and no one had quite the same knowledge base or set of opinions.  The result was something of a happy anarchy.  Sometimes the anarchy was not so happy, but always it defended as preferable to a tight rule-based social order of the sort attributed (often with exaggerated, negative comments!) to the land-dwelling Punti.  Some boat people were less anarchist, and wistfully envious of the good order on shore, but they were resigned to their society’s freewheeling code.  Above all, they were aware that it was different from other codes found nearby.  Those who genuinely wanted a more “grounded” order left the boats and moved on shore for good.

Yet the realities of boat-dwelling enforced some conformity.  A good simple example of rules and practice is provided by clothing.  The boat  people traditionally wore black cotton pants and shirts, and a basketry hat shaped like a mushroom (and often called a “mushroom hat”).  Marja Anderson quickly adopted this style, for the very good reason that no other available women’s clothing would allow easy movement and stand  the hard usage of life and laundry on the water.  I did not, because ordinary California male work clothes did the job well.  The vast majority of the boat people, including essentially all the women who actually lived on board, dressed in black cottons, but a large percentage of the men dressed in ordinary western-style work clothes, as I did.  (In those days, Hong Kong made a good deal of the world’s clothing, and cheap factory seconds in western styles were always available.)  Younger boat women who did not sail the open sea often dressed in western-style clothing.  The traditional outfit was adaptive, and also a culture marker; when it was not adaptive, it tended to get sidelined, and culture was left unmarked.  This nonmarking itself could be adaptive, when one wanted to avoid the stigma of being a “boat person.”

With all this play between adaptive conformity and preferred independence, the community was tight, most knowledge was shared, and people seemed strikingly uniform to the outsider.  The differences between people and families showed up in thousands of little ways, but in no one big way.  One could make generalizations about clothing, food, kinship, morals, fishing methods, and everything else, and these generalizations would be reasonably adequate as Frakian rules. They would miss something vitally important: the role of individualism and adaptability.  But they would let a raw outsider get along on the boats without too much trouble.  We know this is so, because we did it; participant observation works!  Many land people had moved to the boats in living memory, and did a better job than we did.

Culture is not about uniformity or about set rules.  It is about making individuals (within a reference group) act similarly enough that they can get along and get their jobs done.  It comes from the need of people to work and live together.

It works partly because of the broadly imitative tendency of the human animal.  People (and other primates) like to “ape” each other. In particular, humans like to imitate their immediate superiors—their parents, older siblings, and slightly older neighbors, to say nothing of movie stars and other high-status strangers.  No doubt this tendency evolved to make mutual aid more successful in primate groups, but today it keeps much of culture alive.

Yet one cannot make too much of this, and it certainly cannot explain cultural differences.  The specifics of a culture can be explained only through examining the history of the social group that bears it, especially their adaptive needs.  They have had to face threats and dangers, and to take advantage of economic and political opportunities.  How they deal with these has everything to do with the final outcome: the pragmatic rules for acting in the everyday real world (de Certeau 1984).  Anthropologists take a holistic view, and I certainly follow that practice, but “holism” does not mean that culture is seen as some sort of harmonious whole.  To look at the whole means to look at a shifting, diverse, protean pattern; one feels like William James’ newborn baby, confronted with a “blooming, buzzing confusion.”  Imposing a bland uniformity on it would be a hegemonic act (as Gramsci saw), and no boat person would do it.

However, culture is also about maintaining solidarity in the face of threat.  The boat people had to be uniform enough to present a fairly solid front to the hostile shore-dwellers.   In earlier years, they had had to resist much worse threats, climaxing in the Japanese occupation in World War II.  This defensive aspect forced on the boat world a degree of organization and uniformity that it would not otherwise have had.

Conversely, the needs of boat life kept culture flexible and individual.  Boats and fates were different.  Every head of household was a captain whose crew was his (or, occasionally, her) family.  Every day, in this region of storms, disasters, and human troubles, their lives depended on the captain’s decisions.  Every day, livelihood was at stake.  Life was chancy in a way it was not for even the most risk-taking of land people.  Even in the United States, sea fishing is a close second to mining, and far ahead of all other occupations, in physical danger.  The boat people had no radios, no radar, no phones on their fragile wooden boats.  They had to be able to make their own decisions, quickly, accurately, and without much chance for second thoughts.  They had to run their own ships.              For this, culture was the great guide—the repository of knowledge. But it had to be a storehouse of all sorts of knowledge, including all manner of alternative plans and planning methods. It could not be a bank of cut-and-dried rules.

 

Cognitive anthropologists today discuss such issues in terms of “cultural models.”  Throughout the history of anthropology, scholars have proposed knowledge structures of this kind.  The tradition goes back to the original “anthropology” book, Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1976/1796).  Kant saw anthropology in terms of what we now call social cognition.  (In fact, social cognitive psychology, like anthropology, stems from Kant’s work.)  He developed phenomenology, the study of the ways people perceive and experience the world and then organize it in their thinking.  Anthropologists and ethnologists, as well as psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers, subsequently developed more and more complex models of thought, based on Kantian ideas.

Much of the modern concern with such systems can be traced to the thoroughly Kantian writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, especially the essays collected in his book Structural Anthropology (1958).  Lévi-Strauss differentiated the “conscious models” held by the people themselves from the models the ethnographer makes of their thought.  These were highly useful concepts, applied to the boat people by Barbara Ward (1965, 1966).

For Lévi-Strauss, as for most writers, kinship systems have been the archetypal models.  Kinship systems are widely shared and widely understood within a culture.  Every English speaker, even young children and recent immigrants, knows what “father,” “mother,” “daughter,” and the rest of the common terms mean.  They know that “mother” means “female parent”—the woman in one’s lineal family who is one generation above oneself.  They also know that “mother” is supposed to be loving, nurturant, caring, and so forth.  The conscious models tend to run heavily to these role expectations and emotional cues, while outsiders’ models (especially the statistical models that Lévi-Strauss described) tend to be more formal, cut-and-dried, and rigid.  They are often more formal and neat than any conscious model would be.  As Lévi-Strauss pointed out, this is not a weakness; outsiders’ models are not supposed to reproduce the whole messy reality, but to do a particular job.  Often, they are made to facilitate quick and easy comparison between languages or cultures.  They represent reality the way an airplane model represents a real airplane.

This means that outsiders’ models (and insiders’ too, for that matter) differ, according to what one wants from them.  A child’s toy airplane and a Boeing engineer’s test model can be equally good models—in that they serve their purposes equally well.

Barbara Ward pointed out that there are many “varieties of the conscious model”—each ethnic group had its own set (including unflattering stereotypes of the other ethnic groups!), and even each individual had his or hers.  From this diversity of models, the ethnographer must come up with an overall model that works for outsiders.

The outsider may wish to understand the other culture deeply, or may wish only to know how to say “hello” and ask for food.  There are, therefore, different outsiders’ models too.

Subsequent writers on cultural models have tried to define widely-held, widely-shared structures.  Kinship systems and other semantic systems remain the archetypes (see Kronenfeld 1996).  However, everything from “scripts” for entering an American middle-class restaurant (Schank and Abelson 1977) to love and marriage (Strauss and Quinn 1997) is fair game (David Kronenfeld 1996 and work in progress).  My own work has been largely on classification systems for plants and animals, and indeed the Ph.D. thesis resulting from my Hong Kong work was a study of naming systems for fish and other sea life (Anderson 1972).

Models may be highly structured and widely-shared domains like kinship systems.  They may be areas where the vast web of connections in the brain are tighter and closer—where one idea typically calls up a particular set of others (Naomi Quinn, personal communication; see also Strauss and Quinn 1997).  A model may be a set of rules for a particular bit of behavior; it may be a particular canonical story-line or program.

The farther such models get from kinship, the more heavy water they encounter—to use a marine metaphor.

Restaurant scripts vary much more.  Schank and Abelson’s pioneer study vastly underestimated the need for improvisation and local adaptation in restaurant scripts.  There are quite different ways of entering different kinds of American restaurants; fast-food-joint etiquette is quite different from that proper to a pizza parlor, a white-tablecloth gastronomy palace, or a buffet.  But at least we can still specify these.  One could write rules for all of them, such that a foreigner reading the rules could act appropriately.

Love and marriage are different matters.  There are, indeed, broad and vague expectations that most Americans share.  My student Kimberly Hedrick (unpublished data) has found that a wide variety of ordinary Americans were familiar with the standard stories—the age-old fables once known from folktales, now from Hollywood plots.  But they did not expect any real love affair to follow those scenarios.  They referred back to the stories for orientation and sometimes for understanding, but they knew that no one really lives that way, and that every love affair is a new, unique, surprising phenomenon.

Are there, then, cultural models for love and marriage?  Yes, but they are not at all the same kind of model as that we see in kinship systems.   Knowledge of English kinship allows one to label properly, every time, everybody to whom one is related.  Knowledge of love and romance clichés does not give that much advice.  They are mere skeletons of plots—sometimes suggestive, but no more than that.  Even a wider knowledge of love and romance—knowing, for instance, all the self-help literature on “communication,” “talking about feelings,” and so forth—does not help much with the wild, woolly, and thoroughly unique ride that is a real love affair.  One has to improvise.  There are cultural models telling musicians how to improvise—every jazz musician knows a whole set of them—but a lover is often on her own.  And, even in jazz, is a model-for-improvising really like a model for how to label kinfolk?

At this point, we have come full circle, and are back to practice.  Bourdieu, a sometime student of Lévi-Strauss, reacted strongly against the latter’s structuralism.  For the Kabyle Berbers, the house had to be structured in a quite specific and particular way, but no two houses looked alike.  Politics—including kinship politics—was even more improvisational.  People negotiated.  They developed Machiavellian tricks.  They created new and fluid ways of doing business.  Kabyle Berbers—and Hong Kong boat people—treated the informal political rules (yes, there were rules) as obstacles to be avoided or finessed.

If one wishes to use kinterms or fish names appropriately, one needs a simple, cut-and-dried model.  However, if one is trying to deal with an actual living kinsperson, manage a love affair, or play politics, one needs a model that specifies not only the rules (such as they are) but also the standard ways around them.  Not only that; one needs to know a great deal about the methods in which all the above are deployed, strategized, and adapted to particular situations.  To keep with the musical parallel, we have gone from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to Dizzy Gillespie.

Cultural models thus blend insensibly into the whole web of thinking, planning, and acting.  No one can specify the point at which a bunch of ideas is organized enough to be a “model” rather than mere typical human woolgathering.  One can say only that some realms of human action are tightly organized around very well-structured sets of knowledge, while other realms must be the domain of improvisation, negotiation, and continual re-creation.  (The resemblance of “re-creation” to “recreation” is one that an English-speaking boat person would truly appreciate!)

Cultural models could include the various knowledge structures we all know:  classification systems, plans, strategies, goals, beliefs, vague ideas, tendencies, poems, songs, stories, routines, repertoires, dance patterns, canonical scripts, and so on.

Anthony Giddens (1984) coined the word structuration for the process by which negotiation of this sort leads to new structures.  Douglass North provided a broadly similar—but very differently phrased—account of how economic institutions come into being (North 1990).  Giddens sees social interaction as key.  North focuses on people’s efforts to reduce the costs (monetary or otherwise) of interaction by creating institutions that make it easier.  The boat people did not create any dramatically new social institutions, but they did create, and constantly rebuild, cultural institutions ranging from fishing methods to song styles.  Thus the cultural models were always changing, as the result of agency (Giddens 1984) taking shape in practice.

Obviously, I am creating observer’s models, though I try my best to stay close to the conscious models of my friends (see, again, Ward’s wonderful treatment of the relevant problems).  Unlike many interpretive anthropologists, I do not hope to get inside their heads.  However, unlike the more extreme postmodernists, I do not believe that all ethnography is fiction, or that cultures are hermetically sealed from each other.  I know I can still enter a boat community in southeast China and act appropriately; if I brush up my Cantonese, I can sit at a feast and talk about fish and fishing and the evils of government.

That may be a small accomplishment, but it is a real one.  It tells us that people can understand each other reasonably well, even across enormous cultural walls.  Perfect understanding is not a possibility; but, then, perfect understanding of anything—even of our own selves—is not for this world.

 

One example of cultural models in practice, and one very salient to the boat people, was response to oppression.  The boat people were near the bottom of Cantonese society.  This, in turn, was dominated in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s by the British colonial system.  It is not too much to speak of the “British raj,” since many British colonial administrators were reposted to Hong Kong after India and other British colonies in Asia became independent, and many South Asians followed them as soldiers or tradespeople.

The Cantonese were not exactly under the yoke of colonial oppression—they had a great deal of freedom and opportunity—but they were not the rulers of their land, nor did they have much power to make policy.  The boat people, being the lowest-ranked Cantonese in the social hierarchy, had especially little opportunity in that regard.  On the other hand, the British system protected them from the worst of the oppression they had known under Chinese governments; at least that is what I heard from all parties.

In any case, they had need of the full panoply of “weapons of the weak” and “arts of resistance” (Scott 1985, 1998).

These did not exclude the use of force.  Two old cannons lay in tidewater by our boat.  When I asked about them, I was told:  “In the old days we used cannons to defend ourselves from pirates and the government.”  The equation of those two categories was noteworthy.  All older people had tales of defense through force of arms.  Pirates were the worst and most constant problem, but Nationalist government vessels in the old days acted like the pirates, as far as the boat people were concerned.  Then came the Japanese war, when the boat people had served heroically in resistance.  The Communists who then took over most of China were sometimes supported, sometimes opposed.  Life in Hong Kong had been peaceful since order was restored after World War II, but no one really expected this to last forever.  The violent and unsettled times of old had given the boat people a fatalistic expectation of change and upheaval.

The boat people resisted prejudice and oppression by retreating into their water world.  Barbara Ward has discussed at length their common self-description “dragons on water, worms on shore” (Ward 1965).  On land, the boat people were exposed to humiliation, abuse, and exploitation.  Not many years earlier, they risked physical attack, and even in 1966 most older women and younger children would not go more than a few feet from the water’s edge.  On the water, however, the boat people were the masters.  Their consummate knowledge of seafaring and the water world made them independent and powerful.  Any land-dweller who ventured onto the water was at the mercy of the boat people, on whom he or she had perforce to depend.

Also, the boat people were essential to the waterfront merchants, who lived either by buying fish or by selling goods to the boat-dwellers.  This did not stop abuse and insults, but it kept those unsavory features of life down to a minimum.  Also, the merchants had to help in defending the boat people against serious threats.  There was no love lost on either side between the boat people and the fish merchants, but both sides knew they depended on each other.

As James Scott would expect, resistance to prejudice was normally shown through a constant background noise of criticism and restatement of core beliefs.  Usually, this consisted of a stream of sour remarks about land people and self-praise of boat people.   Most commonly, land people were said to be mean, stingy, prejudiced, unfair, and rigid.  Boat people, in contrast, were honest, open, fair, reliable, and independent.  These particular stereotypes are interesting, both because they reveal boat values, and because they contrast with the boat people’s stereotypes of other ethnic groups (see Anderson 1967 for wider discussion of ethnic stereotyping in Hong Kong in the 1960s).

Rarely, however, were these biased statements worked up into actual “arts of resistance.”  The boat people’s rich folk song tradition included only few lines on the issue.  Proverbs and verbal art also stayed close to broader ideals.  In fact, the boat people were rather idealistic and general in their verbal art; bitter commentary was reserved for ordinary conversation.

This was, at least in part, because of fear.  Until recently, they could have been in serious trouble if land people had overheard negative songs or proverbs.  Like the blues of African-Americans in the early 20th century, boat folk songs sometimes had a covert critical agenda that took some digging to ferret out.

More serious was the need to make a living.  Fishing is, at best, a chancy occupation.  Available alternatives were few, and usually not much of an improvement; cargo-carrying, passenger ferrying, boat vending, and smuggling all had their own insecurities.  The land people had the boat people in economic thrall, as will be seen.  The boat people had to protect themselves economically as best they could.  Whatever subsistence they got had to be gained from, and on, the water.

The theme of resistance occurs throughout this book, though not always stressed.  The boat people’s senses of self, their psychological integrity, depended on maintaining their sense of independence on the water.  This led to serious problems for those who had to move on shore.  They coped by swiftly assimilating to Punti society, but during the transition they often had troubled lives.

Thus the real defense of the boat people—not only physical self-protection, but defense of self-image and self-esteem—was retreat to the boats (or the pile-house communities built over tidewater).  Here, the boat people were in their own world, a world they understood and dominated.  It was closed to outsiders, and had its own ways and celebrations.  In it, they could ignore or cope with the outside.

 

Working with these perspectives allows me to do what I have always dreamed of doing:  Actually using the boat people’s own ideas and theories in my analysis.

However much anthropologists have been willing to learn from their subjects, they have rarely taken seriously their subjects’ views on society and culture.  There is a long roll of honorable exceptions, going back to early days.  A notable landmark was Paul Radin’s book Primitive Man as Philosopher (1957).  Radin not only documented serious philosophy among the traditional small-scale societies of the world, but he even suggested (timidly—one usually has to read between the lines) that modern philosophers had something to learn from the “primitives.”

Thus it came about that, in previous reanalyses of my boat-borne data, I have made deferential suggestions that we of the modern world could learn much from boat-dwellers’ family behavior (Anderson 1992), child-rearing (Anderson 1998), and ethics (Anderson, Wong and Thomas 2000).  I now wish to add politics and social theory to the list.  Anthropologists have been quick to appreciate the contributions of their subjects to the world’s store of art, music, economic plants, and medicinal lore; they have usually ignored the value of local social theory.  Yet, every group on earth has its theories of human interaction and group functioning.

Unlike Bourdieu’s Kabyle Berbers, the Cantonese talked about their society with self-consciousness and with an ability to pick out basic principles.  Bourdieu portrays the Berbers as uncommunicative about their social order.  They lived it, but they did not talk about it.  They did not have explicit folk theories of society.  By contrast, the Cantonese—not the least verbal people on the planet—talk much about society, both its realities and its ideals.  I suspect that the Berber are silent because of a kind of linguistic beheading; the language of learned, abstract discussion in Berberland was Latin in ancient times, Arabic from the 8th century onward, and French (in addition to Arabic) for the last century or so.  The Cantonese have always used their own language, or a closely related Chinese language, in learned discussion.

China possesses a huge and venerable literature on social questions.  Much of it was accessible even to the illiterate, because it was constantly being recycled through proverbs, plays, storytellers’ tales, and ordinary speech.  A reader of a manuscript of mine once commented on how preposterous was my claim that the boat people were aware of Confucian thought—because the boat people were “illiterate.”  Leaving aside the fact that many boat people were perfectly literate, this remark showed serious ignorance of Chinese folk culture.  The words of Confucius and Mencius were at least as familiar in old China as the words of the Four Gospels were in Europe and America a century ago. Every child who got through school memorized the Analects and the book of Mencius, and every community had enough educated people to guarantee that everyone, literate and illiterate alike, knew the more famous quotes from these sages.  Ideas of Confucius and Mencius, as well as of their most famous commentator, Zhu Xi (13th century), and their legendary rival Laozi, were common knowledge.

Confucian thought is social.  Unlike religious discourse, it cannot be dismissed as referring to another world, or to ideals impossibly lofty for this world.  The social theory of the Four Gospels is real enough, and sophisticated.  However, it is generally ignored, even by the most learned Christian writers, because Jesus is supposed to be talking about God and Heaven, not about this world.  Christian discourse has generally been about either individual morality or the abstract nature of Jesus and the Three-in-One.  No one could dismiss Confucian social thought this way.

Also well known at Castle Peak Bay were the basic tenets of Buddhism and Daoism, at least in so far as those influenced ordinary practice; the many Buddhist, Daoist, and folk-syncretist priests and temples in the vicinity made sure of that.  Much of this lore concerned the supernatural realm, not the human, but—as we shall see—the difference between these realms was not always seen as great, and discourse on the one often had much to do with the realities of the other.  Much of Buddhist and Daoist thought, like Confucianism, speaks quite explicitly to social questions.

Thus, the boat people had at their fingertips a quite impressive body of social philosophy.  They were not learned inquirers into the details of Mencian or Daoist thought, but they knew enough of the basic principles to argue them in everyday, pragmatic affairs.   I found their social thought to be liberating, exciting, and important.  It and its Mencian, Buddhist and Daoist roots have continued to influence me since.

Inevitably, the boat people had their own individualistic take on the Confucian-Mencian canon.  Land-dwellers tended to see Confucianism—via the thought of Zhu Xi and the Neo-Confucian tradition—as imposing rigid rules on society, especially the family.  The boat people did not see things that way.  They saw the Confucian tradition as imposing a set of general guidelines for social interaction:  be fair, be honest, defer to elders, be faithful to friends, and above all be responsibly independent.  They were aware of the many statements in the Analects and especially in Mencius that question authority or limit its scope.  They were quite aware that Mencius had not only advocated overthrowing bad rulers, but had defended this idea in public discussion with dukes and kings.  They saw the Confucian code as creating a social world that could dispense with government—a world in which internalized morality, enforced by informal means, could take the place of formal authority.  They were quite prepared to live with formal authority if it brought them benefits and was not too corrupt, but they reserved the right to rebel—or at least to pull up anchor and sail for better shores—if formal authority did not deliver.

Buddhist and Daoist ideas were interpreted similarly.  The relevant teachings counseled good behavior: probity, integrity, fidelity, honoring commitments, helping, and not imposing one’s will on others.  They held much wisdom anent getting along with the supernaturals.  They also taught independence and self-reliance, and strengthened the concept of a moral order as opposed to a forcibly imposed one.

Following Mencius, the boat people said that humans are basically “good,” in the sense of “eusocial.”  A person who did well by his family and neighbors was only doing the natural thing.  However, again following Mencius, they saw good upbringing as necessary too; like modern psychologists, they recognized that both genetics and environment are necessary to create the adult.  A bad person was clearly a badly-raised person.

This is, of course, not to say that the boat people were angels.  Like most  people and like all cultures, they had ideals and standards that were higher than anything they could practice.  Ideals were for emulation; one tried to be good, but recognized that the flesh was weak and that everyday needs meant frequent compromises.

In fact, a combination of high ideals with relaxed realism about practice was itself a part of the moral code.  Some ideals (such as utterly peaceful behavior) were only for the most self-sacrificing.  Other morals, such as sexual fidelity, were for ordinary good people, but the lack of them was not grounds for absolute ostracism.  Yet other moral stands, including honesty in financial dealings and generally peaceable behavior, were required of everyone, and failure to conform means expulsion from the community (or worse).

Similarly, the extension of a particular moral varied; treating everyone with equal warmth and friendliness was a high ideal; treating everyone so unless they were downright offensive was an expectation, but one very often honored in the breach; treating one’s own nearest and dearest with warm friendliness unless they very seriously offended one was an absolute standard.  Respect for this threefold division was one of the lessons I learned on the waterfront.

In short, I learned to see culture as a matter of rules.  These included explicit ideals, explicit rules for actual practice, vague rules of thumb, and areas where limits were set on possibilities but free play was expected within those limits.  I learned to see cultural knowledge as something that was learned and deployed for pragmatic reasons—not because it was “the culture.”  I learned to expect improvisation.

From this, I can here go on to speculate, more generally, about cultural systems.

 

3

Practice is what an ethnographer sees and records.  Structure, however, is real too.  Practice builds on it, and, over time, builds it (Bourdieu 1977; see also Bourdieu 1990; Piaget 1963; Rogoff and Lave 1984).  Cultural structures, systems, models, are dynamic things.  They never stand still.  Interaction is the direct means by which they form and re-form—a perception first (and best) enunciated by Wilhelm Dilthey (1985), but followed up by his student George Herbert Mead (1962), and subsequently by many others.  Jurgen Habermas’ work on discourse, interaction, and negotiation in politics (Habermas 1984) and especially by Emmanuel Levinas’ interactive morality (e.g. Levinas 1969) have influenced this book, as well as discussions with David Kronenfeld over the years (see Kronenfeld 1996).

Interaction between adults changes cultural institutions as people feel needs so to do.  Interaction also changes culture when the rising generation learns from their elders.  The young never quite reproduce what they hear; they must adapt, meeting new challenges and creating new ways of doing business.  Even if the objective situation does not force such a change, the need of young humans to rebel is certain to make itself felt.

Some cultural structures are hard, solid, firmly fixed, and almost changeless over time.  Basic kinship systems, basic grammar rules (the ones learned by age 10), basic terms for everyday objects such as body parts and rocks, and basic structures of food are particularly inflexible.

On the other hand, some things change with revolutionary speed.  Women’s fashions are particularly notorious for this, though they have certain underlying continuities and follow at least some rules (Richardson 1940).  Sexual behavior, gender roles, and related matters have changed profoundly in the United States since I first went to Hong Kong.  Political and economic life has altered, being progressively distorted by the growth of giant corporations, the progressive squeeze on natural resources, and the rise of state power, not only in the United States but throughout the world.

One can study structures of thought and action in such arenas only by keeping a very dynamic view of structure.  Kinship systems may seem frozen in beautiful crystalline arrays, if one looks at the short or even medium term; political systems are more like whirlwinds, created and maintained by dynamic forces and subject to sudden and dramatic shifts.  The wind-shear that creates whirlwinds has its metaphoric analogy in the political strife that creates political action .  Wind-shear, and human competition over resources and power, are always with us, providing underlying structure; the ways they play out in whirlwinds and politics are impossible to describe or predict accurately.

Language is the classic place to find fairly permanent structures.  Grammatical rules (the basic ones being firmly set) and vocabulary (all found in the dictionary) are combined to produce an unbounded set of new sentences.  These sentences, in turn, range from dully predictable (“How are you?” “I’m fine”) through moderately new but still conforming to a model (“I’m basically OK, but I have a headache that’s killing me, and I’m taking aspirin”) to completely new and weird (the famous example is Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” [Chomsky 1957]).  Grammatical structure is preserved as sentences become more and more original, but meaning becomes more and more a factor of individual agency until eventually it is so idiosyncratic that communication fails.

Even kinship systems are subject to continual negotiation, but in regard to behavior and usage more than in regard to the basic structure of the system.  The boat people did not know all the words for different classes of kin, and did not usually behave according to “proper” Neo-Confucian principles, but they did all agree on and use the basic kinterms, and they did all agree on the basic expectations of support and deference that went with these.  Similarly, English has added “sibling” as a routine, universally used kinterm within my lifetime, and “parent” became standard usage only a generation earlier.  The people I called “parents,” and others of their generation, still spoke of their “fathers and mothers” or their “people” or “folks.”

We can establish a continuum, from kin terminology to local politics.  Lévi-Strauss concerned himself mainly with kinship terminologies and secondarily with other long-lasting systems, while his rebellious student Bourdieu concerned himself largely with local (and, later, national) politics.  Our theories first shape our field work and then are shaped by it—yet another example of interaction affecting systems of thought.

In realms where stability lasts over generations, we can speak of “tradition” and of “cultural models.”  In realms where change is faster than generational succession, we are better advised to speak of “rules of thumb.”  People learn from each other how to act and what to expect, but they cannot transmit much of this to the rising generation.

Music provides a good example of structuration.  Psychologists have written:  “The emergence of the human mind can be thought of as the magic of the symphony, with the biological substrates analogous to musical instruments, the information-processing operations analogous to the musical score, and the orchestration of these production components and the modulation by the social context as analogous to the conductor and musicians and the influences of the symphony hall itself” (Cacioppo et al 2004).  The anthropologist may add that culture determines what kind of score is found (concerto or Daoist ritual), how much the rules can vary with practice (singing-school rigidity or jazz improvisation), and how expert the musicians are (folk amateurs or New York Symphony).

For the last century or two, in Hong Kong as in the west, every generation has insisted on having its own music, different enough from the last generation’s to drive Mom and Dad into spluttering fury.  Yet the standard scales, and the basic structure of a tune, have persisted, in spite of several desperate attempts to displace them.  Chinese music maintains its systems; the west maintains its major and minor modes.  Twelve-tone music, Indian ragas, and the more African elaborations of the blues each had a season in the sun, but it was not a long or hot season.

Consider the evolution of one type of western music.  Scottish music clings to the pentatonic scale, the “Scottish snap” (syncopation on the lead notes of certain subphrases), and a whole set of grace notes, but otherwise has evolved from song to fiddling to rock band to concert music.  In all these cases, we see a basic structure that goes on and on and serves to define a tradition, and, building on it, an infinite and kaleidoscopic variety of practice and innovation.

Jazz melodies, chords, and note and chord progressions are fairly set.  On this minimal framework, jazz musicians built infinite variation.  The variation, in turn, is usually created by applying a few relatively simple rules and devices.   However, a very great or very insane jazz musician will break out of the mold, and do completely “impossible” and “illegal” things, to the frequent delight of audiences.

 

The questions to ask of any cultural system are, then:

What is the consistent, slow-changing, structured base?

How important is it relative to the rest?

What is built on top of it—a small, compact improvised system, or a huge loose one?

In this topwork, how does trivial, relatively rule-bound variation blend off into the wild and new?

At a deeper level, cultural structures have to build on biological capabilities.  Relatively specific neurobiological programs can usefully be called biological primes.  Humans naturally recognize close kin (as do all mammals), and tend to give them special care and attention but avoid having sex with them.  Humans clearly have some innate programming for language, though whether this involves a Chomskian “language organ” or a more general capacity for higher-order planning of symbol strings (coupled with throat and tongue adaptations) is a moot question.  Humans have an innate ability to classify things (Atran 1990; Berlin 1992), though, again, no one knows whether this is a true “classifying organ” in the brain or just a highly adapted ability to see detailed similarities and differences in things.  (Kant’s arguments about the latter were central to his invention of anthropology; see Kant 1978.)   Basic emotions and motivations are biological primes.

Individuals must deal with the world by using such biological primes to start off their processes of thought and action.  However, no one acts because of genetic orders, except in simple matters like breathing and eye-blinking.  Action requires building structures of thought on the biological bases.  Pace the sociobiologists, humans do not have instincts, above a very lowly level.  Human genes specify abilities to learn and adapt—not locked-in plans for behavior.  The genes guide us, vaguely, toward certain broad enterprises or courses of action, but mainly they guide us in learning how to deal with all manner of different, unexpected challenges.

Once individuals have developed thoughts, they interact.  This can lead to cultural construction; culture then systematizes widely-shared thought-patterns into cultural models.  Cultural models are most likely to occur where biological primes provide a reasonably specific ground, as in kinship, language, and probably music.  However, cultural models are also universal and intricate in the realm of religion, whose biological base is at best dubious and murky.

Thus, we can add yet another question to those above:             Do biological primes underlie a cultural institution, and, if so, how did people get from genetic plan to cultural rule?

 

Predicting practice is difficult; predicting it from structure is particularly so.  On the one hand, much of the practice that practice theorists have identified is merely a set of short-cuts and approximations (and even sloppy attempts at) more structured things.  On the other hand, practice, in a given situation, may simply take existing structures of the relevant system as one input—with the other inputs being anything and everything else, such as hunger or the weather.  Moreover, the boat people not only varied such things as religious ritual and kinship behavior according to immediate situational factors (rain, poverty, political worries, anything), but they would very often vary them just to be different!  Being known as an Individual was a point of pride on the waterfront.

To do this, however, one had to know something about the underlying structure, and one had to know when to stop.  Getting too far from the canonical ritual made it ineffective, and one had to know what could be varied and what could not.  Burning at least three sticks of incense, for instance, was mandatory in essentially every ritual.  The gods would not even recognize it as a ritual without that.  In kinship practice, one could get away without knowing the term for mother’s father’s elder brother, but everyone had to know the term for father’s elder brother, and had to know, also, that it was the proper polite address for any unrelated male friend of one’s father’s generation.

Other matters, however, were loosely structured simply because there was no close structure known, or because the cost of getting the requisite information was much greater than the benefit from having it.  Much interpersonal behavior with strangers, much casting of nets in new places, was done quite improvisationally, because one had to try in the absence of good information.

 

4

The problem of cultural models is made more interesting and complex in the present case by the reality suggested in the subtitle.  The boat people of Hong Kong were quintessentially Chinese.  They spoke a Chinese language, ate Chinese food, dressed in Chinese style, and certainly thought of themselves as Chinese.   In many ways, they fit the classic stereotypes that Chinese have of themselves and that Westerners have of Chinese:  family was extremely important, tradition was strong and lively, Confucian and Mencian taglines graced numerous occasions, group welfare was explicitly held more important than the welfare of individuals.

Yet, their culture was different—to many, astonishingly different—from other stereotypes of China.  They lacked lineages or large-scale family organizations of any kind.  They had relatively free, egalitarian marriages, usually contracted by—or at least with the knowledge and consent of—the couples getting married.  Their women were strong and independent.  Their men did not till the soil.  They had no fixed address.  The stereotype of Chineseness includes obedience to law and order, but the boat people were a rough lot, in both speech and action.  Some even slid over into piracy (Murray 1987, Antony 2003; the latter book is a superb source for negative stereotypes held by land people of the boat-dwellers).

Above all, they were strongly individualistic.  If there is one thing agreed on by all stereotypists, it is that the Chinese are communitarian, Americans individualistic (see Bond 1986; see also Turiel 2004 on the problems of such stereotyping).  Some celebrate the Chinese for this; Tu Wei-Ming, in particular, has devoted his life to a brilliant and insightful exposition of a Neo-Confucian (or Neo-Neo-Confucian) position (see e.g. Tu 1985), while many Americans yearn nostalgically for community (see Turiel 2004 for review), sometimes citing the Chinese as exemplary.  Others find it problematic; some East Asians are critical of the patriarchal family, and Chinese-American novelists such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan have provided nuanced but essentially negative views of the the family-and-community world.  Asian-American family therapists Stanley Shon and Davis Ja were worried enough to write at length on how to mollify patriarchy and Westernize the family in immigrant Asian communities in America, to provide what they believe will be better family environments (Shon and Ja 1982).

Yet, at Castle Peak Bay, we lived with thousands of Chinese who were actually more individualistic and independent than Americans we knew.  This was not a difficult call or hard to assess; the gap was impossible to miss.  Most of the older boat people resisted the very idea of government, let alone communitarianism and conformity.  They had lived under Nationalist, Japanese, Communist, and British regimes, and they knew the workings of different forms of government very well indeed.  I once asked a group of men:  “Which of those governments did you find best?”  An elder in the group said:  “The Nationalists—because they couldn’t control us.”  The rest agreed.  This was only one of hundreds of remarks, by dozens of people, putting opposition to authority in the most thoroughgoing terms.

They set a high value on independence, ranging from the freedom to sail and fish wherever they pleased to the ideal of being (and being known as) a Real Character, as a unique and distinctive individual.  Unlike Americans, they did not set a high value on cultural conformity (cf. Turiel 2004, only the latest to note the contradiction of Anglo-American “individualism” with slavish conformity in matters of popular culture).  In fact, they set a low value on it, except for the basic morality of mutual aid and mutual support that served as the foundation of their social philosophy.  It was no accident that most of their songs were improvisational rather than learned by heart.

Families were a partial exception; the patriarchal family was alive and well.  But even there, patriarchy was observed to varying degrees.  One could observe a range from families almost as patriarchal as the stereotype (a stereotype that many land families actually approximated) to families where everyone had a voice, where punishment of children was unknown, and where everyone seemed to cooperate happily in spite minimal order-giving.  Children had to defer to adults, and adults barked commands in proper sailor fashion, but in most families no one ever seemed to lean on anyone else (Anderson 1992, 1998).

All observers not fooled by the “tribal” myth seem to agree that the differences between Cantonese boat people and Cantonese land people were due strictly and solely to ecological adaptation, and could be predicted therefrom (Anderson 1970b, 1972; Antony 2004; Ward 1965, 1966; and many references in all these sources).  Independence came from boat-management, just as food—although typical Chinese food—ran heavily to fish and shellfish.

However, the differences, ecological in origin though they might be, had gone on to become markers of a true subculture.  Thus, they were more standardized and generally shared than individual environmental adaptations would have been.  On the other hand, many of the adaptations disappeared rapidly when the boat people moved on shore.  I would guess that their descendents still lack lineages, but have otherwise been absorbed into the Cantonese mainstream.

Sailors who manage their own boats and have to be highly mobile simply cannot be as communitarian as rice cultivators.  Even on land, lineages routinely disappear in Chinese communities that lack large-scale landholding with intensive agriculture.  The patriarchal family, in so far as it produced the stresses and strains immortalized by novelists and sociologists (see Chapter 5), could not possibly have existed on the boats; people had to be mutually supportive, and had to be free to make split-second decisions.  When a father washed overboard, his wife or sons could hardly stand around waiting for a command decision on what to do.  Wives who were not free and equal managers of the boats were not fully effective in the fishery.  Defiance of government was natural for people whose livelihood depended on free travel, and often on “free trading” (what some would call smuggling).

Thus, Chinese culture proves highly changeable, according to immediate ecological needs.

What, then, are we to make of cultural generalizations and stereotypes?  Can an ethnographer state rules in such a universe?  The short answer is yes.  However, the rules have to be properly qualified, and grounded in more basic realities.

Lineages provide the clearest example.  All the local land-dwelling Cantonese had lineages.  None of the boat people did.  In the New Territories, this was a perfect open-and-shut matter.  (It was not in some other areas; at least some boat people nearer Guangzhou had lineages [Wu 1937], and many land-dwelling Chinese in other parts of China lack lineages.)  The explanation is simple and straightforward:  lacking land to administer, resources to manage, and even the possibility of having lineage halls or keeping records, the boat people neither needed lineages nor could maintain them.

Matters of individuality and family relationships are far more difficult to define.  The difference between land people and boat people was not open-and-shut.  There were gradations; in fact, the reality was a continuum.  Richer and more settled boat people often emulated the land-dwellers—arranging marriages, developing patriarchal relations with children, and working with government.  However, just as often, successful individuals simply used their money to maintain themselves in an even more flamboyantly individual and free-spirited lifestyle than they had had before!  Many of our friends and acquaintances boasted to us of doing exactly this.  Conversely, many far-from-affluent people had thoroughly conservative personal lives.

Particularly interesting was the ways that Neo-Confucian philosophy was used to justify individualism.  Tu Wei-Ming would have been fascinated to hear how the boat people could quote Confucius and, especially, Mencius to justify their lifeway.  Mencius’ writings include many passages about individual conscience, defiance of tyranny, and the individual and internal locus of morality.  Older and more experienced boat people knew these by heart.  Teik-Aun Wong, Lynn Thomas, and I (Anderson et al. 2000) have discussed at some length the ways in which philosophy can be bent to differing interpretations, according to the bias of the interpreter.

What are we to make of such matters?  How can anthropologists interpret and understand such subcultural and individual differences?

Many Chinese of the old school saw these boat people lifeways as deviant in the bad sense.  The stereotypes of boat people heard by Ward and myself, and found by Antony (2004), Kani (1967), and others, in traditional Chinese literature, speak to that.  For many land people, the boat people were just plain bad Chinese.

Many American anthropologists today might see the boat people as proving that culture is a mere invention of ethnographers, and that individual agency is all there is.

As the subtitle of this book suggests, I prefer to see the boat ways of life as variations on Chinese themes.  Culture is certainly real.  The boat people did conform when it was ecologically rational.  They had long ago discovered the most efficient clothing style, and they had all kept to it within recent memory.  They all ate Chinese food, drank Chinese alcohol, and spoke good if distinctive Cantonese.

Their ways of varying from more typical Cantonese patterns were all not only ecologically driven, but were also found, in a kind of latent or seed form, in mainstream (hegemonic?) Cantonese culture.  Other Chinese see the Cantonese as rough, independent, spontaneous, and prone to idealize an “original” character; the boat people merely took this a few steps farther.  And the boat people were certainly not the only Chinese in history to find in Confucian (especially Mencian) and Daoist thought a charter for independence and even defiance of government.  China’s literary history is studded with thousands of highly original individuals, many of whom justified their stubbornness in the same terms and from the same passages.

We are dealing with variation at several levels.  There were some open-and-shut differences between land and boat society.  Other differences are only differences of degree, or present a continuum from a land extreme to an occasional boat extreme.  Then, within the boat world, there were differences from community to community.  Finally, families and individuals all had their own interpretations and their own practice.

Of course, all this is deadly to the classic stereotypes, whether positive (as in Tu Wei-Ming’s writings) or negative.  Most Chinese do indeed act and think in a relatively communitarian manner, privileging society over the individual, as literally thousands of sober studies and analyses have demonstrated (Bond 1986 provides good, balanced reviews of some of them).  However, this communitarianism does not even begin to exhaust the cultural repertoire.  It is merely an aspect of the culture that happens to be preferred at one time and place.  Changing circumstances can cause a totally different interpretation of the culture, especially if already present in a latent or local form, to take over rapidly and dramatically.  (The “sexual revolution” in the United States in the 1960s was not a sudden new thing appearing; it was merely the elevation of a previously minority lifestyle to cultural dominance and hegemony.)

If one wishes to stereotype, I would suggest that Chinese culture really is defined and described by an individual-in-society perspective; sometimes the individual side comes out more strongly, sometimes the social side.  But this makes the cultural model so general and broad that it is no use as a stereotype.  One can generalize about subcultures and situations, but, even then, one must properly qualify the generalization.  Practice need not follow belief and ideology, and no two people think or act quite alike.

I have elsewhere pointed out practical applications of this (Anderson 1992, 1998).  Family counselors need not go outside Chinese culture to find egalitarian family models.  Educators need not go outside Chinese to find individual-tailored, nonpunitive, empowering education strategies.  Tu Wei-Ming need not worry about a tradeoff between Confucianism and individual rights; he can draw on an authentic and ancient Chinese tradition that combines them harmoniously.

 

A culture, then, is a set of plans for acting, not a rigid crust.  It is a set of useful ideas to draw on at will.  It is a tool kit, not a tool.  It has a structure, but the structure is that of a rather messily arranged toolbox.  Everything is in there, somewhere, but perhaps not in perfect shape and not in the expected spot.  Claude Lévi-Strauss’ image of the bricoleur—the shade-tree mechanic—is deservedly famous.  Not only the traditional consultant, but everyone, has to be a shade-tree mechanic when using his or her cultural tool kit.  The boat people found it necessary to draw on the shipboard tools—the fishhooks, spars, rigging-mending equipment—rather than the plough or the bricklayer’s trowel.  (And France’s counterpart to Home Depot calls itself the place for bricoleurs.)

One must, also, imagine a tool kit that blends at the edges into other, slightly different kits (Vietnamese, Thai…).  Moreover, the tools have the useful property of expanding or shrinking at will.  As every AI expert would agree, cultural tools are more like computer software than like hardware.  They can be stored in zipped files when not needed, or expanded by all sorts of patches and supplements and individual tinkering.

Or, to return to another metaphor, culture is indeed a “thing of shreds and patches.”  But the shreds and patches are woven into a wonderful patchwork quilt—one with the miraculous quality of changing to fit the needs and tastes of anyone who lies under it.  Somehow, it keeps us all warm.

 

5

A final note on cultural modeling, to remind us to be sober and modest, is the question of ethnographer authority.  Throughout the history of anthropology, and especially in the last couple of decades, scholars have questioned the right of ethnographers to produce “the” account of “their” people.  Who am I to talk about the boat people?  I spent something over two years in Hong Kong, including nine months living on a sampan, but I am, obviously, not a seui seung yan by birth.  I have no right to speak in an authoritative or authorial voice.

This book is not in any way “the ethnography” of the Hong Kong boat people.  It is a personal text, an account of one man’s experience in a few boat communities.  It is not intended to be a definitive or canonical text.  On the other hand, I know a great deal about the boat world, and I was there during a critical time: the period of its decline and disappearance.  This gives me not only the right, but (I think) the obligation, to record what I know of the brilliance and troubles of the bay’s last years.

I offer, then, what is, and can only be, a personal view, the view of a sympathetic and experienced outsider.  I was not there long enough to become an insider, but I was there too long to be a coolly “objective” outsider.  Thus, I cannot pretend to speak ex cathedra on boat society.

I tried my best to remedy the lack of boat people’s own voices by recording the boat people’s songs in some detail (Anderson 1975), and by recording life accounts (Anderson 1970b:226-248).  Unfortunately, in those days, publishers were not interested in such materials, and I did not follow up as I should have done.

I have also tried to stick as closely as I can to factual matters that could be objectively verified:  fish species, dollar amounts, number of people on a boat, actual behavior at religious ceremonies.  In this book and in my previous publications, I have used the boat people’s own concepts, ideas, and often exact words.  In particular, I have tried to keep interpretation as close to my boat friends’ own words as I could; I am too uncomfortably aware of my own limitations to indulge in Geertzian flights.  This has gotten me criticized in the past for not imposing enough “theory” (whatever that might mean) on the “raw data.”  Today, I hope that the many critiques of the “authoritative voice” have made us more sensitive to the aridity (if not immorality) of presenting ex cathedra theory and interpretation in one’s own authoritative voice, while silencing one’s subjects and denying them even the exiguous existence of “aggregated statistical data.”

I wish I could present my friends as living, breathing human beings.  The generation of boat men and women who remember the old ways is now as old as I am, and—to my knowledge—none has stepped forward to write the great novel or great memoir we need.  My own few words can be no more than a stopgap, while we await that hoped consummation.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2.  THE STRAIT THAT DISAPPEARED

 

1

The Cantonese fishing people of coastal Guangdong Province maintained until recently a highly distinctive and highly traditional form of life.  For centuries, they have been regarded as a distinct minority within Cantonese culture.  Until recently, most of them lived entirely on their boats; virtually all the rest lived on huts built over tidewater.  They lived by fishing, shellfish and seaweed collecting, cargo-carrying, and small-scale trade.  Their speech often differed slightly from that of land neighbors (McCoy 1965).  Their clothing and foodways also varied slightly from land norms.  Last, but not least, their religious practices differed substantially from those of the land people.

The lifeway of the boat people is dramatically different way of being Chinese.  In current usage, they are typical “Han” Chinese, though the Cantonese traditionally called themselves “people of Tang” rather than “people of Han.”  The terms refer to the Han and Tang Dynasties; the Chinese Empire took its mature form in Han (206 BC-220 AD), but the Cantonese feel they were not really Sinicized until Tang (607-960), although Guangdong was actually conquered and occupied under Han.  (And Han tomb models of boats show the boat people were living then pretty much as they are now.)  The “Tang” label is so persistent that Grant Street, the main thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Chinatown, is known throughout the Chinese world as “Tang people’s street.”  (This is T’ong Yan Kai in Cantonese.  Usage has changed, and now Cantonese, along with others who traditionally speak languages of the Chinese family, tend to call themselves “Han” Chinese.  On the ethnically diverse history of south China, see Eberhard 1942.)

The boat people fit squarely into that universe.   They merely presented a set of variants, bearing a Wittgensteinian family resemblance (rather than a simple set of changes in one pattern).  Each family had its own way of being Chinese and of being seui seung yan.  Also, each family changed and adapted over time, so today’s range of knowledge and practice might be varied tomorrow as circumstances altered.

 

The land people called themselves Punti (pun tei), “locals,” meaning Cantonese-speakers in contrast to the Hakka, Hokkien, and other non-Cantonese groups .  The boat people were generally not considered  Punti, because of their lifestyle.  However, the boat people were Cantonese-speaking locals, and were thus Punti on the dotted line. I avoid the word because of these confusing webs of meaning.

In imperial times, boat people were legally constituted as a separate ethnic group.  They were subject to discrimination; until late Qing, they were not allowed to sit for the Imperial examinations.  They were not allowed to move on shore, though they could, in many locations, build houses on piles over tidewater.  This had been done for centuries at Tai O, on Lantao Island, across a narrow strait from Castle Peak.  Castle Peak was following suit in the 1960s, with a rapid rise of handmade shacks built over the mudflats.

Boat people probably provided many of the sailors, and much of the expertise, that made China a great sea power in dynastic times.  Contrary to a myth of China’s maritime insignificance, Gang Deng (1999) has shown that China was a leader in seafaring, marine technology, and exploration, especially in early Ming but also at other times in history.

In spite of this, land-dwellers have generally regarded boat people with prejudice and contempt.  Boat people suffered discrimination in Imperial times and subsequently.  Antony (2003:12) summarizes the traditional stereotype of boat culture:  “It did not share in the traditional Confucian values of honesty, frugality, self-restraint, and hard work; rather, it espoused deception, ambition, hedonism, recklessness, and getting ahead by any means.”  Of course, the boat people reversed this; they had the exactly same stereotype, but with themselves as the honest workers, the land-goers as the devious amoralists.  Boat people frequently expressed this to us at very considerable length.  The one place they agreed with the old stereotype was on “recklessness.”  The boat people admitted they were more risk-taking, less cautiously routine-bound—but, instead of “reckless,” the words they used were “courageous,” “free,” and “on our own.”

For decades or centuries, the boat people have been claimed as more “aboriginal” or “tribal” (in some sense) than the land people.  This belief was shown to be false decades ago (Anderson 1970a, 1970b, 1972; Ward 1965, 1966; both these authors review a great deal of earlier work), but it still surfaces on occasion.  In fact, the boat people clearly have some “aboriginal” brackground, but non-Han ancestry is general in China’s far south (for a qualified view of the boat people from this perspective, see Ho 1965).  Linguistic, historic, and cultural evidence suggests that southeast China was largely Thai—with many other linguistic groups, such as Yao and Miao—before, and for a long time after, the Chinese conquered it in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-221 AD).  For instance, the delayed transfer marriage still practised in the Guangzhou area (Stockard 1989) is a Zhuang custom (Jeffrey Barlow, unpublished ms.; the Zhuang are a Thai-speaking group now dominant in much of the Guangsi Zhuang Autonomous Region just west of Guangdong).  It has probably been retained by former Zhuang who have become Cantonese, rather than having been borrowed by Chinese migrants (see Stockard 1989).  In Cavalli-Sforza’s studies of human genetics, southeast Chinese were found to sort genetically with southeast Asians, not with northern Chinese (Cavalli-Sforza 2001).  This being the case, contrasting “aboriginal” boat people with “Han” land people is completely wrong.

Often, unfortunately, “tribal” claims for the boat people are coupled with the use of the highly offensive ethnic slur “Dan” (or Danjia; Cantonese Tanka; see e.g. Siu and Faure 1995; Ye 1995).  This is supposedly a “tribal” or “ethnic” name of the boat people.  It goes back to imperial times, but it seems purely an outsiders’ term with an insulting connotation.  It is not always insulting, and lately it has been rehabilitated by boat people from Tai O and elsewhere, following the rehabilitation of “Black” and “Chicano” in the United States.  This fascinating bit of sociolinguistics was conveyed to me (in an email of May 15, 2002) by a young Hong Kong sociologist, Ho-fung Hung, who studied Tai O and its recent conflicts and activist politics (Hung 1998, 2001a, 2001b).  There are several folk etymologies purporting to explain why the word tan, “egg,” came to be an ethnic slur word for Cantonese boat people:  Their boats look like eggshells, “Tan” was a “tribal” name, “tan” is their pronunciation of some other word (various words are suggested), and so on.  These speculations are no doubt as valid as most folk etymologies.  The boat people referred to themselves as seui seung yan (Putonghua shui shang ren “people on the water”; seui seung yan was pronounced soi song yan in Hong Kong boat dialect) or by similar descriptive phrases.  In English, the people in question have always been called “boat people.”  In the 1970s, this term came to be used for the Vietnamese refugees who fled by boat from Vietnam.  Many of these came to Hong Kong, and obvious confusion followed.  In this book, of course, the term “boat people” applies to the boat-dwellers native to the Hong Kong area, not to the Vietnamese.

In fact, there was continuous movement from land to water and from water to land.  The water people were never a separate group.  My interviews and life histories revealed that many people traced their descent back to shore-dwellers who had taken to the boats during periods of unrest over the last couple of centuries—often within the last two to three decades.  World War II, in particular, drove many land people to the boats, where life was safer than on shore.  Conversely, boat people have been moving onto shore for millennia, often in substantial waves, when opportunity or local decree encouraged them (see Antony 2003 for the most recent historical treatment of these millenia-old patterns).

They did, however, maintain a separate lifestyle with many cultural features with linked them with other boat people in China, and differentiated them from the land-dwellers.  Most of these features can be understood as adaptations to a seafaring, boat-dwelling life (Antony 2003; Ward 1965, 1966).

However, successive governments, both local and national, constructed them as a separate ethnic group—greatly oversharpening and exaggerating a real subcultural difference.  The boat people became a “separate tribe,” as if they were as culturally distinct as the Tibetans or Mongols.  The only real difference, howeever, was that the boat people lived on boats (or pile houses over water) and worked at water occupations.  Even such clear cultural markers as lack of lineages, special accents, and independent ideology were not hard-and-fast distinctions from the land world; some land groups lacked lineages and had similar accents and attitudes.  Costume, folk songs, and a few other such usages did set the boat people apart, but not very dramatically.

Yet the boat people received prejudice; often they had been forbidden to live on land or—locally at least—to sit for imperial examinations.

They came to see themselves as “dragons on water, worms on shore” (Ward 1965, 1966).  The double terminology is critical here:  they were held down, victimized, and unable to control their destinies when on land, but on the water they were unquestioned rulers.  Land people could travel on water or ship cargoes only through boat-people agency.  On the water the boat people were fully in control of the human or social side of their lives, though the weather and seas were still out of their control.

Thus, much of boat culture and discourse was about control and its negotiation.  A sense of control over one’s life is a powerful human need (Anderson 1996), and the boat people had it on water, lost it on land.  Their lives had to deal with that constant negotiation of a major, basic human psychological mainstay.

The boat people of the central Guangdong coast formed a large social network, united by constant shifting back and forth.  Until the rise of the Communist government, local and national borders meant little to them, and even after 1949 it was always fairly easy to weigh anchor and move.  The Hong Kong border was permeable.  Tens of thousands of boat dwellers had fled at one time or another from the unrest and poverty that were endemic in China during the 20th century.  Particularly large waves came to Hong Kong during the famine years of 1958-61, when millions of Chinese starved to death.  A steady trickle came through after that, until prosperity and the call of shore life made China more attractive during the 1970s.

The main source area of Hong Kong boat people, both long-established and newcoming, was Hong Kong’s immediate neighbor region:  the two-county area of Baoan (Po On in Cantonese, and so called henceforth in this book) and Dongguan (Tung Kun).

The distinctive boat-dweller accent of Hong Kong seems to be, basically, the accent of that area.  It is very close to standard Cantonese (the urban accent of Guangzhou and Hong Kong).  There are some patterned differences.  Most obvious is the substition of  –o– for –eu– (as in soi song yan, above).  “Hong Kong” probably got its English name via boat people, because it is Heung Kong in standard Cantonese.  (Poetically “Fragrant Harbor,” literally “incense port” because sandalwood was once shipped from it, Hong Kong is Xiang Gang in Putonghua.)  The boat people changed initial ng- to something like a w- (ngo “I” becomes wo).  Some final consonants were dropped or assimilated (all final nasals became –n).  As in colloquial Hong Kong Cantonese generally, unaspirated ts before vowels is sounded like English j (tsai “little one” is pronounced jai).  There were also some tonal quirks.  I have not indicated boat pronunciations in this book; I simply use standard Cantonese forms (see Anderson 1970b and McCoy 1965 for full technical descriptions).

Many boat people came from farther upstream, around Guangzhou city.  A few came from still more distant counties.  In Tai Po Kau, on the east side of Hong Kong’s New Territories, there was a large community of boat-dwellers speaking a dialect of Southern Min (Hokkien), a completely different language from Cantonese.  Their dialect was spoken from northwest Guangdong Province into neighboring Fujian.  These people kept to themselves, and had their own style of boats, their own foods and customs, and their own fishing techniques.  They disappeared as a community in the 1970s and 1980s, with their dialect and culture still unrecorded (see Anderson 1970b:257-259 for what little is known).  They constituted no more than 3% of the boat people of Hong Kong; the rest, including all those I knew at Castle Peak, were Cantonese.

In Hong Kong, the boat people were concentrated in a number of good harbors.  The biggest and most famous concentration was at Aberdeen, on the outer side of Hong Kong Island.  (The main city is on the inner side, facing the mainland.)  Others were at Kowloon Harbor, Deep Bay, So Kwun Wat in Hong Kong, and elsewhere.  Barbara Ward, the only other person to do prolonged participant-observation research on the Hong Kong boat people, worked at Kau Sai, a small settlement on the east side of the New Territories; Castle Peak Bay, a larger settlement on the west side, was a quite different place.  Outside of the British colony, there were huge concentrations of boat people all around the Pearl River estuary.  In 1966 we visited Macau, then a Portuguese colony, where we observed huge concentrations of boat-dwellers.  In 1978 I visited Guangzhou, and saw what little was left of the boat culture there; by then, most of the boat-dwellers had moved on shore there (as in Hong Kong).  Smaller concentrations existed all along the coasts and major rivers of Guangzhou and Guangxi.  Elsewhere in China were perhaps three million boat people, speaking the languages of their own areas (see e.g. Worcester 1959).  Almost everywhere, the boat-dwellers spoke the same dialects and languages as the shore people nearby.   Nowhere did they have their own language.

This is true throughout Asia; almost every country with rivers and coasts has its own boat people, all local, all speaking local languages or at least languages derived from home ports not too far away (Sopher 1965—eked out by my own observations and conversations all round southeast Asia).  The boat-dwelling adaptation is clearly something that appeals to all sorts of people; representatives of many of the ethnic groups of Asia have taken to the sea.  Some, such as the Sama (Randall 1977) and certain Bugis trader groups, have become long-distance voyagers and merchants.  Humans are usually creatures of the land, but here they have become as bound to the water as are the fish that supply much of their livelihood.

Speculations that the boat-dwellers are some sort of distinct “tribe” or “tribal group,” or otherwise have separate origins from the land people, have often been entertained (see Sopher 1965).  All the evidence suggests otherwise:  that they are simply representatives of the shoreline groups whose languages they speak.  (The Moken “sea gypsies” of the Malayan peninsula, who speak a distinctive dialect, are a partial exception; see, yet again, Sopher 1965).  The Sama have dispersed from the south Philippines to Sulawesi and elsewhere, but their origins are clear and they know their homeland.  Vietnamese boat people speak Vietnamese.  Japanese ones spoke Japanese when they existed as an identifiable group.

In Hong Kong, the boat people are clearly Cantonese in language, culture, and—usually—origin.  We talked to many who knew from family tradition that they were recently land-dwellers, only a couple of generations away from rice farming.  However, the boat lifestyle predates the Sinicization of the south.  Archaeology reveals that there were boat-dwellers as early as 1500 BC in Hong Kong (as I learned from archaeologist William Meacham, while observing with him the ongoing excavation at an obvious boat-dweller site on an isolated island).  These would probably have been Thai-speaking.  On the other hand, Austronesian voyagers from south China apparently settled Taiwan and later the South Seas (Bellwood 1997), and it is tempting to see them as related somehow to early boat people.  Doubtless these early boat-dwellers represented many linguistic communities.

Boat people much like modern ones were certainly present by Han, as we know from tomb pottery.  People throughout the Han empire had the custom—incomparably useful to archaeologists—of making small pottery replicas of the things of this world, to accompany the dead into the other one.  From this we know that the Han world had woks, pagodas, “sharpei” (sha pi) dogs identical to modern ones, and sampans almost exactly like the one on which we lived.  Even minor details of style are the same.  These models show the oldest fore-and-aft rigging and watertight compartments in the world; evidently the South China Sea was an area of maritime innovation, and the lack of subsequent change indicates early perfection rather than late conservatism.

After Han, we get occasional flashes of light in what is usually a profound darkness.  Boat people are known to have existed all over the major rivers and coasts of China from a very early time.  Their folk songs, often clearly related to modern songs, were recorded by poets.  In the 16th century, Feng Menglong recorded some boat folk songs similar to ones I recorded in 1965-66 (Anderson 1975).   Even earlier, the boat folk songs of the lower Yangzi inspired Tang Dynasty poets to imitate them in elite style.  Cui Hao (704-754) gives us an exchange between a girl and a young man, of a type that could still be heard on Castle Peak Bay in 1965.  The girl sings the first verse, the boy the second.  Hengtang and Longpole (Janggan) are near Nanjing.

 

“Where are you from good sir

this maid is from Hengtang

I ask while our boats are moored

perhaps we’re from the same place

 

My home overlooks the Great River

I travel along the Great River’s banks

I’m from Longpole too

but I’ve never seen you before.”  (Red Pine 2003:36-37).

 

In the 18th Century, the poet and writer Shen Fu lived in Guangzhou for a while, and had a romantic affair with a boat girl.  He describes it in one of the most exquisite and heartbreaking short accounts, in Chinese or any other language, of a lost love.  This account was published in a small book titled Six Records of a Floating Life (Shen 1983); only four of the chapters ever saw the light.  He includes some general ethnography, including the significant note that the word for “what?” was mie (Putonghua for “rice grain”).  Mi ye is still the boat pronunciation of the Cantonese mat ye? (“what?”).  The title of this book and its predecessor The Floating World of Castle Peak Bay (Anderson 1970b) are both based on Shen’s, whose title, in turn, refers both to literal floating and to the Buddhist image of this transient life of ours as a “floating world.”

After Shen, accounts get thicker, and have been synthesized in historical studies by Ho (1944), Kani (1967), Ye (1995), and others.  These are generally marred by a too-literal reading of local gazetteers and similar sources that allege “tribes” of boat people.  The boat people do not have tribes, or anything similar.  The “tribes” were probably followers of a particular local leader, or people who came from a certain area and named themselves from it.

In the early 20th century, sociologists discovered the boat people.  Wu Yuey-len (Wu Yuelin in modern transcription) and Chicago-trained Chen Suching (Chen Xujing), and later their student Ho Kaak-yan (Ho Ge’en), were associated at Lingnan University in Canton.  They carried out extensive descriptive sociology of the sort done at the University of Chicago in those days; in fact, it was excellent ethnography.  They described everything from economics to folksongs (Chen 1933, 1935, 1946; Ho 1944, 1965, 1966; Wu 1936a, 1936b, 1937).  Ho later moved to Hong Kong and taught at the University of Hong Kong, where I interviewed him; Chen and Wu stayed at Lingnan; Chen survived the Maoist era and lived to a venerable old age.  Barbara Ward carried out major research on the boat people of Kau Sai, Hong Kong, in the 1950s and 1960s (Ward 1955, 1958, 1966, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969).  The economist Frank H. H. King (1955) and the linguist John McCoy (1965) worked with her there for short periods.  Ward’s pathbreaking, brilliant, and richly theorized ethnography was tragically cut short by her untimely death, before she could publish more than a few articles.  Her interests ranged from child-rearing to livelihood to history.  She was instrumental in showing that the boat people were not a separate group but were simply Canontese on boats.  More challenging to theory was her work on the boat people’s own ideas about their social system (Ward 1966), of which more below.

Many popular writings and photographs were devoted to the boat people.  Col. V. R. Burkhardt published a long series of columns in the South China Morning Post, later compiled into three volumes (Burkhardt 1953-58), that contains much excellent material.  Less excellent were the vast numbers of photographs, film, paintings, transient writings, and other materials that exploited the “picturesque, quaint” boat people.  The old sailing junk was a photogenic craft, and became a symbol of Hong Kong.

After that, the research reported in this book is the major published material.  (See also Hung 1998, 2001a, 2001b, and references therein.  Anderson 1970a, 1972 provide full bibliography of boat people studies through 1970.)  The boat people no longer exist as a major community in Hong Kong, but many remain along the rivers and coasts in more remote parts of Guangdong.  The opportunity for studying the traditional culture is now gone forever, but opportunities now exist for studying the modern vicissitudes of those who make their living on great waters.

 

2

Like the boat people, Castle Peak Bay has a long history and a controversial past (Balfour 1941; Lo 1963; Ng 1961).  When Castle Peak and its environs were first noted, in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), Castle Peak was separated from the mainland by a strait that connected the present Castle Peak Bay with Deep Bay.  Later, the strait filled, and Deep Bay became shallow.  Finally, from the 1960s onwards, Castle Peak Bay progressively shrank, as more and more fill encroached on it.  By 1990 it had disappeared.

The strait was known in ancient days as Tun Mun (or Tuen Mun, “Garrison Strait”; mun, literally “gate,” means “strait” or “passage” in Cantonese nautical usage).  This name may have been used later for the strait on the other side of Castle Peak, a still-open channel separating it from Ling Ting Island.  The area was once of the utmost strategic importance; it guarded the north corner of the Pearl River estuary, while Macau guarded the south.  Thus, in the Tang Dynasty (620-907), a garrison was established in the area. The great Tang writer Han Yu supposedly passed through the area, though details are shadowy.

According to local legend, a mysterious monk, Pei Tu (“Cup Measure”), who sailed in a winecup and could disappear at will, founded Castle Peak Monastery in the fifth century.  In fact, the monastery was founded in the early 20th century.

During the Nan Han Dynasty in the 10th century, records speak of “Tan” people in the area, using the same character as that in “Tanka” (dan jia; Lo 1963:23).  In the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the area remained a port and checkpoint.  Local legends once again take us farther:  the last boy emperor of Song passed through and found brief refuge on Lantao Island, where his guardian and uncle is still revered as divine patron of the community of Tai O.  More securely attested is the passage of Jorge Alvares in 1513; this Portuguese navigator touched at Ling Ting Island and was the first European to see castle Peak.  The Portuguese fortified Lantao, but the Chinese drove them out, and they consolidated their position in Macau instead (Braga 1956).  The local gazetteer recorded that the Portuguese raided the surrounding countryside, capturing and eating children (Ng 1961).  Such claims of cannibalism occur again and again in Chinese history, with no factual evidence presented; the view of “barbarians” as cannibals merely a standard trope, as it is in European and Euro-American travel lore (see Chong 1990).

Piracy increased, notably at the fall of Ming (1644), when Ming loyalists took to the sea and harassed the coasts for years (Anthony 2003; Murray 1987).  Some were theoretically under the direction of the Ming loyalist leader Coxinga.  (The name is a European rendering of kok sing a, Southern Min for “Imperial Surname Kid,” a slangy reference to his being granted the Ming imperial surname for his services in trying to save the dynasty).  Japanese, local boat people, and shore people turned pirate were also involved.  From 1662 to 1669, the Qing government depopulated the whole coast, the people being forcibly resettled inland.  The local economy never recovered until modern times.

The British leased the New Territories in 1898.  The area remained rural and agricultural, raising high-quality rice and fruit, until after the Japanese devastated it in the Second World War.  From 1950 onward, urbanization spread explosively from Hong Kong and Kowloon.  By 1997, when the New Territories reverted to China, the southern New Territories, including Castle Peak Bay, were a vast sprawling city.  The northern New Territories were still rural, but no longer agricultural; the labor force had gone to the city or to England and Europe to work.

Much of the urbanization of Castle Peak was driven by refugees from China.  These came largely in three waves:  1949 (during the civil war that brought Mao Zidong to power), 1957 (initial communization of rural lands), and 1960-61 (famine following the failure of the Great Leap Forward).  The last of these was by far the largest as far as Castle Peak Bay was concerned, for it brought floods of desperate people, most of them boat people, to the bay.  Most of these were from nearby, especially from Po On (Bao An), the Chinese county (xian) just across the border; most of its boat people had fled, according to informants.  Many more came from Tung Kun (Dong Guan), the next one north, and from other counties around the Pearl River estuary.  Many brought functional boats and kept fishing, but most had fled in aging and decrepit craft, and had no capital.  They could only squat in houses built of scrap lumber on the waterfront, often on pilings in the water.  They were destitute, and many children died of malnutrition.  Finally, from 1965 and especially from 1970, expansion of factories and shops in the area provided employment.

The town of Tun Mun Kau Hui (“Garrison Strait Old Market”) was a gray-brick town on the old creek entering the bay.  An eastward extension, Tun Mun San Hui (“Garrison Strait New Market”), began life about 1945 on a mudflat at the head of the bay.  It grew with spectacular speed.  By 1965 it had a government clinic, a market, a school, and other amenities.  By 1974 it had expanded onto bay fill and acquired many factories and high-rise apartment blocks; by 1997 it was a huge city.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were several thousand boat people in the bay area.  No exact figures can be given, for people were always moving in and out, shifting to shore life, shifting back to boat life, or otherwise acting as a truly “floating” population.

 

The boat people were dependent on the natural world for life and livelihood.  Earning their income from the sea and much of their food from local land, a the mercy of weather, and required to navigate dangerous passages, they had to know a great deal about their surroundings.  This section provides a brief introduction to those surroundings.

The New Territories and Kowloon comprised a peninsula.  Most of it is low but rugged granitic mountain land.  Castle Peak is just under 2000’ high.  Overall, the coast of the region had been sinking, producing many bays and islands.  The islands are drowned mountains.  Largest was Lantao, across a strait from Castle Peak.  Most flat land is recent alluvium, deposited by runoff from slopes deforested by human activity over the last two thousand years.  In the torrential rains that follow typhoons and summer storms, topsoil washes in floods from cleared land, leaving gullies and bare half-decomposed granite.  The granitic soil, under tropical conditions, rapidly loses fertility, and becomes laterite or simply bare rock.  Attempts to reforest—usually with pine (Pinus massoniana)—were rarely successful, since even this almost-indestructible tree could barely hold on in such conditions.  Moreover, farmers regularly burned the mountains, to clear brush and eliminate snakes and other wild animals.  Where this did not go on—as in fengshui woods and forest reserves—the natural semideciduous tropical forest eventually reasserted itself.  A magnificent wood at Tai Po Kau Forest Reserve now reminds Hong Kong of what it has lost.

The peninsula is tilting slowly from northwest to southeast, so new lands are emerging from Deep Bay.  Because of this and siltation, the bay is no longer deep.

Hydrology is dominated by the distant but powerful Pearl River, whose waters pour in a vast muddy stream through the estuary to the west.  The complex pattern of islands and rivers causes strong currents.  Narrow straits constrict the flow, forcing tidewater to race through fast and powerfully.  Turbulent currents boil up where they collide, as in the “Meeting-Waters Strait” east of Castle Peak.

Hong Kong has a classic monsoon climate.  Rainfall is concentrated in summer.  Annual rainfall is 70”-80” per year, but variations are substantial.  Hong Kong (average 86”) had 35” in 1963, about 160” in 1966.  About 25 typhoons and tropical storms affect the area per year, with one or two hitting dead on, producing violent winds and rains that may deposit 25”-30” of precipitation in two or three days.  Temperatures range from freezing (Hong Kong is the only place in the world’s tropics to have freezing temperatures on the coast) to nearly 100<o> F.  Summers are unbearably hot and humid.  Storms keep fishermen in harbor; it is a time of boredom, worry, and misery from soggy clothes that never get quite clean or quite dry.  Late falls and winters are dry and clear, usually delightful, though cold drizzle may go on for a day or two.  Fish run, and there are few storms to keep fishers in harbor.  This is the time for festivals, weddings, and general enjoyment.  Spring is a time of fogs and of sudden temperature shifts as the dry north wind and wet southeast wind battle for control.  Sickness is rampant at this season, and the boat people blame this wild fluctuations in weather, as well as the relative lack of green vegetables at this time.  Early fall brings typhoons.

Farm villages, built of hard-fired gray brick with gray tiled roofs, had changed relatively little since the Qing Dynasty.

The rural lands around the bay produced, in the 1960s and 1970s, rice, Chinese cabbages, ducks, pigs, chickens, and fruit.  More specialized crops included sugar cane, sweet potatoes, eggplants, peppers, papayas, lotus, water spinach, and much more.  Geese and water buffaloes provided a distinctive local touch.  Cantonese cultivators grew the high-quality rice and many of the vegetables, but Hakka farmers in the higher and hillier areas were also important, especially as vegetable and fruit gardeners.  The more level areas were incredibly productive.  Chinese cabbage yielded eight or more crops a year; rice two or three.

Rice yields were up to 2500 pounds or more per acre per crop, a substantial yield in those days.  Good yields in the Pearl River area today are closer to 10,000 pounds per acre per crop.  But rice is no longer grown in the Castle Peak area.  Saddest of all, when I was last in the area, I was told that the distinctive, flavorful, salt-tolerant rice of the northwest New Territories had become extinct.

Thanks to all this farming, food was abundant, cheap, and superb.  Farmers took enormous pride in the quality of their meats, grains, and vegetables.  Good quality brought high price; a pound of tender, succulent mustard greens brought about four times the price of a pound of old and tough ones.  The pork and rice of the area were deservedly famous.  Eggs were fresh and came from chickens and ducks fed on natural, varied diets—often largely weeds and bugs, since these birds were the main pest control agents on the farms.

 

3

The cultural ecology of south coastal China is a complex, elaborate system, brilliantly effective at producing human food, miserably unsuccessful at preserving forests and wildlife (Anderson 1988; Anderson and Anderson 1973; Elvin 2004; Marks 1998; Wen and Pimentel 1986a, 1986b; we, with Wen and Pimentel, emphasized the benefits to humanity, but Marks and Elvin emphasize the damage to wildlife).

Farmers directed rainwater and stream water into irrigation channels—vegetables higher up, then rice lower down.  The rice requires exquisite control of water levels, so it can be grown only where water is always available but can always be turned off or drained off.  Burning the hills and fields released nitrogen fixed by legumes and other plants.  More nitrogen was fixed by blue-green algae growing in the paddies.  This nitrogen was constantly recycled through animals and concentrated in their manure, used for fertilizer.

Still lower, where water was more difficult to drain, were buffalo and duck farms.  Below them, where water never drains away, were lotus and fish farms.  Then came brackish shallows, with shrimp and oyster farms.

At every stage, composting and recycling of all wastes—from human and animal dung to old ropes and sandals—continued to enrich the system.  Over the millennia, this process has massively transferred soil and nutrients—especially nitrogen—from the uplands to the deltas.  The mountains are eroded, often to bare rock, while the delta lands build rapidly outward to sea, and become ever richer with accumulated silts.  Much of the Pearl River Estuary area is sa tin (sha tian), literally “sand fields,” but, in local usage, “polder land.”  These fields have been reclaimed from the sea, as shallows fill up with silt.  This process continues actively today.   My friend Hugh Baker, with his inimitable turns of phrase, summarized my findings by saying that “it must make nitrogen atoms unfortunate enough to be in other parts of the world feel unloved” (Baker 1989:661-662).

Inevitably, some nutrients escape this almost perfectly closed system.  These do not escape for long.  They go to feed the fish that, until a generation ago, produced one of the greatest and most diverse fisheries in the world.  The boat people were those who caught these and brought them to land—thus closing the final loop in this endless chain.

The South Chinese rice agricultural system is certainly one of the wonders of the world.  Pace Mark Elvin and Robert Marks, south China was better than other areas even in its dealings with elephants and tigers; Native Americans seem to have exterminated the American equivalents without maintaining much population density or supporting a civilization.  There are still tigers and elephants in southern China, in spite of the hundreds of millions of people, but the last American elephant died (probably by spear-point) thousands of years ago.

The South Chinese system does not, however, reflect a society of rich farmers.  It was the product of a dictatorial imperial system that encouraged farming and farm technology but discouraged radical change (whether ecological, economic, or social).  Given the impossibility of getting ahead any other way, the farmers had to work harder and harder to wring a livelihood out of tiny parcels of land—parcels that got steadily smaller as population grew.  (The system survived by the growth of land seaward, but population growth usually ran faster than land area growth.)

As pointed out by Philip Huang (1990), this resulted in something rather similar to the “agricultural involution” that afflicted colonial Java (Geertz 1963).  Lack of capital and lack of legal opportunity led to “biological” innovation rather than mechanical or technical (Hayami and Ruttan 1985).  Farmers had to develop what they could develop without much cash and without any political freedom to experiment with new political-economic institutions.  Moreover, farmers had to have many children, to provide a labor force for the farms.  The typical completed family was around seven children (our data, but they are quite representative of old China; see e.g. Eastman 1988; Huang 1990).  With so many children, a family could not save or get ahead without some special circumstance.

Moreover, the ecological damage highlighted by Elvin and Marks was real enough.  Constant burning afflicted the high uplands.  This was terribly destructive to forests and terribly causative of flooding and erosion, but it did release nutrients in the form of ash and mineral salts.  Rains washed these nutrients off the high hills.

This is not to say the system stagnated; it did not.  It steadily grew, changed, and improved.  But the changes and improvements were small, and were of a “biological” and involutional nature, so they did not greatly help the burdened peasantry.  They enabled more and more people to live, but not many lived better.  Any catastrophe (such as the Taiping Rebellion and the wars of the 20th century) pushed millions over the brink into starvation.  Millions more died of endemic diseases such as malaria and bubonic plague (Carol Benedict’s superb work on plague, 1996, now a classic of medical history).

The system was at once a masterpiece and a deathtrap.

Within it, the boat people played a key role.  They caught the fish that provided 90% of the animal protein along the coast (Anderson 1988; Buck 1937).  They provided the water transport, essential to the system at all levels.  They were, thus, one group within a tightly-locked ecological and economic system, not a separate and independent people.  Yet, they had the independence of the free drifting life.  They were fully aware of the contradiction between these two aspects of their reality, and they felt the resulting tension; this fueled their constant talk of “independence.”  Cognitive dissonance was audible in many a waterfront discourse on such matters.

As the world runs out of resources, we all will have to return to something like the south Chinese system—intensive, sustainable, self-renewing.  One hopes we can do it without the ecological devastation of the wild, the totalitarian central government, and the local problems of violence and conflict.   Realistically, we probably cannot.  If we can, it will be because we learn from the south Chinese experience.

 

CHAPTER 3.  STRUCTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE

 

 

1

Castle Peak Bay, as of 1965, was a triangular bay, the head being at the north end.  This end was largely mudflats.  Wrecked boats settled on it, and a typhoon shelter (a mudflat except when typhoon waves filled it, and adequate only for small craft) took up part of its space.  By 1974, all this area was filled, but the rest of the bay—from the center south—was still a fairly deepwater harbor, with boats ranked in neat rows after the day’s fishing.  A small island, Mouse Island on maps, lay in the east central part of the bay.  Much beyond it, the roadstead was too open for anchorage.  The boat people called this island “Little Ghost Island,” because they abandoned dead children on it—not from poverty, but from adherence to an ancient tradition that no one seemed to want to talk about, partly because there was a rumor that in the past the children had not always been completely dead.  By 1965, most children were buried on shore.

The waterfront was lined with settlements.  On the remote and roadless south part of the west shore, and on around to the west side of Castle Peak, only a few houses and tiny communities existed.  They were as much as five miles from a road, and were isolated and highly traditional, often without electricity or other modernizations.  By contrast, the east side of the bay, on the main road from Kowloon through the western New Territories, was densely settled.  Shops, restaurants, and temples clustered around the wharf, which extended from the middle of the east shore out a few yards into the bay.  It provided mooring only for sampans.  To reach regular boats, one hired a sampan, rowed by a boat woman (very rarely a man).  These water taxis were a highly distinctive feature of life in all the boat settlements of those days.  The sampan women were in a position to know everything about everyone, and were prime sources of gossip.

Around the head of the pier, a cluster of shops, restaurants, and daily market stalls catered to the ordinary needs of the boat people.  Above the head of the pier, on a rocky hill, stood the Three Sages Temple, the main temple for land-dwellers.  The main one for boat people was the Tin Hau temple across the bay; another Tin Hau temple, near the Three Sages, was built in the late 1960s.

Along the bay southward were the fish dealers’ huge barnlike buildings.  More will be said of them.

 

2

The standard greetings in Cantonese are heui pin tou a? “Where are you going?” and sik jo faan mei? “Have you eaten yet?”

Where did people go, and what did they do and eat there?

Well before dawn the big boats slid out of harbor.  One by one the diesel engines roared into action, or, on sail-driven boats, creaking and heavy thuds showed that men and women were hoisting the rigging and the huge five-sided sails.  The cries of sailors giving orders waked sleepers.  If the weather was fair, hardly a boat is left in harbor by 6:00 a.m.

On the boats, each person began his or her appointed tasks.  The head of the family—normally the oldest man who is still actively working—directed the whole operation.  He guided the boat around other boats, rocks, and dangerous eddies.  If the boat was big and modern enough to have a regular captain’s wheel, he was at the wheel.  The second-in-command was usually the head’s eldest son or younger brother, but often his wife or even his mother.  He or she operated the rudder.  The other adults worked with the engine or raised the sail, and put gear in order.  A child was entrusted with the necessary task of placing three burning sticks of incense in the bow for the Bow Spirit, at the side of the boat for the Sea Surface Spirit, and at the mast for the Sky Spirit.

By dawn the boat was well out of harbor.  The women prepared breakfast, the senior woman directing the others.  People drifted to the cooking area; a bowl was sent aft to the tillerman at the rudder.  Breakfast was boiled rice with soy sauce, and, unless times are hard, with steamed or leftover vegetables and some sea food from yesterday’s catch.

Then the long day began.  Fishing went on without intermission till late afternoon.  Some time between 4:00 and 7:00 p.m. (depending on season and weather), the boat was back in harbor.  The catch of the day was loaded in a rowboat and brought to the laan.  The fisherman would be paid off—usually getting very little, for the laan kept most of the money to pay off the debts that inevitably accrued, at very high interest rates, from the fishermen’s needs for loans for boats and repairs.  The fisherman would go shopping at the pier head.  The man would buy small necessities for dinner and the household, return to his rowboat, and go back to the main boat.

The women would cook dinner—rice, vegetables, sea food.  Always, some of the catch was too small and misshapen to bring a good price, and this became the featured dinner dish.  Both men and women were expert at picking out fish and shellfish that were small and unlovely but exquisite-tasting.  They were also expert at cooking them by whatever method brought out the very best flavor.  I have never had anything like the fish dishes they cooked; no four-star restaurant can touch them.  (I have given extensive accounts of local food in Anderson 1970b:33-36; Anderson 1988; Anderson 2003.)

Everyone would then relax.  They might make nets, buy snacks from rowboat-plying hawkers, or tell stories.  They would certainly talk over the day’s affairs and waterfront news.  By 9:30 all were asleep.

 

This was the normative day.  By 1965, it was already only a memory for many:  the impoverished refugees who had to work at odd jobs, beg, or simply sit and pray and starve.  By 1974, the vast majority of the boat people were working shore jobs, mostly in the factories that sprang up after 1960 in San Hui.  By 1999, when I last visited the area, the boat way of life was a fading, nostalgic memory of people my age.

Even in its time of dominance, it was not the universal order.  Storms kept the boats in port all too often, especially in late summer and early fall.  Emergencies—especially engine repair—did the same.  Major festivals gave people an excuse not to fish.  At New Year the boats were idled for days.  Even the industrious knocked off three days, and many of the less industrious took off two weeks.

There were also those boat people who were not fishermen.  There were cargo handlers and lightermen.  There were boat hawkers and sampan girls.  There were shoreline workers:  longshoremen, restaurant workers, entertainers, small-scale fish retailers, odd jobbers—people who lived on boats still, but did not fish.  There were even some teachers and skilled repair workers who lived on boats.

This was no new thing.  History records not only that there has been constant movement back and forth from shore to boat, but that boat people have worked longshore jobs since time immemorial.  The boat people of nearby Shanam, in the 1920s, worked largely in salt-making (Wu 1936a, 1936b, 1937) and related shore jobs.

Boat people in harbor or on shore could indulge in the greatest of Cantonese pleasures, yam cha (“drinking tea”).  This ritual, now well known in California, involves going to a restaurant to drink tea and eat snacks.  In urban restaurants, it involves whole families sitting for hours around a table, gorging on wonderful tim sam (“dim sum,” small snacks).  “Tim sam” literally means “dot the heart”; compare the English “hits the spot.”  Drinking tea on the Castle Peak Bay waterfront was a different world.  The restaurants were small, rough, and built out on piles over the water.  (Castle Peak had a “floating restaurant,” actually moored on piles, but—like other, larger floating restaurants—it catered more to tourists than to local people.)  Yam cha was largely a man’s world, and largely about drinking tea—no one could afford snacks beyond minimal ones.

The senior man of a family would have his regular table.  A senior man might have his grown sons or other family members, including his wife or other senior women, but young women and girls were not allowed.  For a community leader, his regular table was his office.  A leader would be at his table at a well-known time, and anyone wishing to speak to him would know when and where to find him.

Land and water people came together over tea, signed contracts, made deals, discussed economics and weather and pleasures, planned coming festivals.  The fishermen talked endlessly of how the fish were running, and who was catching what.  Drinking tea was thus part of work, not just a pleasure.  The Cantonese rule that deals had to be closed over drinks and food was one of those cultural rules that brooked no exceptions, and so a negotiation too small to be worth a dinner had to go on and to close over tea.

While the man drank tea, his wife went to market.  Crowds of women rode the local bus (never the fancier long-range bus, though it stopped at all the right places).  Within recent memory, shopping had been a senior man’s job, for women and young people were afraid of the prejudice and harsh treatment they got on shore.  Some still left it to the men.  Most, however, were willing to go as far as the public market in San Hui; it was safely near the bay.  However, boat women who were loud and volatile on the water became quiet and reserved.  Children clung close and tried to be invisible.  This was land people’s territory.

At San Hui, the boat people bought vegetables, hardware, clothing, and, very rarely, meat.  (More routine needs like rice, eggs, oil, and medicinal herbs could be bought on the pier.)  Such local items as papayas, roasted chestnuts, and other fruits and nuts were rare treats.

Everyone then returned to the boats, to spend the day washing, cleaning, and mending or making nets.  Children played, often swimming in the harbor.

 

3

Food was important to the boat people, not only as sustenance but as marker of social occasions and as one of life’s greatest pleasures.  The boat people ate well, and spent a great deal of time cooking, eating, and talking about food.  Like other Cantonese, they spent a good deal of their discretionary income on dining out.  This was not, however, merely for pleasure; dining had major social functions.

The ease of getting fish in those good years meant that few active fisher families lacked for basic sustenance and for high-quality protein.  Valuable fish were sold for many times their weight in rice; less valuable catches were the family dinner.

This was fortunate, for the caloric needs of the boat people were enormous.  Anyone fishing on the winter sea faced horrific conditions.  Fishers had to draw nets by hand, handle awkward rigging and rowboats, and move heavy equipment and heavy fish-baskets around the deck—all on a pitching, rolling boat in freezing wind and soaking cold spray.  Summer, with its enervating heat, frequent diseases, and constant thunderstorms, was not much better.  Under such circumstances, an adult man needed at least 5,000 calories for a long day’s work, and we saw people eat more.  I was once challenged on this by a critic who had looked up “fishing” in a table of nutritional needs and found it required only 3,000 calories.  Of course, the table-maker was thinking of recreational fishing.  I had to point out, patiently, that dangling a hook and line in a lake was not quite the same thing as facing a winter storm on the South China Sea.

One typical breakfast for an adult man facing a winter day was fat pork ribs, heavily sugared, and washed down with raw alcohol.  This tasted to the men as awful as it sounds, but it was often the only way they could choke down enough calories in the few minutes available.  Work without breakfast could easily mean death from hypothermia and exhaustion.  Lunch and dinner involved several bowls of rice, with sea food, soy sauce, ginger, and perhaps a bit of something else.

Vegetables were in short supply; they were expensive (especially in late winter) and hard to store.  The boat people knew all too well the result of going for weeks with almost no vegetables or fruits:  sores that did not heal, sore mouths, infections, and all the other symptoms of scurvy—the sailors’ eternal scourge.  Knowing nothing of vitamin C, they believed it was caused by yit hei (“heating qi”), but they knew the cure well enough; experience showed which vegetables and fruits were most effective.  They saw this as proof that the foods had cooling qi.  We noted that the foods were those highest in vitamin C content.

Serious food was divided into faan (cooked rice) and sung (prepared items to put on it).  In addition to these came ko or kuo (fruits and nuts), tim sam, noodles (min), and other snacks; children away from home were the main snackers.

Social occasions were marked by special foods, usually high in animal protein.  First in importance were the choice sea foods of the area.  These were readily available.  Castle Peak Bay had the reputation of having some of the best—the water was clean and the fish abundant.   The standard shore dinner included shrimp, crabs, and fish; the favorites among the latter were the groupers (sekpaan, Epinephalus spp.), with the pomfret second.  Other fish, as well as fish roes, cuttlefish, squid, and other sea creatures, followed in order, with the lowly sharks and rays being among the least choice.  Good seafood was kept alive in clean water.  A dead fish or shrimp was a second-rate commodity.

These foods were usually used in feasts that were primarily to entertain and interact.  Feasts for more structured occasions, especially religious ones, demanded certain specific land foods.  Chicken was the most general of these, being virtually a marker of ritual or ceremonial occasions, from weddings to ancestral sacrifices and from store openings to community gatherings.

Pork was virtually universal at all land people’s meals above the plainest level.  The boat people got far less of it (and far more sea food), but still had it on the table at every special occasion of any great importance.  However, unlike the land people, they did not so often have it at dinners that were merely fun and good fellowship.  Moreover, the land people often had large hunks of roast pork, by itself; the boat people usually stretched it by cutting it into small pieces and cooking it with less expensive vegetables.  Duck, rare and exceptional for everyone, was also rarer on boat decks than on land tables.  Finally, expensive, choice vegetables were definitely a land luxury; the boat people had few enough of even the cheap kinds.  Only at large weddings and other truly exceptional feasts did mushrooms or blanched chives or small cabbages enter the boat world.  Certain foods, such as shark fin, duck with cashew nuts, and steamed freshwater mullet, were especially expensive, and thus marked truly exceptional occasions.

A boat feast, then, was usually of sea food with chicken dishes and a dish or two of cut-up pork with vegetables.  A land feast was largely chicken and pork dishes, with some expensive sea food and some expensive, luxurious vegetables.  The actual code was far more complex than this, and one could write a book on the specifics of social-occasion marking through food in Cantonese culture (see Anderson 1988, Watson and Watson 2004).

For the boat people, fish had to be cooked a certain way.  Groupers were steamed and eaten with ginger and other flavorings.  Pomfret was steamed and usually covered with a white sauce.  Sea bass was chunked and stir-fried.  Yellow croakers went into sweet-and-sour sauce (the only time anyone made sweet-sour sauce on the waterfront, sweet-sour pork being considered uncouth).  Crabs required black bean sauce or red vinegar.   Fresh shrimp were generally simply boiled, or stir-fried with various flavorings.  People were surprisingly conservative about these methods.  A diner choosing to cook a fish in a non-canonical way had to explain why he had “wasted a perfectly good fish.”

 

Patterns of clothing in rural south China distinguished different ethnic groups.  The boat people wore loose black cotton pants and shirts, and mushroom-shaped hats made of hard bamboo slips or palm leaves.  The black cotton cloth was light but incredibly tough, withstanding salt water and heavy wear.  In winter, people adopted the layered look, with thin undergarments and wadded jackets.  For formal occasions, dark blue often substituted for black.

In the mid-1960s, most people still wore traditional clothing.  By the 1970s, cheap western-style clothing had become rather common.  It had to be very cheap to compete, because the old-fashioned outfits outlasted western-style garments by months or years.

Children wore brighter colors, and young ones added many protective charms, including tiny models of floats.  Most women and many men wore jade bracelets, because in an accident these would shatter instead of one’s arm bone (a religious belief, not a scientific fact; most people could recite counter-cases).

 

Recreation usually involved socializing, eating, drinking, and relaxing.  The young engaged in horseplay—chasing, swimming, pickup ball, and miscellaneous energetic activity.  Land people included in their stereotype of boat people an odd belief that the boat people could not swim.  Anyone who visited the bay on a warm sunny day could see the error of that.

More serious time-killing usually took the form of gambling; older women in particular played mah-jongg and related games by the hour.  A standard way of saying someone was living the easy life was to say “he/she can play mah-jongg all day.”  Mah-jongg was a noisy game, usually played on a table of thin, resonant wood.  It was an older adults’ game; playing it was a privilege of seniority.  Younger adults did not play.  No one won or lost much money; now and then someone would win HK $100, but this would be lost again in a few days.

On the other hand, the boat people were largely a sober lot.  Robert Antony in Froth Floating on the Sea (2003:140-150) provides lurid accounts of the activities of South Chinese pirates—boozing, whoring, gambling, and otherwise acting like pirates.  (Those of the Caribbean, however idealized by Disney, were, in reality, the same or worse.)  The boat people of Castle Peak Bay told the same stories of such rough elements, but they were quick to distance themselves from such lifestyles.  Their difficult life, demanding not only hard and dangerous work but also extreme thrift, honesty, and mutual aid, allowed very little recreation.  Almost all profit went to pay off loans.  True, what little was left very often went to gambling and alcohol, but that was more about maintaining social ties than about debauchery.  Tiny sums of money, a few days a year, hardly permitted debauchery.  Even the relatively well-off could not indulge often.  The boat people carefully calculated feasting and drinking, and gambling to a lesser extent, to maximize social ties.  These activities were not mere amusement.

Music delighted everyone.  Radios, festival music, instrument solos, and folksinging all made the waterfront a vibrant, wonderful cacophony that could be heard a mile away.  During the day, one was usually able to listen to several radios, each playing at top volume, each tuned to a different station—and often someone was singing over it all.

Well into the 1960s, the boat people were known for their “salt water songs” (haam seui ko; Anderson 1975; Wu 1937). These songs had been famous throughout south China for centuries.  These included some traditional folksongs and poems (with set texts), but most were freely improvised, blues-like sequences.  Singers, usually young, displayed great musical and poetic ability.  Singing was a typical feature of courtship (usually of the “light love” variety), but salt water songs also included funeral laments, marriage songs, complaints about hard life, and simple time-killing songs for dull hours on the water.

In 1965, when I began to record salt water songs, many people knew a rich selection, but radio music had already made great inroads.  By the 1970s, salt water songs were dead, and only a few people remembered them.  One of the greatest folk song forms in the world, a tradition fully comparable to American blues or Scottish ballads, had disappeared without trace.  To my knowledge, my recordings, done on a wretched old tape recorder that barely played, are all that survives (the tapes are deposited in the Hong Kong Museum).

The salt water songs were a true expression of boat culture: beautiful, intense, personal, and usually highly improvisational.  They combined classic themes and images in ever-new ways, the better to express deep truths in a language that was at once highly metaphoric and strikingly direct.  They ranged from gloriously ribald to delicately sensitive.  They treated the full emotions of the singers, revealing much that could never be spoken.  They focused boat life and experience into a single rich form.  They were one of the great achievements of the human spirit, and they should never have died.  Nothing like them will ever appear again.

 

4

Predominantly fishermen, the boat people had an amazing knowledge of marine life.  Dr. William Cheung, the Stanford-trained fisheries expert who generously provided most of the identifications for me, had kept a running record of the knowledge, and we estimated that the boat people of Hong Kong knew over 1,400 named taxa of marine life.  I recorded about 400 names at Castle Peak Bay.  These covered everything from seabirds, sea snakes, and sea turtles to shrimps, sea cucumbers and even humbler bottom fauna.  (All the names can be found in Anderson 1972; I will stick largely to English here.)

Like most people, they recognized life-form categories:  birds (jeuk), snakes (se), turtles (kuai) fish (yu), decapod crustacea (ha, including shrimps, prawns and lobsters), crabs (hai), and snails (lo).  These were basic large divisions of the animate world.

They also had a range of smaller but comparably basic divisions—small life-form categories, or merely the residual taxa that Berlin called “unique beginners.”  (No one has ever really solved the question of how to regard these terms.)  These included Cantonese categories exactly equivalent to English labels: clams, squids, cuttlefish, octopi, sea cucumbers, oysters, roaches, horseshoe crabs, starfish, jellyfish, and sea urchins.  Except for squids with a very few categories, these taxonomic units were not further subdivided.  There was only one marine type of each.  (The roach had a land exemplar, however; water roaches—seui jaat— were crustacea, Lygyda spp., but seen as marine forms of the cockroach, kak jaat.)  Porpoises and dolphins were often called “sea pigs,” which would make them another sea exemplar of a land category.

Cantonese had no categories equivalent to “shellfish,” “crustaceans,” “mollusks,” or “cephalopods.”  The boat people simply saw no reason to lump highly disparate creatures under broad headings of that sort.  English keeps “squids” and “cuttlefish” separate, as Cantonese does, though the learned scientific term “cephalopod” has gained some currency.

One category somewhat problematic to me at first was lung, “dragons.”  The boat people knew, and claimed to see on occasion, three or four types of these.  Most of these remained invisible to me, but one, the cham lung (“sinking dragon” or “deep-diving dragon”), was quite visible; it was the sturgeon.  The tentacles and distinctive scales of this strange, primitive fish made it seem more dragon than fish, though it was uncomfortably intermediate between these two categories (see Chapter 7).

In general, Chinese classification is strikingly similar to English, and thus very different indeed from many classification systems around the world.  Not only does it have more or less the same structure and categories; it is also rather complex, with many terms at each level.  It has many folk species, for instance.  This contrasts sharply with North American Native systems, including the Haida, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Yucatec Maya ones I have studied.  To my knowledge, all Native American systems are very heavy on folk generics, very light on life-form categories and folk specifics.  They are “shallow” taxonomies.  Apparently it is easier to learn a simple list of names until the list becomes overwhelmingly large (Hunn 1990).

I suspect the deeper and more complex Chinese system results from China’s long history as a mercantile civilization.  I think that this history has produced particular pressures to name certain beings in certain ways—as a similar history certainly did in Europe.  Plant names can be more easily traced than fish names in Chinese history (Anderson 1991), and thus provide a valuable comparison.  Sources from the earliest period of Chinese history show a Native American type of plant taxonomy, with many one-word terms comprising folk generics.  Folk specifics were added steadily over time, as the Chinese discovered more and more plants that were obviously related to familiar plants.  For instance, the familiar willow lent its name to the Near Eastern pomegranate, which arrived in the early medieval period and was labeled “stone willow.”  Then the Portuguese brought the guava from South America in the 16th century; the guava was called the “barbarians’ stone willow” because of its similarity to a pomegranate.  The Portuguese were “barbarians” not just because of Chinese prejudice, but also because of less-than-lovable behavior; more than a few were smugglers and swashbucklers.

Brent Berlin points out that people classify under one terminological head those organisms that appear to make up a “natural” group to members of the culture (Berlin 1992).  Berlin, like Scott Atran (1990), tends to think such groups are natural—they are typically biological groupings, given by shared evolution and genetics, and people see them as such.  Where the folk are clearly not doing this, as in classing whales with fish, it is because of understandable mistakes; numerous similarities link whales and fish.  The boat people realized that porpoises and whales are “like pigs” internally.  They classed them with fish on the basis of surface similarities, but also called them “sea pigs.”  As in the case of the sturgeon, this appearance of belonging to two opposed basic categories made these mammals anomalous, and thus uncanny (see Chapter 7).

Other anthropologists, especially those who have studied systems radically different from English or Chinese, see taxonomy as much more arbitrary, much less grounded in “real” biology (e.g. Ellen 1993; Forth 2004).  Obviously, the anthropologists’ experience matters here[1].

Looking over world systems, one cannot miss a universal tendency to “carve nature at the joints” (as taxonomist folklore has it)—to see real biological divisions.  Such divisions tend to make sense; they capture useful truths.

However, when other, even more useful truths are captured by a quite different classification system, people may ignore whatever joints nature may have.  For instance, some systems noted by Ellen and Forth class bats with birds, but class flightless birds as something else entirely.  This makes perfect sense if flight is a key characteristic but other obvious biological markers (feathers, beaks, etc.) are not.

More interesting are basic differences that these and many other systems make between spiritually powerful creatures and other, lesser ones.  We shall see below that the boat people have such a division, but they do not make it part of their basic taxonomic system.  Many other peoples do.  However, Native North American groups such as the Haida made a far more serious issue of spiritual-power classification.  One cannot understand their system without knowing both local biology and Haida religion.  This did not keep them from having an enormous and biologically very sophisticated taxonomy and knowledge base for marine life.

Even scientific taxonomists provided us with some groupings that seemed reasonable, but turned out to be genetically far off base.  Fungi were included with plants (they are genetically closer to animals).  American vultures were lumped with African ones (American vultures are storks; African vultures are close to eagles).  So, when a society finds it expedient to recognize ceremonial value, fightlessness (of birds), or stem shape (of plants) as basic, we should not be surprised, even if it means “carving nature at joints” totally different from the joints recognized by scientists or folk English speakers.

The boat people found it to their advantage to develop a classification system close to the scientific one.  This interested me, and I asked them to explain.  They said that not only do all sharks, all groupers, all squids look alike, they also act alike and often taste alike.  If you want to catch new species, you can make certain predictions based on the behavior of the ones you know.  If you want to sell them, you can expect to get about the same price, or at least be in the same pricing universe; sharks are very cheap except for the valuable fins, groupers are all valuable, squid are in between.

Broad, basic terms of the sort described above were broken down into what my teacher Brent Berlin calls “folk generics.”  These are the basic terms of reference to animals and plants:  one-word or two-word, easily-learned names that can be applied to a group of very similar organisms.  These are sometimes broken down into “folk species.”  In American English, “trout” and “shark” are folk generics.  Folk species within these categories include brook trout, brown trout, rainbow trout, white shark, sand shark, and so forth.  Normally,  a folk species name is made by adding an adjective to a folk generic.

Such categorization is dynamic.  Most Americans have “salmon” as a folk generic, with chum salmon, pink salmon, and so on as folk species.  These Americans see salmon as very similar, and probably very few can distinguish the species.  By contrast, the Northwest Coast Native peoples never recognized such a generic.  They have always seen the many species of salmon in their waters as totally different fish.  They find it preposterous that anyone should lump them.  This pattern has spread to Anglo settlers, who now use “chum,” “pink,” “sockeye,” and so on as folk generics, and use the word “salmon” only when referring to aggregate economic data and the like.  They laugh at tourists and other ignorant folk who cannot instantly see that a sockeye is totally different from a pink.  (This paragraph is based on my field work in British Columbia, 1984-1987.)

The boat people’s fish terminology turned out to be as neat, straightforward, and well-organized as kinship, but there were huge differences in people’s knowledge of it, leading to smaller but real differences in people’s classification systems.  Some were experts in one thing, some in another.  Trawlermen knew all sorts of small, scruffy marine items that hook-and-line fishermen ignored.

Hook-and-liners knew the fine distinctions between the many grouper species (or rockfish; sekpaan in Cantonese; to scientists, Epinephalus spp. and close relatives).  Trawlermen just called them all “red” or “green” or “spotted groupers.”  This was one case where one could see why nature was carved at the joints.  The hook-and-liners explained to me that each sekpaan has its own behavior:  its own favored habitat, depth, wariness of the hook, favorite bait, and so on.  They could give excellent species-specific accounts of these matters.  The trawlermen caught groupers in huge net hauls, and did not have any occasion or reason to know the differences between different species.

In all cases, folk generics corresponded to scientific taxonomic units, but the units varied in size.  Sekpaan corresponded almost perfectly to the scientific genus Epinephalus, but sa yu, “sharks,” corresponded to several families—all the fish we call sharks, hammerheads, and guitarfish in English.  The boat people were aware of real biological relationships, but they were not concerned with making folk genera comparable in extension.

They were equally well aware of real biological differences.  For instance, they recognized that the almost exactly similar mudskippers and walking gobies were quite different biological entities.  The hook-and-liners recognized different species of sekpaan that biologists could barely distinguish; the hook-and-liners knew, moreover, that one species occurred on very rocky and rugged bottoms, while another virtually indistinguishable one preferred pebbles and sand.  Marine biologists, if they knew this, knew it only because they had learned it from the fishermen.

Clearly, Berlin is right about at least some folk biologists.  They do know “nature” very well indeed, and know how to carve it at joints that are biologically real .

Folk specifics usually corresponded closely to biologists’ species, but sometimes a folk specific lumped a whole set of biological species, especially in the case of small organisms whose biological species look much alike.  Shrimps and small, worthless fish were the main examples.

Unlike the Maya (whom I have worked with since), the boat people had many folk generics divided into folk species.  In addition to groupers and sharks, there were species of rays, croakers, soles, seabass, and many other common types. They coined many names that were, or functioned as, folk specifics by adding adjectives to life-form categories:  “spotted shrimp,” “dragon shrimp” (lobster), and so on.

Turning a term like sa yu into a folk species term involved dropping the life-form category yu and adding an adjective, as in pak sa, “white shark,” apparently identical to the western white shark (Charcharodon carcharias).

 

This biologically-grounded taxonomic system was the basic system—what Berlin calls a basic or general-purpose taxonomy.  It was the one always used when what one wanted to do was simply give a name to something.  It was the system always used to supply a name when I asked “what’s that”?  (Not, you remember, “what’s its name?…”)

However, the boat people used other ways of classifying fish.  These were all ad hoc, functional systems.  They cross-cut the biological taxonomy.  I recorded the following:

–Price.  The price mattered a great deal.  So everyone knew which were the high-priced fish, and even the exact prices that the better ones brought from the dealers and in the markets.  Many were worthless, or good only as “duck feed fish.”   Some fish were good only for salting as haam yu “salt fish.”

–Catching method:  trawler fish, hook-and-line fish, gill-netter fish, and so on.

–Life cycle stages.  Amazingly common and uniform around the world is a tendency for fishermen to divide common fish into life cycle stages.  In English, for instance, salmon are fry, then parr, then smolt, then finally mature salmon.  Eels begin as elvers.  Similarly, for the boat people, tiny fry were “flowers” (fa), and there were size terms for sole and a few other species.

–Life type.  Oysters were differentiated by where they grew:  rock oysters, tile oysters, and so on.

–Metaphor.  Very rarely, a human was called a shark or a dragon.  One might have thought the boat people would more often use marine metaphors, but they did not.

–Religious importance.  Several species were san yu, “sacred fish.”  This very important category will be discussed in Chapter   .

These ad hoc functional schemes were never used to produce ordinary conversational or formal names.  They arose only in context.  On the other hand, they were important, formalized, and frequently discussed—especially the price system.

The boat people certainly recognized that the basic taxonomy was grounded in nature—in the reality of the fish and their obvious relationships or similarities.  They recognized that this was a totally different classification method from that used in the cross-cutting systems, which were based entirely on human concerns.  The boat people thus paralleled the thinking of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962) in his differentiation of “scientific” thought and “wild” thought.  Scientific thought tries to understand the nonhuman world in its own terms.  Wild thought understands the nonhuman world in strictly human terms, projecting human categories onto it, seeing it only as a site for human use-values and metaphors.  The boat people’s sharp distinction between the basic taxonomy and the ad hoc cross-cutting systems closely parallels this division.

The Yucatec Maya, whom I have studied since, have a similar distinction, but it seems less sharp.  In fact, recording the related Itzaj Maya language, C. A. Hofling and the Itzaj Maya scholar Felix Tesucún (1997) do not distinguish a basic from ad hoc, special-purpose systems.  They provide only one taxonomy, incorporating functional, human-centered categories as part of the whole system.  The human-centered terms are subcategories within a basically nature-centered taxonomy.  Since one of the two is a fluent native speaker, this must be psychologically real to the Itzaj.  It would certainly not be psychologically real for the Yucatec, who do distinguish basic from special-purpose taxonomies.  However, even among the Yucatec, the division is not as clear as among the Cantonese.

The whole nomenclatural system provides a wonderful simple case of a cultural classification system.  The terms hang together neatly, are organized in sharply defined cross-cutting categorization modes, and apply quite precisely to the natural world.  People use the terms in a flexible, adaptable, but straightforward fashion, to talk about fish.  Practice enters, especially in the cross-cutting ad hoc systems.  These change rapidly according to felt needs in interaction and discourse.  On the other hand, the basic structure of Chinese fish taxonomy has remained the same for thousands of years, as we know from classical texts.

This makes a very neat model of culture:  long-lasting structural framework, shorter-term changes and adaptations, and instant accommodation to the much more fluid, rich, complicated world of actual discursive practice.  (On the general theory all these matters see Hanks 1990.)  This may be one of the most important theoretical conclusions I learned from my boat friends.

It also makes clear the degree to which traditional people know their environment.  The boat people’s system was biologically sophisticated and knowledge-rich.  I could give only a brief summary of their incredible working knowledge even in my more detailed books, and will not even attempt it here.  Suffice it to say that one could easily fill an encyclopedia with Cantonese fishermen’s knowledge of sea life, to say nothing of ships, winds, waters, and the rest of their environment.

Comparing the boat people’s system with modern biological knowledge helps appreciate how much they knew, and also what we can learn from it, but the comparison is also interesting for what it tells us about human thought.  This being the case, we need comparisons of the boat system not only with the biological, but also with the Maya, the Haida, the various systems studied by Ellen and Forth, and, last but far from least, with classical Chinese fish lore.  Such comparisons will have to await further research.

The currently popular myth that “indigenous knowledge” is “culturally constructed,” and thus not similar to or close to modern biological knowledge, does not stand up under investigation.  Most fishermen’s knowledge of marine environment and biology was scientifically impeccable, and modern marine biologists learned a great deal from the boat people.  The boat people sometimes phrased it differently, but it could be translated into bioscientific terms with ease.  Cultural classification systems are, of course, culturally constructed (by definition), but that does not mean they are out of touch with reality.  Many anthropologists seem to think that there is an opposition between cultural construction and “reality” (whatever that is).  Of course not.  Culture is adaptive; it is the knowledge we need to live our lives.  It has to be realistic.  It is never a perfect reflection of reality; that would require perfect information, and humans never have that.  Culture provides useful knowledge, not perfect knowledge.

Yet, equally interesting, and common in China as elsewhere, is the combination of highly perceptive and expert biology with a number of beliefs that seem flagrantly and obviously counter-evidential.  Dragons and sacred fish were important to the boat people.  The boat people sometimes saw dragons writhing in the clouds of a typhoon or violent storm; fear made the vapor seem malignantly alive. Classical Chinese biology—like folkbiologies around the world—includes many other strange creatures, ranging from phoenixes to crane-riding Immotals.   The sacred fish were real enough, but were fish that seemed anomalous in some way, and thus uncanny; they were thus out of the normal realm.

Very often, such “mistakes” arise by logical extension of reasonable beliefs that approximate reality.  I have described elsewhere (Anderson 1996) how Chinese ideas of nutrition and of landscape evolved naturally from correct observations.  Such beliefs as are incompatible with modern bioscience were logically deduced from correct observations; the logic was imperfect only because the observations were limited by the investigative and theorizing capacities of a premodern society.

We need more and better analyses of how such knowledge systems arise, and how they serve to mediate between people and environment.

 

5

To live, the boat people had to make money.  Chinese society has been market-oriented for millennia, and much ink has been spilled over the question of why China did not develop capitalism before the west did.

The boat people had an ambiguous view of money.  This showed clearly in a proverb they very often cited:  “Money is like dung; honesty and goodness are worth a thousand gold.”  Money is dung—but is the measure of value and goodness, too!  The ambiguity is, however, less real than appearance suggests.  In fact, money per se is like dung; misers and penny-pinchers got no respect.  Money used for sociability, community, and mutual aid was a different thing.  Using money thus was the very soul of honesty and goodness.

The proper boat person, especially the male, thus immediately converted any spare wealth into social capital (a phrase I used in my original Castle Peak monograph, before Bourdieu made it famous [Anderson 1970b:83]; maybe I should claim credit).  He throws feasts, supports festivals, cultivates friendships, enjoys himself, and helps others out.  Such a man is gaining min, “face,” of which more anon.  Actual behavior ranged from almost complete indifference to money to grasping skinflint attitudes, but most boat people, especially leaders, stood close to the ideal.

Poor people had mixed standing.  Unfortunate or hard-working ones were pitied.  Lazy, dishonest, or incompetent ones were despised—not so much because they were immoral as because, in the words of one land-dweller, “the poor can’t help you.”

Rich people did not get automatic respect.   They would have to deal with gossip to the effect they got their wealth dishonestly, especially if they did not spread it around.

The ideal, then, was to get money industriously; grasping or too-clever tactics were acceptable.  But, however the money came, one should share the good fortune with as many people as possible, and in as helpful a way as possible.  Helping with religious festivals was perhaps the most prestigious.  The believers saw these festivals as the best hope for guaranteeing good weather, good health, and good luck to the whole community.  The skeptics saw that at least the festivals brought the community together as nothing else could.

Traditionally, the boat people of the western New Territories made their living on the water and from the water.  Most of them were fishers (for full detail on fishing, too specialized to cover here, see Anderson 1970b, 1972).  The rest made their living as cargo-carriers, longshoremen, fish market workers, and other shoreline occupations.  A large number, often women or older people with limited options, made their living carrying passengers in sampans.  Many others lived as boat-based vendors.  They rowed among the moored fishing boats during the evening, selling everything from vegetables and oil to firecrackers and incense.  Like vendors in Elizabethan London, they had beautiful, musical calls to advertise their wares; these calls were among the most characteristic and nostalgic sounds of quiet evenings on the water.  Cries were more numerous and varied in the past, said the fishermen, who added that they deeply missed those old sounds.

At Tai O, but not at Castle Peak, some boat girls made their living by singing songs and otherwise entertaining young men.  Sex was not necessarily involved, nor was it excluded.  No one considered these girls to be prostitutes, and no stigma attached to their occupation.  Quite the reverse; by singing folk songs and sometimes classical Chinese poems, they brought highly valued cultural delights to the waterfront.

Within recent memory, smuggling and piracy had also been important occupations (Antony 2003; Murray 1987).  Piracy was long extinct in 1965, but smuggling opium and running refugees out of China were still side occupations for a few fishermen.  I had no opportunity to investigate this, for obvious reasons, but I was told by reliable friends that it was rare at Castle Peak.  Most such activity was concentrated in the bigger, more urban ports.

At Castle Peak, all these nonfishing boat people, whatever their occupation, lived on sampans or on stationary craft.  At Tai O, most boat people lived on houses—built and maintained like boat cabins—on pilings over tidewater.  The tidal “streets” left between rows of houses became mud at low tide, neither navigable or walkable.  These streets were known as chung (no character known), a word that sounds to me suggestively like the Thai equivalent klong.  (There is a theory that klong is cognate with jiang, the traditional Chinese name of the Yangzi River.  Central China still has some Thai speakers, and, as noted above, the Hong Kong area was probably Thai-speaking—in the broad sense of the word “Thai”—within early historic times.)

Life on the old boats was wonderful, vibrant, and fascinating.  It was even beautiful, for the boat people kept their boats clean, varnished, and shipshape.  The old craft were striking enough to show up in every tourist photograph of Hong Kong—even long after they had disappeared except as photographers’ props!  Many of the furnishings—jars, tackle, pans, altar sculptures—were true works of art.

By 1965, unsuccessful fishermen and poorer refugees from China were moving out of the fishery to work in the factories, shops, and cafes that were opening in San Hui.  No one we talked to did this voluntarily; all were forced into it by being unable to raise capital to maintain a boat.  After that time, decline set in, until the fishery ended.

In 1965 and 1966, the fishery still employed the largest number of people of any activity around the bay.  Some 400 species of marine life were more or less commonly found, and another several hundred potentially occurred somewhere in the area.  I recorded about 100 species commonly taken and sold at Castle Peak Bay.  Most important commercially were groupers, soles, croakers, goldenthread, and shrimp.  Pomfret, crab, and flathead made up a more specialized group of species.

Huge old hand trawlers—magnificent sailing-junks from another era—dominated the skyline.  The newer, sleeker, diesel-powered trawlers, net-hauling booms lowered for fishing or raised out of the way, moved around them like wolves among bears.  Trawlers drag huge nets over the bottom, or close to it, and catch mostly trash fish and larger but less valuable species; the slow hand-trawlers specialized in catching vast masses of tiny sea life used for duck feed.

Below and around and among these were the small gill-netters that stretched long curtains of nets from the water surface, blocking the paths of migrating schools of fish.  They made most of their money in spring, when the yellow croakers (Pseudosciaenia crocea) ran north to breed in the Yangtze area and the China Sea (on this fishery, see Chu 1960).  By 1975, the yellow croakers were declining, victims of pollution and overfishing.  Gill-netting was a dying art.  Sweet-sour yellow croaker, one of the superb signature dishes of Castle Peak Bay restaurants, was almost a thing of the past.  A few purse-seiners, similar to gill-netters but using smaller nets that surrounded fish, worked the shallows; they caught small amounts of small fish.  This was a chronically low-paying fishery; purse-seining paid much better in the eastern New Territories.  (Barbara Ward’s community, Kau Sai, in the east, was largely a purse-seiner port).

Smaller still were the hook-and-line boats that specialized in catching high-quality larger fish for the fresh-fish market.  Some of these boats were no more than sampans, but they had cabins and housed families.  Many of these were not mechanized.  The ancient five-sided mat sail, amazingly adaptable for sailing close to the wind, held its own among the aging bus engines and other retooled motors that drove most of the fleet.  One reason was that the engines constantly broke down, and the trouble and expense of repairing them ruined many a family.  Therefore, less affluent or more traditional families avoided them.

In the fresh fish market, hook-and-line fish took pride of place, since net-caught fish were dead on arrival.  This allowed the tiny hook-and-lining sampans to make a living.  What they lacked in catching power and range they made up in value of product.   Some species fetched many times as much as others, and fashions tended to change; the fishers had to keep up on fickle tastes.

 

The number of people on a boat was a function of its size.  The hand-trawlers had, by my census count, up to 47 people living on them.  I heard of junks with 60 to 80 residents.  Often there were passengers as well.

One other type of boat was the houseboat.  In addition to old wrecked trawlers and other craft still used for housing, there were many houseboats, some large enough to serve as schools and meeting halls.  They had large square cabins, and could not travel; they were anchored in place, except when ponderously towed to shelter during typhoons.

One important type of houseboat was the live fish boat.  Several of these lined the southeast shore of the bay, where they sold live seafood to gourmets.  Tied to the boats were small, low barges with the bottoms replaced by chicken wire; sea water circulated freely for the fish, shrimp, crabs, and lobsters.  (Such boats are known as “well-smacks” in England.)  The live fish boat owners lived in their small houseboats, surrounded by these well-smacks, and bought the fish from specialized small fishermen (mostly hook-and-liners) for resale to the connoisseurs.

Life on the boats was not necessarily poor or uncomfortable.  Medium-sized ones had chickens and a dog or cat.  Big ones might add ducks, geese, and even a pig for New Year.  Flowering plants and medicinal herbs in pots graced the stern, and many sterncastles were magnificent floating gardens.

 

The fishermen sold most of their catch to the fish buyers.  Here and elsewhere, when talking about sales and economic interaction, I use the term “fishermen,” because dealings with the buyers and similar powerful shore folk were invariably carried out by the senior men.  The women had a full share in decision-making and fund allocation on the boats, and did their share of the fishing; indeed, the boat world was the least patriarchal in Hong Kong.  But land people, especially big businessmen, were dangerous; women avoided them.

Castle Peak Bay was especially interesting as a last holdout of the Imperial Chinese merchandising institution of fully private fish-buying.  Elsewhere in Hong Kong, and of course in China, government had stepped in to market the fish.  Only at Castle Peak did the fish buyers still control the industry.

The fish buyers’ dark, barnlike structures lined the southeast part of the shoreline.  The sheds, and by extension their owners, were known as laan (“pen,” and by extension “dealing place, auction shed”).  The backs of these structures projected over the water, raised on high pilings.  Boats came in and offloaded fish in baskets, which were carried up flights of steps (underwater at high tide) to the main shed floor.  The other end of the laan opened on the main road. These dealers—there were 18 of them in 1965, fewer in 1974—bought fish directly from the fishermen, packed and graded them, and resold them to middlemen from the cities, who came out at evening to buy lots of fish.  These they would put in baskets and leave on the curb, there to be picked up in the wee hours by the dealers’ trucks.  These city buyers, in turn, sold the fish to retailers in the urban markets.  Caught between the powerful laans and the sharp urban retail dealers, and forced to drive trucks in the wee hours, these city buyers did not have an easy life.  The laans took 6% of the city buyers’ price for themselves, remitting the rest to the fishermen—but only after debt repayments had also been extracted.  Debt repayments were calculated such that the fishermen’s usual margins were barely enough to buy fuel and food.  Anything beyond that required borrowing still more from the laans.

Laans preferred loyal and honest customers, and gave much better terms to such, to hold them.  On the other hand, they quickly stopped all credit to deadbeats, driving them out of the fishery.  The laan owners knew the credit-worthiness of every established fisher family on the waterfront.  Newcomers had a hard time of it unless they could establish a reputation.  Conversely, a fisherman with a reputation as both a good fish-catcher and a thoroughly honest man could get special terms from the laans.

The laans were cordially hated by the fishermen, who uniformly accused them of colluding to fix prices.  They also supposedly gave short weights; a proverb said that “a laan’s catty is eighteen ounces.”  (The normal catty has sixteen ounces.  This proverb was not restricted to the waterfront—it was a “frame text,” and producers all over Hong Kong used it to describe purchasers of every stripe.  But it was not a hollow figure of speech.  I personally saw some rather shady weighing carried out; see King 1955 for a study of pricing in a more free-market boat community).  Laans often sold fuel and other needs, and, like many other merchants on the bay, they charged top prices[2].   Also, the laans were not friendly to boat people.  In 1965, one lost his temper and said “I can whip you dirty Tanka like dogs.”  The fisherman sued him for abuse, and won, but that was something that could not have happened even three or four years earlier.

Moreover, the laans were the fishermen’s source of capital, and charged high interest rates—theoretically 20% per year, actually higher, though terms were flexible (they did not want to put fishermen out of business permanently).  In practice, fishermen in debt to laans almost never escaped.  The interest rates were too high, the capital needs too great and too oft-recurrent.  Engines, in particular, constantly needed fixing, and the boat people—unlike some groups I have worked with—were not “natural-born” mechanics.  They tried to repair their engines, but rather than working with the cool efficiency of the people I know in south Mexico, the typical fisherman sweated, cursed, cut corners, became angry and threw bolts, tinkered without much enthusiasm, and eventually had to buy a new engine.  Even without this, expenses constantly added up, and prices stayed low.

A fisherman could not normally change laans.  The laans had a strict rule that they would not pick up another laan’s fisherman, unless said fisherman was thrown out by his usual laan.  Since no laan would do this unless the fisherman was a deadbeat, fishermen did not switch laans.  Once in a great while an extremely lucky and honest fisherman could get away with a switch, but normally this was impossible.

The fishermen therefore pressured the government to put in a free auction market, which was done around 1970.  By 1974 it was in full operation, but was not as revolutionary as hoped.  The laans gave slightly lower prices than the market; however, they made up for it by giving easier credit to well-known clients (known to be good risks) than the government loan programs did.  Moreover, the laans were only too happy to loan money for weddings and other festivals, which the government found too frivolous.  Therefore, at first, many fishermen stayed with the laans.  This slowly changed, but before the laans could die out, the fishery ended.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the British colonial government became convinced that producers’ cooperatives were the best way to develop small-scale rural production in the colonial world.  Producers would join coops, pay a small fee for handling fish, and also pay 6% of their income into the general fund.  They could then borrow such money as was available, and pay it back at low interest rates.  Gradually, coops could get larger and better off, if managed well.  Throughout the British Empire, they became something of an article of faith, but, alas, the sun set on them when it did on the Empire itself.

In Hong Kong, the movement to cooperativize farmers and fishermen was most identified with G. A. C. Herklots, a biologist and agronomist.  Herklots had written a useful book on fish, which we used in the field both for reference and to study boat people’s ability to recognize the fish from the black-and-white drawings (Herklots and Lin 1961).  Among other things, Herklots saved many lives by managing to grow vegetables while interned in a Japanese death camp in Hong Kong in World War II (Herklots 1972; Herklots and Lin 1961).  By 1965, many farmers and fishermen were in savings-and-loan coops for developing production, and in “better living societies” (coops for developing housing and other amenities).

Such activity was only beginning at Castle Peak Bay.  The government had been slow to move in, and the laans were implacably hostile.  Fishermen who went with the coops found the laans stonewalled them when they requested credit.  This kept the coops poor (very few fishermen could join), and thus kept the threat credible.  By good fortune, we were in Castle Peak Bay when things turned around.  Thanks to a great extent to the tireless and self-sacrificing work of Choi Kwok-Tai, at first clerk and later director of the cooperative office at the bay, the coops finally turned a corner, and acquired enough successful members to have significant money to loan.  Fishermen—again, only men engaged in coop business—rapidly turned away from the laans.  Between coops and the new market, the laans found themselves badly squeezed, and they were a shadow of their former selves in 1974-75.  Even the advantage of providing loans for festivals was not so significant, for secularization and declining fish catches were combining to reduce festival activity[3].

Fishing was a living; the Hong Kong market was almost infinitely large, exports were developing by 1974, and Cantonese love good fish better than all other foods.  However, fishing did not pay well.  In general, a fishermen either caught great amounts of poor-quality, low-priced fish (hand-trawlers, purse-seiners), or small amounts of high-priced ones (gill-netters, hook-and-liners).  A top-value grouper weighing a kilogram brought as much as a ton of fish sold for duck feed.  Only the power trawlers had the chance to make a real killing, as when one man got impossibly lucky and caught a whole shoal of shrimp at one shot—“netting” $30,000 Hong Kong dollars, almost all of which went to pay off his debts.  But even the power trawlers barely survived, because of the high costs of fuel and engine repairs.  Also, China charged taxes and license fees for fishing on their waters (or fines for poachers—poaching was common), and these could be substantial.  Above all, repaying the laans for loans took most of the profits, unless one was in the coop.

Worse was the steady decline of the fish.  Pollution and overfishing eventually destroyed the Hong Kong fishery.  From 1965 to 1975, the loss was spectacular; the bottom had dropped out of the fishery.  Local seas were virtually sterilized by chemical wastes from industries.  Migrant schools—even the vast runs of yellow croakers, streaming north in millions to breed near the Yangzi mouth—had been fished to extinction by boats all along the China coast.  The high-seas fishery had been exhausted everywhere within reach of Castle Peak boats; fish for the markets of Hong Kong now came from farther away, from the waters reached by the huge, powerful boats out of Aberdeen and out of Guangzhou.  By 1990, there was virtually nothing left in the waters once plied by the Castle Peak fleet; a few boats caught minnows in the polluted waters.  The few surviving Hong Kong fishermen ran out to deep water, in the South China Sea and beyond, there to catch fish that sat on ice (or, at best, stayed alive in dirty tanks on board) for hours or days before reaching the restaurants.  This, of course, caused sorrow among old-time gourmets.  There is certainly no comparison between the fish of Castle Peak Bay in the old days and the so-called “fresh” fish of modern Chinese restaurants.

The lack of fish conservation stood out as an anomaly in rural Hong Kong.  Management of the rice agricultural system was incredibly careful, precise, and fine-tuned (Anderson 1988; Anderson and Anderson 1973; Marks 1998).  The system was sustainable over the long term (though probably not indefinitely), and involved conservation and recycling of a highly sophisticated order.  It was very hard on the forest environment and the large animals therein, as Robert Marks (1998) and Mark Elvin (2004) have pointed out, but otherwise it was a model of sustainable agriculture, and as such has much to teach the world (Anderson 1988).  A fully integrated part of it was the exceedingly sophisticated management of pond aquaculture and of oyster-farming in shallow bays.  So, fisheries management and conservation was no new or radical idea.

In Malaysia in 1970-71, we studied an area where Chinese fishermen had parceled out the shore and shallow waters, and enforced their community fishery space with savage thoroughness, burning boats and killing fishermen who poached (Anderson and Anderson 1978).  The Malaysian government ended this system—it was too violent, as well as being too much an independent and uncontrolled regime in a centralizing nation—but did not substitute anything effective in its place, so the fishery collapsed.  However, the system worked very well indeed for a long time, showing that Chinese fishermen are no less able than others around the world to establish sea tenure.

Why, then, did the south Chinese boat people not do this?  The answer is simple:  their drifting and politically powerless life.  Under modern governments as under the Qing Dynasty, they had had no political power, no way of establishing ownership, and no way of enforcing communal tenure.  Moreover, they had had to move at a moment’s notice from port to port, depending on the political situation.  Subjected to erratic clearances from the shoreline in Qing (Antony 2004; Murray 1987), and to chronic violence and governmental change in the 20th century, they had rarely had opportunities to develop stable communities, let alone conservation.  Even the stable communities, such as Tai O, had limited power over their own resources.

As I slowly accumulate more ethnographic experience, I wonder more and more at the ability of some writers to generalize about the environmental wisdom—or any other attribute, for that matter—of “the Chinese,” “indigenous people,” or even “all humanity.”  Examples like the present one show that the same people, under different conditions, can be superb (though never perfect) managers, indifferent managers, or not managers at all.  I have found this range everywhere that I have worked.  The huge literature on fisheries management, ranging from ethnographies (such as Maria Luz Cruz Torres’ superb Lives of Dust and Water, 2004) to conservation and comanagement work, documents similar things all over the world.  Moreover, many boat communities—Tai O included—depended on fish runs.  Vast fish schools migrated from the South China Sea along the coasts and up the rivers.  No one community could exert any meaningful control over these.

Formal national and colonial governments failed because they did not really care deeply about the boat people; because they were ideologically committed to other styles of governing; and because they too faced instability and violence.  Still, one must fault these governments for their indifference to conservation.  China’s Communist government has drawn down the conserved and accumulated wealth of thousands of years, wasting it in a few decades.  China faces a bleak future (Brown 1996; Chetham 2002; Edmonds 1998; Smil 1984).  Capitalism in Hong Kong proved no better; the market never internalized the costs of pollution, resource depletion, and destruction of producer livelihoods.  A truly free market should do these things, but somehow no market is perfect enough.

At any time, the barest minimum of investment in fishing regulation and pollution control could have saved a fishery and a way of life.  Hong Kong’s relentless commitment a chimerical “free market,” and China’s Communist commitment to maximizing immediate production whatever the future cost, were equally effective at wasting a multi-million-dollar resource that could have been saved for a trivially tiny sum.  Thus does political correctness, capitalist or communist, destroy everyone’s benefit, sooner rather than later.

 

 

CHAPTER 4.  FAMILY AND KIN

 

1

The household of the boat people was, of course, the boat.  When the boat people used the term ka (jia, “household”) it was the boat and its occupants that they meant.  The live-fish boats and the huge old trawlers often had an employee or a few employees, on board, but in other cases the occupants of a boat were close familial kin.

Boats of friends and relatives anchored or moored together.  As Ward (1955) found in Kau Sai, the question of which boats moored together was an important consideration.  The boats did not anchor randomly in the harbor.  They formed neat rows, neater in fact than village streets, and the patterns of anchoring were significant.

Most boats were isolated by water, but they moored near friends and relatives.  Some boats tied up to each other, so that groups became, in effect, one enlarged household.  Brothers, in particular, not only moored together but warped in so that the decks became one single living space.  When five or six trawlers were thus joined, the space was as large as a suburban house lot.   Father-son groups also fused this way, and so, less often, did uncle-nephew groups, brothers-in-law, and other close kin by birth or marriage.   At a festival, boats from outports gathered at Castle Peak, and long-lost kin came together; the united deck space might include 20 boats—true family fleets.  After their father’s death, brothers usually “drifted” apart eventually, but they reuinted at such occasions.  However, no fleet was more than two generations deep.

In the everyday unions of two to six boats, women cooked together; men ate together and discussed fishing and fishing grounds and financial details far into the night.  Children formed one playpack, swarming over all the craft.  The boat people, agile sailors, climbed with ease over and among the gunwales, rigging and tackle piles, barrels, and other impedimenta, or leaped small gaps between craft.  Important business transactions took place over dinner on the boat of the eldest man—the father or oldest brother.  The boats went out to fish together, and often fished close to one another, ready to help in an accident.

As a man’s sons grew up and married, he was expected to help them obtain boats.  This involved considering not only finances, but labor power.  A hook-and-liner could break off on his own as soon as he married.  (Single-person management of a boat was essentially impossible.)  A trawler needed a larger crew; a son had to have enough sons of his own to run a big boat, or an elder brother might split off with his younger brothers for crew.  Labor power, as well as space, determined the fact that small boats held nuclear families but big ones held extended ones (statistics are found in Anderson 1970b:88).  Only the smallest trawlers held nuclear families, and then only as a temporary expedient—at least, so the families hoped.

Families on the largest boats consisted of parents, children, sons and their wives, and grandchildren.  After a father’s death, brothers stayed together on the same boat only long enough to marry and branch out on their own.  Polygamy was theoretically possible, but found on only about 6% of boats, and never involving more than two wives.

Boat families were large in the old days.  Crew members were precious, and, as one person put it bluntly, “it costs less to raise crew members than to hire them.”  In 1965-66, the average family had five children, and the average completed family had about seven.  By 1975, this was falling fast; many young families were stopping at two, and few indeed were having more than four.  I was watching a demographic transition happen before my eyes (as I have since done, again, in southern Mexico).

 

The wider circle of kin remained important to boat people, though apparently less so than to the land people in the huge lineage villages nearby.  Boat kin beyond the immediate family tended to wind up in different ports, far away and out of touch.

However, kin ties were as strong as the exigencies of a “floating life” would allow.  Kin in general were hingtaai (xing di, “older and younger brothers”).  This phrase meant, metonymously, all kin.  No one used the formal Chinese words for extended families or kindreds.  Relations within the kindred were, indeed, like those between siblings—close, warm, and supportive.

Unlike the land people, the boat people had no lineages (tsou, Putonghua tsu; see Ward 1965, 1966; in some other parts of south China, however, boat people did have lineages; Wu 1937).  Within sight of some boat settlements were the huge lineage villages of the New Territories, famous throughout the anthropological world as perhaps the largest, deepest, and most formalized kinship groups found at ordinary-folk level (see Baker 1968, 1979; Freedman,1965, 1966; Potter 1968; Watson 1975; Watson and Watson 2004).

The boat people gave as reasons the facts that they had no land or equivalent estate to administer; no place to put lineage halls; no fixed address to call home; and neither a reason to group hundreds of kin together nor a way to do it.  Some mentioned also that they were generally illiterate, and so could not keep records.  (Being illiterate, they had not read the British Africanists, and so did not know that many lineage-based societies are nonliterate—the elders keeping track, in their heads, of thousands of kin.  Ancient China, before writing became common, was such a society—though its lineages were simpler than, and different in structure from, the huge lineages that grew up with widespread writing, printing, and middle-class society in and after the Song Dynasty; see Chang 1986.)

The basis of the great lineages is communal estate-holding—especially land, but also other wealth (Baker 1979; Cohen 1976; Pasternak 1972).  The foci of such great lineages are their ancestral starting-points and ancestral halls.  Lacking all the above, and lacking any need for lineages, the boat people did not bother.  Other Chinese fishermen often lack lineages (e.g. Diamond 1969), and, as all social historians of China know, north China lacks the huge, deep lineages of rural Hong Kong.  Indeed, even the other minority ethnic groups of Hong Kong tend to have small, shallow lineages.  Pasternak (1972) provides a land-based tale of lineage loss due to land ownership changes.  He called it “agnatic atrophy” (Pasternak 1968, 1972).  It may have been the original state of his sample village, rather than a derived condition, but, in any case, it was clearly more functional than historic—more a matter of present needs than of historical contingency.  As noted in Chapter 1, many boat people trace their descent to recent land-dwelling families that gave up their lineage identification to go on the water.

The Chinese fishermen we studied in Penang, Malaysia, maintained their ancestral lineage connections only if they were politically and socially active, and then they would pay a fee to join a “lineage association”; ordinary fishermen did not do this, and their lineage connections gradually declined into forgetfulness.  We were watching agnatic atrophy in process.

The limits of the family—the hingtaai unit—are therefore impossible to define.  A family blends off into a realm of forgotten distant cousins.  The patrilineal ancestry will be remembered as far as living memory goes.  An elder will remember his grandfather, perhaps his great-grandfather.  Beyond that, there is only haze.  Only one man in my sample knew much about his patrilineal family six generations before, and that only because his ancestors had left the land for the water in that generation.  Matrilineal kin are even more quickly forgotten.

Therefore, hingtaai rarely included anyone beyond one’s grandfather’s brothers and their children, and even they were usually a rather shadowy lot.  Father’s brothers, by contrast, were intensely involved in one’s life, and mother’s brothers often were.  The boat people were strongly patrilateral, but lack of lineages and closeness with in-laws made matrilateral kin more important than they were among many land-dweller families.

Ancestor images (or tablets, for a few highly literate families) were thus not stored in a temple indefinitely, let alone in a lineage hall (as among the land people).  The ancestors were commemorated on the boat shrine until no one was left alive who remembered them.  Then they were “sent to the sky”:  the images or tablets were ritually burned.  Memory of them faded out in another generation or two.  We later found the same thing in Malaysia and elsewhere; it is, in fact, a general rule for Chinese families that are not closely enmeshed in lineage affairs.

A consequence of this was that boat knowledge of Chinese kinship terminology was limited to these close relatives.  More distant relatives have their own names in Chinese, but the boat people simply extended the terms they knew.  If they needed to be more accurate, for ritual purposes (usually at weddings or funerals), they consulted an expert; a few elders knew the entire system, and shared their knowledge at need.

The Chinese kinship system is the limiting case of a descriptive system.  There are separate terms for father’s elder brother, father’s younger brother, mother’s elder brother, mother’s younger brother, father’s father’s elder brother, father’s father’s younger brother, and so on, for a total of well over 100 terms (see e.g. Feng 1948).  The boat people knew terms for lineal kin, brothers and sisters of direct patrilineal kin, and usually brothers and sisters of matrilineal direct kin too.  They knew terms for in-laws only for the spouse’s immediate nuclear family.  Beyond this limited circle, they knew few or no terms.  Two factors made this simplification desirable.  First and most obvious, the boat people lived in a world of small linear families, not the world of huge lineages where one dealt routinely with distant kin.  Second, the boat people tended to assimilate any distant relative to close-relative categories, as a conscious or “preconscious” way of building solidarity.  The Chinese saying “all men are brothers” was  well known, and considered highly relevant, on the waterfront.

Actual terms of address and reference were not the formal kinterms.  Hingtaai, the formal term for one’s older and younger brothers, was almost always used to mean “relatives,” not brothers.  In ordinary address and reference, brothers were taai lou “big fellow” and sai lou “little fellow.”  One’s son was sai lou tsai “little fellow-let”.  One’s wife was addressed by her familiar name and referred to as lou p’o “old woman”; husband was “old man.”  And so on.  Meanwhile, as in almost all societies around the world, respectful kinterms were liberated for use to any respected adult.  A man of one’s father’s generation was politely called “father’s elder brother”; of grandparental generation, “father’s father’s elder brother”; and so on.  See Anderson 1970b:94-96 for fuller account.

More equivocal was mui tsai “kid sister” (mui “younger sister,” tsai affectionate diminutive particle).  This could be an affectionate term for an unrelated girl or a very unrespectful term for a female servant or slave.  In Hong Kong, as in Imperial China, girls, often boat girls, were still (illegally) sold to wealthy people as “maids”—de facto slaves.  On the waterfront, however, mui tsai was affectionate enough that in the 1960s our little daughter was kuai mui tsai “kid sister foreign devil” (lit. “ghost kid sister”) to everyone.  By the 1970s language was more polite but less colorful.

 

A proof of this desire to be solidary with one’s immediate world was the network of fictive kinship.  Sworn blood brotherhood (of the sort widely found in China) was one form of this, though it was fairly rare.  More often, was contract (k’ai) kinship, an equivalent of godparenthood in the United States or compadrasco (coparenthood) in Mexico (Foster 1961).  Among the 47 families of my 1965-66 sample, 12 individuals had k’ai relatives, and three of these were in one family.  Most were boys.

Usually, a child would get a k’ai ye (godfather) or k’ai maa (godmother) if the child’s health or other fortune was poor.  The child would then inherit his luck or good fortune from the k’ai parent instead of his or her own parent, whose fortune was presumed to be incompatible with the child’s.  This did not mean the parent’s or child’s fortunes were necessarily bad.  Fortunes could be both perfectly good, but mutually incompatible—as blood types can be, in biomedicine.  The reasons were usually, but not always, astrological.

The k’ai parent would, therefore, be someone with notably good health, or luck, or astrological compatibility.  Such matters were beyond the knowledge of most fishermen; spirit-mediums diagnosed the need, and selected possible k’ai parents.

However, normally, friends and close associates of the child’s parents received the call.  The institution thus formalized and secured links of mutual aid.  It was not so explicitly an institutionalization of this as compadrasco is in Latin America (Foster 1961 and my own experience), but it certainly had the same effect.  For the fishermen, contract parenthood was symmetrical in Foster’s terms; it was always contracted with social equals.  Among the land people, it was usually asymmetrical; more powerful people, and even gods, were called.  In the Chinese Malaysian community where we did research in 1970-71, though the people were fishermen, contract parenthood was not only usually asymmetrical, it was usually religious; gods were the main k’ai parents, with Kuan Yin being by far the most popular.

Once a spirit medium or similar authority suggested contracting fictive kinship, the family selected a likely candidate.  Then the child’s mother went to the woman of the selected household to negotiate.  If all went well, the families worshiped ancestors together and drew up the contract.  For the boat people, a verbal contract sufficed.

Unlike a Latin American compadre, a k’ai parent had little formally to do.  He or she had to give the child lucky money at festivals, and offer presents and receive respect at the child’s marriage.  The child had to pay respects, and mourn as regular kin did at the k’ai parent’s funeral, then continue to worship the parent’s soul (usually by leaving a tablet in a paper-goods shop to receive prayers).

The contract relationship was a mixed bag.  It was not quite real kin, and seemed somehow to compromise family.  A symptom of tension was the use of k’ai taai (fictive younger brother) as a term of abuse, an obscene term for a passive homosexual.  This was a deadly insult.  In actual reference to fictive kinship, one spoke only of father, mother, son, and daughter, not of siblings, so this particular kinterm had no legitimate use.

 

Since the lack of lineages and need for support heightened the importance of affinal kin, it follows that marriage was the consummately important social act (in more ways than one).  Typically, a family would seek a spouse for their child from the circle of neighbors, good friends, and coworkers.  More than in fictive kinship, parents explicitly wanted to shore up social linkages by thus formalizing them.  There was rarely a shortage of candidates.  Exogamy did not extend beyond the family line, many different families lived close together, and the boat people moved around enough to have friends in many ports.

Marriage among the boat people was so far from the traditional Chinese model that half the marriages in our immediate experience were contracted “for love” (though parental approval and help was always sought eventually).  Moreover, many of the marriages “arranged” by parents, in the classic Chinese form, turned out to have been suggested by the young people in question!  The parents duly formalized the negotiations over dowry and other payments.  Even genuinely arranged marriages—arranged, that is, without the couple’s suggesting them first—rarely involved strangers.

Still less were valued sons and daughters married off to children or aged rich men.  Such things had, indeed, happened in the past, when families had been reduced to starvation and had had to marry off a daughter or send her off as concubine or as a servant to be married off by her masters.  But by 1965 everyone was well enough off to avoid such dreaded circumstances.  The endlessly repeated literary and movie cliché of the bride who meets her husband at the wedding, only to find that he is a child, an ancient, or a madman, was far from boat experience.  Still farther was the concept of “minor marriage”—marrying young children to each other and raising them together (A. Wolf 1995; M. Wolf 1968, 1972).

Given the free and easy lifestyle of the boat people, and the completely accepted institution of “singing girls” at Tai O and elsewhere, virginity was by no means required or universal.  It was theoretically preferred.  I have no reliable data on how common virgin brides actually were.  My data on the sex lives of the boat people are extremely extensive and extremely unreliable!  Among sailors, whether in southern California or in southern China, jokes, insults, teasing remarks, stories, gossip, wild generalizations, and rank speculation about sex, and about individuals’ sex lives, are the classic theme of conversation over a drink or two (or more).  Castle Peak Bay certainly fit (and overfulfilled) that stereotype.  Unfortunately, the resulting excruciatingly detailed and extensive picture was only accidentally in contact with reality.  Not only did people exaggerate, dissemble, and invent; they had an elaborate tradition of erotic folklore to draw on.  Many stories told as fact could be traced to Chinese novels and classic short-fiction collections.  Even without running down specific stories, one could easily find in such literature the rules for insults, boasts, and other relevant folk forms.

We did get enough reliable data to know that sex was fairly free, uninhibited, and joyous among most couples, including at least some unmarried ones.

A double standard existed; men often visited the Tai O girls after marriage, but wives were expected to remain faithful, and usually did so in our experience.  One couple close to us produced a son when the man was 58; his wife was substantially younger, but still well over 40.  We were aware this man was not averse to a visit to Tai O on occasion, also.

Once a young person finally decided to settle down and commit to marriage, the search for a suitable partner was usually not long or difficult.

Some people said that arranged marriages were the rule until recently.  Rich boat people, in particularly, supposedly contracted economic relationships such that the bride and groom were strangers.  We knew of cases of runaways (see above), including some in which brides fled from arranged marriages that did not work.  However, boat society has always been free and open, with love liaisons not involving marriage being well known (recall Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life; Shen 1983).

Mothers usually negotiated arranged marriages.  Men would lose too much face if the negotiations fell through, so they did not deal with such matters.  Here, as in many other cases, women were by no means unaware of the power this gave them, and sometimes gloated openly about it.  We recalled the equally neat trick by which women convinced men that higher-status people ate last—thus insuring that the “low status” women and children got the food when it was hot and freshly cooked.  The men were rather ruefully appreciative of the dodge.  They worked similar tricks on the land people, using “low status” to excuse a number of irregular behaviors.  Truly, low status has its rewards, especially if the low-status individuals can outsmart the higher ones, as James Scott reminds us (Scott 1985, 1998).

The boat people did not usually use go-betweens, since there was not enough money to reward them.  Sometimes, a relative served as go-between, or at least alerted a family with a marriageable youth of the existence of an available and desirable potential mate at such-and-such a port.

Chinese traditional families were supposed to take horoscopes into account in deciding whether a match was suitable.  Nobody at Castle Peak seemed to take horoscopes very seriously.  Wolfram Eberhard (1963) found that in Taiwan people tended to use horoscopes as excuses to set up, or break off, engagements, when the real reasons were personal.  I suspect the boat people did the same, but people we knew simply did not take the horoscopes seriously enough for this to become an issue.

Within the boat community, almost all marriages linked families in the western New Territories ports.  People married fairly often within the Castle Peak community, but were just as apt to find spouses in Tai O or other nearby ports.  Much more rare was a marriage to Aberdeen or any other more distant bay.

The boat community was almost strictly endogamous.  People tended to marry individuals from the same general category of the boat world.  Trawler boys usually married trawler girls, and gill-netters married gill-netters.  However, this was very far from a strong rule—merely a result of differential knowledge and networks.  More serious was a tendency for people of similar economic status to marry.  A marriage of rich and poor did not seem a good bet for lasting success, according to waterfront opinion, borne out by alleged cases.

A few marriages of boat girls to land-dweller’s sons had recently taken place.   Only one land woman had married a boat man, and she promptly left him—the life was too hard.

Once married, a girl moved to her husband’s boat or house.  She then became part of the family.  She was still something of an outsider, however, till she bore a son, and thus contributed to the patriline.  This was less an issue than among most Chinese (including the fishermen we studied in Malaysia; see also M. Wolf 1968, 1972), but was still a very serious matter.  However, a wife who bore only girls was thoroughly accepted after a few years, though the family would always be somewhat regretful of lacking a son.

After marriage, relations with in-laws were close, often coming to approximate parental relations even for men—let alone for women, who, in China’s patrilineal and virilocal world, almost always came to live with their husbands.  Exceptions occurred when women had large, independent money pools—something that normally could happen only if the woman in question had been a successful singing-girl.  The close, supportive ties of in-laws were a point of difference from the land people, who found in-laws a frequent cause for tension and distancing (see e.g. Baker 1968, 1979; Freedman 1966).  In fact, we knew several cases in which a man’s closest friends, coworkers, and allies were his wife’s immediate kin.

The stated ideal of boat families—described to us repeatedly, in rather set terms, by dozens of people—was for everyone to get along.  In-laws in particular had to be supportive and warmly helpful to each other.  Clear lines of authority should be maintained, but an elder should listen calmly, respectfully, and attentively to everyone’s opinion—expressed in due order of seniority, and with due consideration and temperateness.  Everyone was supposed to be even-tempered, calm, and thoughtful.  Aggressive and impatient behavior endangered everyone on a boat in rough waters, or even in the harbor.

Some families really did live up to this irenic ideal.  We had tea every morning (in 1965-66, and frequently in 1974-75) at a tiny café-cum-residence near our boat.  It was the home of a widow—of land origin—and her boat-born daughter-in-law.  (The latter’s husband usually worked outside the home).  The two women were both gentle, affectionate, retiring souls who adored each other and adored the daughter-in-law’s children (who were, indeed, model children by any standards).  In the hundreds of hours we spent absorbing tea, we never saw anything but affectionate and gentle behavior in that household.

However, families with such close relationships represented one end of a continuum, the other end being represented by dysfunctional families with considerable fighting, abuse, and even illegal violence.  In between were the normal families, usually harmonious but often argumentative or burdened with one or two distant and suspicious members.

Some families even exemplified the tense, distrustful relationships between in-laws described by Hugh Baker.  The lack of lineages and lineage villages, however, meant that in-laws were never real enemies.  They often were real enemies in the old walled lineage villages that Baker studied, because lineage exogamy forced men to find wives in other villages, and neighboring villages were almost always competing over land.  This often led to violence.  Wives were suspected of, and sometimes clearly guilty of, helping their natal families in enemy towns.

The dynamic was exactly the opposite among the boat people.  One needed all the helpers and allies one could get.  One never knew when one would need to be rescued in a storm, helped with a large catch of fish, or helped with a quick small loan to fix an engine.  One did know that all these needs would arise, sooner rather than later.  Therefore, the pressure was all on the side of being as solidary as possible with in-laws—and with anyone and everyone else nearby.

At first, though, the plight of a new daughter-in-law was hard, often very hard.  As junior woman, she had to do the heaviest and dirtiest work, and patiently accept criticism from her husband’s mother.  As noted above, in-laws were much closer on the boats than among many land people, but this was still no enviable situation.  It was the subject of several of the boat folk songs (Anderson 1975; Wu 1937).

However, the tendency to marry among close friends and neighbors usually reduced the tensions innate in the Chinese family between an in-married girl and her parents-in-law (cf. Baker 1968; M. Wolf 1968, 1972).  Therefore, the classic Chinese drama of the wronged and abused daughter-in-law played itself out only occasionally among the boat people.

Still, it did happen.  Brides fled back to parents to escape impoverished, wastrel, or abusive husbands.  The boat people of Castle Peak Bay being a notably non-abusive lot, all the runaway cases known to us involved economic problems.

We heard of at least one case of attempted suicide—a more socially tense case involving a girl from a poor family married into a rich one and thereafter insulted and hounded.  Suicide of a daughter-in-law is probably the commonest type of suicide in China, and occurs as a trope throughout the history of Chinese literature.  Such a suicide is not just a tragic act; it directly damages the abusive offender—usually the husband’s mother.  Not only do abusive individuals lose face; the unfortunate girl becomes a “wronged ghost,” haunting those that have driven her to death, driving them to madness and misfortune.

A woman’s lot was hard work, but fairly equal partnership.  On the fishing boats, she was high in the command chain, and she had to manage boats and haul nets or lines with the men.  If not in a fishing family, she would still be actively engaged into economic activity; no one could afford a nonworking wife.  This gave her considerable power and independence.   She could not be relegated to the shaky status of fishing wives in some parts of the world (Cruz Torres 2004).  Even among boat families that had forsaken the water to live and work on land, women had to work—not only around the house, but usually for cash—to make ends meet.  They had to have decision-making power, and they had it.  The Confucian ideal of women obeying “fathers when young, husbands when married, and sons when old” had less to do with reality than in some, probably most, Chinese spheres.  In particular, obeying sons when old was conspicuously absent; sons deferred to mothers throughout life.

 

Each boat family was theoretically an independent and sovereign unit, regulating its affairs with little interference from anyone.  Even brothers could only suggest, advise, and agree.  Only a father with a fleet of sons could genuinely command other boats, and even he had that right only as long as his sons allowed it; very often, they did not.  All they had to do was sail to another port, or even another side of Castle Peak Bay.

On the boat, there were strict rules of authority, which made life very much easier.

First, each boat had one senior man who served as captain.  This was the eldest man on board, unless the eldest was too old and frail, in which case he would give over command of his boat to a son, or live on a son’s boat with the son as commander.  Since the eldest son would normally have long ago gone his own way, the caretaking son was often a younger one.  The transition from captain to elder was a gradual one, managed with a minimum of friction, but—be it noted—not totally without friction.  A man who was losing control and wanted to maintain it would try hard, sometimes tyrannizing his sons, who would in turn try to maneuver him—usually with great tact and gentleness, but sometimes with blunt frustration—into giving over command.

Occasionally, the strict seniority rule was broken by an older brother deferring to a younger and more assertive or competent one.

Second, other adult men and women advised, in order of seniority and gender.  A son listened to his mother until fully adult, after which the mother was supposed to defer.  As long as the father was alive, father and mother stood together in authority, but once a father died, his widow was supposed to defer to her son, unless he was still quite young.  This was, of course, the classic Confucian pattern, and it was universally followed.  However, it provided plenty of room for play; how old is “still quite young”?  And a mother with strong character made her will known quite emphatically, no matter how old her son was.

A wife, especially a captain’s wife, had considerable real authority, and many of them “twisted their husband’s ear” thoroughly.  (The idiom, of obvious derivation, is the standard Cantonese phrase for the condition.)  A man with an ear-twisting wife got compassion and some sympathetic joking from his peers; most of them knew how it felt.

Third, a captain was expected to listen to advice and counsel from other adults, and take it when it was good.  They, in turn, had to respect his final decisions, as well as commands that he had to make without consultation when faced with the need for immedate action—a daily event on the open sea.

Fourth, women controlled cooking, child care, and related aspects of home life.  They did not take the lead in off-boat matters (politics, economic transactions, and so on), but they provided advice and back-up assistance.

The women’s status hierarchy, like the men’s, was a matter of seniority, but here confusion reigned.  Theoretically, an older son’s wife ranked above a younger son’s wife, but if the older son’s wife were (herself) younger than the younger son’s wife, or (much more serious) if the older son’s wife had not born a son and the younger son’s wife had, a real problem in rank presented itself!  Such contingencies virtually guaranteed that the couple in the anomalous position would get their own boat.

On a large fishing boat, the senior man would be stationed at the wheel or on lookout on the cabin roof.  The next senior man (the oldest son, in the normal situation where the captain was the father of the family) would take the wheel when the senior man was otherwise occupied.  Otherwise this second-senior man would be managing the rudder, rigging, or fishing tackle.  The third man would be in charge of the engine.  The fourth would be the usual manager of fishing tackle.

The senior man’s wife would direct cooking and mending; the next woman in line would do the least unpleasant cooking and cleaning operations; and so on down to the youngest adult woman, who would swab decks, do heavy laundry, haul water, and help fish.  Children and oldsters would be mending nets, washing vegetables, and looking out for younger children.  Everyone knew his or her exact place and task responsibiilities, and if there were any question, a council of seniors would resolve it.  Sometimes this council was convened when a family fleet moored together in the evening, and brother captains discussed the issue.

Boats, whether in Newport Harbor or Castle Peak Bay, have to be managed with exquisite and thorough order and care.  Loose lines of authority, poor task management, and shirking were immediately disastrous.

On the other hand, inflexibility was even more rapidly fatal.  Discussions over dinner were an institution never ignored.  Consultation, along proper lines of authority, was not only real but universal.  People followed the Confucian virtues of harmony, cooperation, and respect, not only because they came from a Confucian tradition, but—much more importanly—because they lived and moved in the world that produced Confucius and his ideas.  China had changed in the 2500 years since the sage taught, but some aspects of it had changed very little.  The need for a household to regulate its affairs stood high on this list.

Naturally, this allowed much variation.  Some boats were run in a quite patriarchal and authoritarian style; others were so democratic that we wondered how anyone ever decided anything.  The vast majority were somewhere between these extremes, but the spread was great, and no obvious central peak presented itself.

As people became too old to work, they slowly faded from the world of the living.  Death, like maturation, was a gradual process.  Command devolved increasingly on the next generation.  The elder slowly sank into quiet.  He or she did the shopping on shore, takes care of young children, tells stories, dreams, and waits patiently for the afterlife.

 

CHAPTER 5.  EMOTIONS IN THE HOUSEHOLD

 

 

Child-rearing on the boats turned out to be one of the most interesting and thought-provoking things we studied.  Having children of our own, and spending two full years in local households with local families, we had a unique opportunity to observe.  Our two older children were old enough in 1974-75 to be real field workers, and both were (and still are) first-rate observers and judges of humanity.  They were well accepted into local playpacks, and became treated more or less like any other neighborhood kids.

This was one of the areas where one could learn important data from a society now gone.  The distinctive family behavior on the waterfront challenges stereotypes—both Chinese and western—of “the Chinese family.”  In household behavior as in much else, the boat people had a quite distinctive way of being Chinese.  I have told the full story elsewhere (Anderson 1992, 1998), but some repetition will be useful here.

Much of the literature on Chinese families presents a picture characterized by authoritarian patriarchy, distant and stern communication, and silent obedience alternating with wild break-out.  Chinese novels often present this picture, from Cao Xueqin’s great 18th-century novel Hong Lou Meng (translated as The Story of the Stone; Cao 1973-86) to Ba Jin’s 20th-century classic Jia (“The Household,” translated as The Family, Pa Chin 1964).  Western accounts are usually conformant to this image.  Some even stress violent wife and child abuse and other pathologies, maintaining they are typical and inevitable consequences of the patriarchal family (Eastman 1988 is particularly dramatic, but there are many other examples, both Chinese and western).

As one might expect from all that has gone before, the boat people were as far from this stereotype as one could be and still remain identifiably Chinese.  The patriarchal Confucian family was alive and well, but in a very open and even nurturing form (Anderson 1992, 1998).

Picking up from the last chapter, I can begin by continuing the account of child-rearing on the water.  Children slowly and gradually got more rights and more responsibilities.  Every new task responsibility meant more freedom, authority, and ability to act independently.  This process started when toddlers were old enough to help mend nets.   It ended only when a man finally took over from his aging father; the two could be 60 and 80 years old by this time.  The man would still be learning from his father.  Thus, there were no sharp breaks: no initiation rites at young adulthood, no sudden changes at marriage.

An eight-year-old could mend nets or bring water and bait.  A twelve-year-old did simple fishing.  A sixteen-year-old boy would get a chance to steer the boat, while a girl would be cooking.  Usually, children were ordered to do something; parents expected them to know, from helping and from observation, how to do it.

The plan produced the most problem-free adolescence I have ever seen.  Teenagers had a physically difficult and demanding life, but at least did not have to face the trauma of being child and adult at the same time.  They moved rather tranquilly up the ladder of command, pushing to have more authority, but aware that they would get it only when they could do more responsible tasks.

Boys got more freedom, less discipline, and better care than girls.  They also got less work; girls had to help fish and manage the boat and had to help with women’s tasks.  The disparities were not as great as in many or most Chinese communities (see e.g. Croll 2000), but they were certainly real and obvious.  Some parents dressed boys in girls’ clothes to make them less attractive to deities that might want to steal them.  Boys got more good luck charms to wear:  tiny models of life-saving floats; sea horse eyes; jade bracelets; tiny strings of old coins.  Boys were more outgoing; girls turned inward and expressed less emotion; this was the expectation, generally fulfilled, though to varying degrees.

Education was intensely moral.  Actual verbal instruction was heavily focused on moral training.  Learning about fish took place within this moral discourse.  From birth, a child learned that he was part of a wide family group, and that his or her will was more or less subservient to its collective interests.  Most of the people in the child’s world taught this more or less consciously.  Mothers passed babies around to be held by everyone.  All the women and girls on the boat or in the household “mothered” all the children.  From toddler age, children are involved in playpacks that included everyone in the extended family, and, on shore, in the whole neighborhood.  Except on the smallest and most socially isolated boats, the child has close relationships with many persons, but no single outstandingly close one-to-one relationship.

Life on the boats, or in any traditional Chinese household, cannot center on the will of the baby.  A mother nurses when she has time, not when the baby is hungry.  She, or any other caregiver, dresses, washes, puts down for sleep, gets up, plays with or quiets the baby when time is convenient—not when the baby wants it.  The baby soon learns to be philosophical about all this; crying does no good, and smiling or cooing does rather little.  This does not mean the baby gets little care; quite the opposite.  Usually, several female caregivers are around, and the father and his close male relatives often do their share.  The baby most often cries in a desperate and totally futile attempt to be left alone.  Wu (1937:812), describing the same syndrome, reported that boat children were “spoilt.”  Wu’s value-judgement shows that a traditional Chinese male was as surprised by the high level of caregiving and low level of punishment as we were.  The actual effect of this system is not to “spoil” the child but to teach him or her that his or her will is subservient to that of elders.

The pattern continues with age.  Boat children could not develop exploratory and independent abilities early; they would fall overboard and drown if they did.  They could also get caught on fishhooks or other deck gear.  They were thus tied to the mast and kept as quiet as possible.  Caregivers discouraged early walking.  Someone was always around to pick up the child.  When a child fell overboard—which happened often, in port; people were more careful on the open sea—everyone within 50 yards, whether related or not, instantly went to help.  (A strange story among land people held that boat people would not save a drowning person.  This was no more true than the other common tales told about the boat-dwellers.)

Mothers nursed babies for about two years, never less than eighteen months and sometimes up to four years.  Caregivers fed children solid foods from eight months on.  Children did not feed themselves until three or four.

A distinctive and vitally important feature of child-rearing among south Chinese was the meitaai or “carrying belt.”  This was a square of cloth that held the baby to the mother’s back.  It was tied on by ribbons, starting from the four corners, and tied together in front.  This left the mother (or other caregiver) free to do anything and everything, while producing no special strain on her.  Babies were carried in the meitaai until three or four.  All south Chinese used this device, but the boat people used it much more than the land people, since they needed to keep the child immobilized as much as possible.

The meitaai gave the child a tremendous sense of security and reassurance.  A baby or toddler crying inconsolably would always quiet down immediately if backpacked.  This was true even when the crying was due to real hurt, physical or psychological  Weaning from the meitaai was, strikingly and very obviously, more traumatic for the child than weaning from the breast[4].  Thus, severely troubled children were sometimes backpacked when they were six or seven years old.

Girls recently weaned from the meitaai almost always got toy meitaais, which they used to carry dolls and stuffed toys.  By the time they were five or six, they often had a real baby—a new younger sibling—to carry.

The age from three to six was traumatic and difficult; the child was weaned from breast and meitaai, but had no freedom yet.  Crying and aggressive behavior increased.  By six, however, the child was undertaking the simpler adult tasks.  Boys began to fish; girls began to care for siblings.  With this came a vast increase in freedom and opportunity to learn, explore, and interact with the wider world.  Crying and aggression dropped off, in proportion to the steady increase in rights and duties and in playpack involvement.  With age, playpacks got larger, more diverse, and more cheerful.  The playpack, inevitably mixed-age because older siblings are taking care of younger ones, became a major focus of socializing and learning.

Playpacks were not very gender-segregated.  Boys and girls played with dolls, girls and boys explored and scuffled.  Both improvised elaborate games with bits of string and wood and paper.  Somehow almost everyone managed to find a kite to fly in spring.  Teasing and taunting were common, and, in all innocence, boys and girls alike used the rough waterfront language in perfectly ordinary settings.  Children knew an amazing range of songs, rhymes, chants, and other folklore.  All this is lost without trace; we could not record it, partly because the subjects would never hold still.

Many boat children were notably less aggressive, less noisy, and generally better behaved than most land-dwelling children of the area.  This was especially true of the recent refugees from mainland China, a very traditional population.  However, a substantial minority of the boat children were toward the other extreme; they resorted to begging, yelling insults, and otherwise acting bad, as long as they were out of parental control.  This earned them the sobriquet of “water rats” from the better behaved.  Overall, one can see, in this range, the independence and individual difference so visible also in adults.

The boat people reacted with horror and with immediate community intervention to threats of genuine abuse.  Senior family members stopped it in no uncertain terms.  Failing the availability of senior family members, bystanders would quietly, tactfully distract and calm a parent who appeared to have lost his or her temper to the point of physically harming a child.

By the age of eight or ten, a child rarely needed punishment.  The message of overwhelming family dominance had penetrated.  A simple verbal command almost invariably received rapid compliance.  If it did not, a most impressive verbal fireworks display could result, and no one ignored that.  Physical punishment, reserved for the most serious cases, consisted of a light slap, or in extreme situations a light but painful spanking across the backs of the calves with a flat board or thin stick.  Parents inflicted this for only three situations:  fighting, extreme insubordination (very rare), or dangerous neglect of a younger sibling.  Girls got more punishment than boys, partly because of patriarchal bias, but partly because girls usually did most (though far from all) of the sibling care, and thus were at risk of committing neglect.  If a girl neglected a baby brother, she was in real trouble, worse than anything that happened when she neglected a baby sister.

We saw such punishment about once a week, and in an average day our research and marketing rounds took us past hundreds of households, where life was mostly lived in the open.  The lack of conflict was striking.  Moreover, such conflict and parental problems as occurred were concentrated among certain families, mostly boat people who had failed at fishing but had not fully moved onto shore, and who lived in wrecked boats in the typhoon shelter.  One group in particular made up something of an outcast colony, and had continual (though usually minor) problems with children.

The land people, though somewhat stricter than the boat people, followed the same principles of childrearing.  Far from the beatings alleged in some Western literature on China, corporal punishment was almost unknown at Castle Peak, beyond the spanking on the backs of the legs previously noted.  British colonials frequently commented to us on how amazing it was that “Chinese children are so well-behaved” when they were so “spoiled” (and sometimes added it was proof that the Chinese were an inferior race, naturally docile).

In fact the secret was the deliberate ignoring of the infant’s will, discussed above.  The land people saw this as simply part of socialization for civic life.  The boat people, with their value on independent agency, saw a contradiction, but dealt with it by saying that young children had to be restrained or they would have accidents, such as falling overboard.  Thoughtful parents went on to say young children did not have and should not have much agency, and, in any case, they were part of the family, a structured world where order had to reign.  The famed independence of the boat-dweller had to be earned, by growing in responsibility over the years.  With independence as a promised reward for clear evidence of responsible behavior, children were motivated to take on more duties.

It is not hard to see how such a child-rearing method produced well-behaved young without harsh discipline.  This was especially true on the boats, where a child had no escape.  Land people had to be more disciplinarian because their children roamed the whole neighborhood in playpacks.  But even the land people of Castle Peak Bay were, by Chinese or world standards, gentle parents.  They made up in constant supervision what they lacked in harshness.  Adults or older children were always around, and would discipline any local child that was out of line, sometimes even perfect strangers.  This certainly had much to do with maintaining tranquility and keeping children socialized.

Some particularly articulate parents put the matter in philosophical context.  The independence of an adult had to be won.  It was not something that came with the turf (as it does for many American teenagers).  It came only with demonstrated competence and responsibility.   The road from restrained infancy to free senior adulthood was a gradual progression.  Each stage had to be won by demonstrating the ability to handle more duties with responsibility.

Crime and trouble were not teenage specialties.  Crime was very rare at Castle Peak in any case, but when it occurred, adults were the ones involved; some families were pirates by trade and tradition.  Teenage gangsterism was, however, not unknown (and not even rare) at some more urban ports.

Few children got to school in 1965, but the number was rising, and by 1974-75 all children got primary education.  Some were beginning to go on, and boat people in more urban ports were beginning to go to college.  A government survey of 187 Castle Peak children in 1964 showed most had no schooling, and very few girls got to school at all.  By 1965, people recognized the need for education.  A rapid increase in the numbers took place.  The major reason to move on shore was to get access to schools, and those who moved on shore took in countless related children whose parents were still on the boats.  Bright girls sometimes got to school instead of duller brothers—a really dramatic new turn.  At this time, school was cheap or free, but parents had to buy uniforms, supplies, and books.  We knew families in which everyone went essentially without food for days in order to buy these for the brightest children.  Those bright ones had hope; their siblings had nothing but hunger.

Cultural reproduction thus took place through a variety of informal channels, and occasionally the formal one.  Most education was through practice (cf. Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; also Chaiklin and Lave 1993, Lave 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff and Lave 1984).  Children learned not through formal instruction but through watching and involvement—what Barbara Rogoff now calls “intent participation,” a process which “involves observing keenly and pitching in to shared endeavors” (Rogoff 2004).  She defines this as “horizontal and collaborative….  Experienced people guide while participating, and learners take initiative….  Motivation revolves around the chance to contribute to important activities….  Assessment occurs during shared endeavors, to aid learning.”  This description of learning among the Maya of Mexico is perfect for the boat people of Hong Kong—and, for that matter, for the Maya that I too have lived with in Mexico.

Going beyond that literature, I speculate that the boat people are typical humans in their embedding of instruction in a moral framework that stresses the virtue of the learning.  People want to learn only when they think the data are important socially.  They must be emotionally involved in the process, and they must think it is in some sense “right” or valuable.  So, when the boat people went on shore, they immediately dropped the old knowledge, forgetting even what they knew; it had ceased to have meaning for them.

 

For a few decades in the late 20th century, a debate arose between those who felt emotions were innate and shared by all higher animals and those who saw human emotions as complex, basically learned, and subject to heavy cultural conditioning.  Most earlier psychologists fall into the former category.  Many anthropologists fell into the latter.

Freud and other early psychologists introduced many new ideas that made emotions look less than simple and straightforward.  Freudian theory forced social scientists to look at even the simplest emotions as highly conditioned by early experience.  By the 1930s, anthropologists were studying “culture and personality” (Wallace 1970), basically the interactions of innate feelings with cultural norms and structures.

A later generation of anthropologists, often those trained by such culture-and-personality theorists as Beatrice and John Whiting, concluded that the feelings might not be innate.  They held that some, or even all, emotions were culturally constructed.  Richard Shweder (1991), Catherine Lutz (1988), and their associates were leaders in this field.  Lutz argued for the utter strangeness to westerners of the Micronesian emotion of fango.  However, she weakened, if not destroyed, her case, by doing a perfectly good and clear job of explaining it.  It turned out to be much like ordinary familial love as practiced in the world at large.  (It seems to me to be a social construction of parent-child love.  Having done field research in Tahiti, I have some experience with the closely related Polynesian concept of arofa.)

Others drew from other theoretical perspectives.  The Polish linguistic anthropologist Anna Wierzbicka argued for the uniqueness of such cultural states as Polish feelings of nostalgia (Wierzbicka 1999), but her description makes it sound like other cultures’ ideas of nostalgia.  Sociologist Rom Harré insisted on the fundamental difference of French, Spanish, and English emotions (Harré 1986), but his evidence is not convincing.

Time seems to have softened radical claims.  Few if any cultural anthropologists believe now in purely innate feelings unmodified by culture.  A few biological anthropologists probably still do, but certainly the evolutionary psychologists and those influenced by them have moved beyond such a position (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992).  On the other side, few have followed the extreme social constructionists.  Most scholars now allow innate feelings to exist.

To make a long story short, the intermediate position turns out to be correct.  Clearly, people do have deep innate feelings.  Rage, affection, loyalty, fear, interest, and parental affection are shared with all mammals and are clearly genetically specified in a reasonably tight way.  Feelings like guilt and disgust may require human intellect, but are arguably panhuman.  However, humans are thoughtful animals, and highly social ones too.  So one expects to find differences in the subtleties and in the cultural interpretation of emotions.  Shorn of their extreme rhetoric, Shweder, Lutz, Harré, and others certainly show that people in different cultures, and for that matter different individuals within the same cultures, have different phenomenological worlds.

Psychologists have long studied the interaction of emotion and reason.     From the 1950s onward, Albert Ellis had built up increasing mountains of evidence for the success of rational-emotional therapy (RET; Ellis and Blau 1998).  This method depends on the recognition that people are creatures of both reason and emotion, and that human action involves integrating these.  Many life problems come from mistaken cognition leading to misdirected emotion.  Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy (Beck 1999 is perhaps the most anthropologically interesting, if not the most focal, of his many books) and several variants of it essentially follow Ellis’ perception.

Experimental psychology followed in due course, teasing out the neurological pathways that link emotion and reason.  It turns out that these are closely integrated in the brain (Damasio 1994).  Social perceptions, and all normal social functioning, depend utterly on successful performance of this integration task.  It also appears that some degree of feeling—“emotions” in a very basic sense, or at least moods and animal reactions—influence all cognition, even the most apparently neutral (Zajonc 1980).  A constant low-level play of interest and disinterest, evaluation for good or ill, and responses of affection or fear color all thought.  Reactions thus involve cognitive evaluation of situations, but also emotional reactions to them, combined in often predictable ways; fight-flight response, for instance, turns on evaluation of a threat and of how best to cope with it (Bandura 1982, 1986).  The situation at hand is evaluated in the light of prior experience; one flees, cowers down, or fights back.

Culture and individual cognition can thus influence emotional states, and the experience of emotion.  Mental action is a constant, shifting, rich fabric in which knowledge, feeling, and will are interwoven and color-mixed as in a Chinese textile.  However, predictable basic human reactions provide the warp, supporting and defining the whole.  Culture weaves patterns over the warp strings, and holds the fabric together.

 

All this is preface to a consideration of some claims made by western observers about Chinese emotional states.

First, westerners, and some Chinese as well, often claim that Chinese are among the peoples who are so intensely social that they do not experience the world the way “westerners” do.  According to a stereotype that goes back to the ancient Greeks, “Asians” are group-oriented, in contrast to the individualistic, freedom-loving peoples to the west of them.  These western individualists were first the Greeks, then “Europeans,” finally the ambiguous and unbounded “westerners.”  In the modern version, as espoused by scholars such as Richard Shweder, “Asians” are group-oriented, think mostly of the welfare of the collectivity, and do not stop to analyze and think independently about their cultural rules.  “Westerners” are “individualists,” verbal, self-conscious, self-analytic, and well-contained.  (See Shweder 1991 and references therein; see Anderson 1998 and Anderson et al. 2000 for China citations. For the general case of Western and Chinese stereotypes of their culture and of Chineseness, see the very important historical study by Lung-Kee Sun, 2002.)

My professor in these matters, John Pelzel, a superb teacher, used to say (in lectures, 1961) that, according to this view, westerners are like steel-plated balls, while Chinese were like amoebas, extending pseudopods till “there is more of them in the pseudopods” than in their own selves.

An interesting question is just who these “westerners” are.  The term is very general, but in most cases the scholars obviously mean urban, university-educated Americans and West Europeans.  Small-town Midwestern Americans, or East European villagers, might make a very interesting comparison set.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that Chinese, in general, are indeed more strongly social in their values and behavior than such urban educated western folk, and are less self-consciously individualistic.  Michael Bond (1986), for example, assembled many data-rich papers that prove this beyond reasonable doubt.

However, the contrast between “westerners” and “Chinese” is clearly overdrawn in much of the literature, as Sun (2002) shows in extenso.  The Hong Kong boat people prove that Chinese can be reasonably individualistic.  They do not, to be sure, inhabit steel-plated balls, but neither do westerners outside of cultural psychology books.

Scholars of such matters would do well to consider Chinese literature.  On the one hand, it almost uniformly describes highly prosocial values, and reflects a patriarchal order.  This order seems alien and oppressive to most westerners.  However, it also seems oppressive, though not alien, to the Chinese writers themselves.  Modern novels, in particular, usually criticize it.  Their criticism proves they take it seriously.  (See, for instance, the writings of Lu Xun, Ba Jin [Pa Chin 1964], or Maxine Hong Kingston.)

Yet, on the other hand, Chinese literature reflects an emotional world strikingly familiar to the western reader, once he or she adjusts to the unfamiliar order imposed by kinship and family structure.  The most revealing single example is Cao Xueqin’s great 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone (Cao 1973-1986).  Cao describes in exquisite detail the lives of teenagers growing up in a particularly strict Neo-Confucian family.  They have to conform to norms particularly rigid even by traditional Chinese social standards.  Yet, they are all individuals, and they are all highly self-analytic and self-conscious.  They experience a whole range of emotions familiar to American readers, including the desperate urge to rebel against family strictures.  They resemble American teenagers closely enough that anyone spending time with a group of bright American young can soon find close matches for Cao’s characters.

One might also consider the relation between rhetoric and reality.  Certainly, Chinese rhetoric, from classical literature down to village discourse and beginning school classes, favors the Confucian position.  Obedience, prosocial behavior, conformity, and hierarchic relationships of deference receive constant attention.  But historians know that when a government continually passes laws against some particular behavior, that means the behavior is commonly problematic, not that it is eliminated.  Many Chinese literary works, notably Wu Chingzi’s novel The Scholars (Wu 1957) and Pu Songling’s short stories, dissect the enormous disparity between rhetoric and behavior.

A reader of these or any of thousands of other Chinese novels, stories, plays, operas, and poems cannot escape feelings of great familiarity.  China certainly produced its share of dour advocates of conformity.  However, it also produced its share of selfish and amoral people.  Perhaps most interesting, it also produced prosocial but highly independent thinkers—classic “individuals” as idiosyncratic as anyone westward.  One recalls literary figures such as Mencius, Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, Zheng Xie, Yuan Mei, and countless more.

Even the hypersocial preachers of conformity and dogma often turn out to be rather misconstrued.  Zhu Xi in the 1100s taught, and to a great extent originated, the strict Neo-Confucian rules that often seemed (in future centuries) to be an enormous leaden weight on Chinese civilization.  Yet Zhu himself was a loner and outsider, rulemaking from a social-critical position based on Mencius’ rebelliousness.  He spent a good deal of his life in a hut perched partway up a thousand-foot sheer cliff in the remote mountains of Fujian.  One wonders what he would have thought of the rules’ latter-day petrification.

Ethnographies of China that focus sensitively on feelings (e.g. M. Wolf 1971; Gates 1987) seem, in general, to conclude that the human feelings of Chinese in Chinese families seem to be what one would expect of ordinary people subjected to such realities.  The differences between Chinese and American life are clear and sometimes deep, and usually in the postulated directions.  Chinese family structures have their effect on human relations.  On the other hand, humans are indeed siblings beneath the epidermis.

Rhetorics of conformity and individualism may also outrun people’s realities.

Chinese of the old school—including literally everyone in Castle Peak—loved to justify anything they did by recourse to the words of Confucius, Mencius, Zhu Xi, or any other ancient authority who might be relevant.  Doctors quoted ancient medical works, educators quoted old education manuals.  However, we noted that people justified quite different, and even opposite, courses of action by recourse to the same sages, and even the same passages.  Clearly, more directly relevant reasons had some bearing here.

Conversely, Americans love to justify anything they do by some directly functional reason, especially an economic one.  However, much of what is so justified is so far from economically sensible that one must look for other reasons.  One often finds that the reason is sheer cultural tradition.  For instance, Americans continue to wear Northern European clothing styles in southern California; the Native Americans sensibly went almost naked in that hot land.  Frequently even the American pretense of “rational self-interest” breaks down, and Americans admit that they are seeing an admittedly awful movie, or following an admittedly ugly and uncomfortable fashion, solely because “everybody’s doing it.”

Chinese concepts of intelligence foreground not only intellectual competence, but also “interpersonal intelligence” and rote memory, while American folk concepts of intelligence feature verbal skills more than Chinese concepts do (Sternberg 2004:335).

One should not confuse the rhetoric of folk explanation with the reality of emotional and intellectual experience.

 

Another problem concerns privacy and space.

A small fishing boat provides a minimum of space and privacy.  Even on shore, a fisher family’s simple home is little better.  A one-room hut, designed like a boat cabin or built as a square block, jams up against many others on a crowded shoreline.

Humans are amazingly social creatures, but such conditions tax their abilities to get along.  Formerly, some authors suggested that humans are territorial, or cannot tolerate crowding, and I found in Hong Kong an ideal test of that theory, since obviouisly people were forced into a minimum of space (Anderson and Anderson 1973).  The boat people had it easy.   In 1965, when recent refugees from China jammed the city, I visited a room in the oldest part of Kowloon that had 57 people living in a space of approximately 750 square feet.  They had decked the room into two storeys (each about 4 feet high) and they slept in shifts.  Yet they got along.  In Malaysia, fisherman friends of mine who had gotten relatively affluent built large houses—and used the opportunity to bring all their families in.  The result was as much crowding as in any hut.  They were proud of it.

Yet, inevitable stresses occurred.  Children played noisily.  Competition for scarce deck space was inevitable, as people worked on critically important projects—net-mending, trap preparation, bait-cutting.  Cooking filled the air with smoke, which dispersed on an open boat but was difficult to bear in a small house.  The bathroom of a boat was the starboard side of the sterncastle—a hole allowed wastes to escape—and small boats had no way for bathing or defecating individuals to hide completely.  No one looked; people condemned any staring.   Sex could hardly be private on a rocking boat.  Couples were very quiet, often sitting up (in the position of Tibetan yab-yum figures) to avoid noise.  But, inevitably, a small boat would sometimes shake and creak, conspicuous in the still night.  People studiously ignored this, or sometimes teased a particularly amorous couple.  Privacy was respected as much as possible, but no one was under the illusion that total privacy was possible.

Beyond these, rules for respecting space and privacy were clear and sharp (Anderson 1973—I have benefited since that date from discussions with Rance Lee, Robert Moore, and Ambrose Tse):

First, functional subdivision of space.  Sleeping space was inviolate.  Other activities have their defined areas.  Socializing was in neutral space:  front room of a house, center or aft deck of a boat.

Second, time was loosely structured; people worked around each other, negotiating.

Third, people tolerated almost any amount of noise.  The bay was quiet, but life on shore, especially in the towns, was very noisy.  People adjusted, learning to sleep through everything from crying children next door to firecrackers at New Year.  Thus, the constant pressure to “quiet down,” typical of American towns, did not occur.

Fourth, children could be disciplined by anyone, as noted above; this was necessary for close-quarters living.

Fifth, emotion was warm and passionate, but kept quiet except in its proper—usually private—place.  People did not tolerate either coldness nor promiscuously open emotionality.

Sixth, family and public rules of deference, respect, and leadership (discussed in the preceding chapter) clearly had much to do with living in close quarters.

These and other mores allowed people to live together in harmony and cooperation, and to enjoy social life without undue stress.  The rest of the world could well learn from these simple rules.

 

Another question currently debated is that of maternal sentiments.  Is mother love a human universal?  Do the Chinese feel it?

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) denied the existence of innate feelings of mother love or motherly attachment, seeing these as pure cultural construction.  (No one seems to have even considered fathers.)  Scheper-Hughes saw mother love as a western bourgeois idea.

Darwinian theory requires us to think seriously about this.  Even before Darwin,  scholars observed that raising children is so difficult and demanding that essentially no one would raise a child without a powerful innate drive to do it.  In view of the fact that the human population is six and a half billion and increasing at an explosive rate, it seems rather strange to conclude that parental love is a fiction.  Moreover, the western bourgoisie are almost the only group in the world who are at “zero population growth.”  One would expect that if mother love were a western bourgeois notion, only the western bourgeois would go to the trouble of raising children; surely no one else would.  As Nasir ad-Din Tusi put it in (or about) 1235 C.E., long before Darwin:  “An example of natural love is that of the mother for the child:  if this class of love were not innate in the mother’s nature, she would not give nurture to the child, and the survival of the species could not conceivably be effected” (al-Tusi, tr. Wickens, 1964:197).

Feelings, however, would naturally be expected to vary in strength between individuals.  On the genetic level, Darwinian theory leads us to expect variation in all genetically guided traits.  At the phenotypic level, Scheper-Hughes is surely right (and has a long line of forebears) in maintaining that poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, chronic sickness, and general desperation often play against any maternal instincts, hardening many women toward their young.  Bowlby’s attachment theory, and other attachment-through-experience theories, add that mothers who have little contact with their children, such as the elite mothers of Europe in ancien regime days (Hrdy 1999), have little chance to bond and thus to develop full maternal sentiments.

Arthur Wolf, who has written some of the best, most thorough, most insightful, and most psychologically informed ethnography of China, has argued that “maternal sentiments” are not strong in at least some parts of China, and may be nonexistent for many women (A. Wolf 2003).  This conclusion is based on his research on minor marriage:  giving of child-brides or even infant-brides, to be raised by the child-husband’s family.  Working in a part of Taiwan where minor marriage was common, he found that mothers usually gave up their daughters without undue stress or apparent emotion.  From this he concluded that mother love in humans is at best fickle, if it exists at all:  “…bearing a child, nursing it, and caring for it are not alone sufficient to arouse maternal sentiments….  [other authors] may be wrong in arguing that maternal sentiments are ‘a major component of human nature’” (A. Wolf 2003:S40; the scare quote is from John Bowlby, who argued for strong attachment between mother and infant; Bowlby 1988:165.  It is well to remember Bowlby’s point that bonding depends on good circumstances around and after birth.)  Wolf argues that even well-to-do women gave up babies, apparently only for calculated financial advantage, and appeared to do it without concern:  “To be confident that Taiwanese women did not find giving a child away particularly distressful one would need to have observed their concurrent behavior.  I never had an opportunity to do so because by the time I arrived in Taiwan in 1957 adoptions were not common and no longer handled in the traditional manner.  But I have talked to many women who gave their daughters away, and my impression is that this was not a wrenching experience” (A.Wolf 2003:S39).  Wolf was dealing with memories of a long-distant past, and apparently did not make detailed psychological enquiries.

Wolf takes a consciously strong position, stronger even than such questioners of mother love as Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) and Sarah Hrdy (1999).  Unlike Scheper-Hughes, who documents the horrific lives of her apparently uncaring mothers, Wolf (like Hrdy) dismisses poverty and harsh life as an explanation.  Wolf and Hrdy maintain well-to-do women were just as guilty—a claim for which one might wish for some direct ethnographic evidence (Hrdy cites only historical records, many of them polemics of exceedingly dubious veracity).

To be sure, many well-to-do women gave up girls in old China and Europe, and Croll shows that many well-to-do women abort girls today.  However, the vast majority of abandoners were either desperately poor or in danger of becoming so.  Wolf (and Croll) somewhat downplay the uncertainty of life in the old days.  Unlike East Asia today, East Asia two or three generations ago was a land of falling economies and falling expectations.  The poor could not afford to give dowries for their daughters, and might let girls die if they could not—as the boat people did—reform the dowry rules.  Even the rich feared the effects of multiple dowries—on top of revolutions, market crashes, wars, famines, and epidemics.

A classic European stereotype, common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, alleged that the Chinese, like other “inferior races” suitable for colonial takeover, were deficient in human feeling, notably mother love.  Writers such as Arthur Smith (1894, 1899) held forth on the callousness and cruelty of the Chinese.  The 19th century authors (Smith is typical) spoke more of infanticide, extremely common in those days (and far from unknown today; Croll 2000) and almost always directed against girls.

Infanticide (usually or always female) and selling off of excess girls had been done in the past, to the enormous heartbreak of the parents, who did it only under family pressure (in cases we knew; see below).  Selective neglect of girls existed in the 1960s.  Girls got less food and more trouble.  However, in many families, a promising girl got more care than a not-so-promising boy.  By the 1970s, girls got full care.  The economic situation had improved; easy access to education had guaranteed that a girl could potentially be as productive as a boy (or more productive if she were brighter).  Gender differences had by no means disappeared, but they had become less obtrusive; they were no longer dangerous to health.

The horror stories of “typical Chinese” callous infanticide and neglect of girls (Croll 2000; Smith 1894; Wolf 2004) certainly did not apply at Castle Peak.  Children were universally loved and valued.  Some families were certainly better and more caring parents than others, and indeed a few parents (there as elsewhere) beat or starved or abused their children, but literally no one among the thousands of people we knew exhibited the callous attitudes that westerners so love to attribute to all Chinese (see e.g. Eastman 1988; Smith 1894).  This is not to say that the sober data recorded by Croll are incorrect—they are, alas, all too true.  Patriarchy was alive and well at Castle Peak.  However, the flamboyant stereotyping by writers like Arthur Smith take the worst of Chinese behavior as the rule.

The Cantonese boat people (and even the Castle Peak Bay land people) may, however, have been unusually far in the other direction (see further discussion in Anderson 1992, 1998).  Certainly, intensive ethnography of some other Chinese communities shows far more severe attitudes toward women—especially in-laws—and children (see e.g. Gates 1987; A. Wolf 2004 and references therein; M. Wolf 1968, 1972), and ethnographic novels like Ba Jin’s, provide an insider’s view that is no less revealing.  Marja Anderson and I ourselves studied a Chinese community in Malaysia that was much more like those harsh communities than like Castle Peak Bay (Anderson and Anderson 1978).  Perhaps significantly, it was largely Hokkien, thus linguistically and culturally closer to the communities known to Gates, Smith, A. Wolf, M. Wolf, and others.

Like minor marriage, infanticide was essentially a way of dealing with the fact that girls marry out, and require dowries.  The parents must not only pay to raise a girl who will never do much for them, but must then pay to get her married off.  Many families cannot afford this, and many more could do it only at the price of substantial economic stress.  They thus kill the girls if they are desperate, or, if less desperate, sell them or adopt them out.  This gave rise to the muitsai (“little sister”) system, in which the girl goes out as a servant or concubine.  More charitable (at least in theory) was minor marriage.

Wolf is, of course, aware of the social-structural and economic reasons for these practices, and his nuanced and comprehensive ethnography is the antithesis of Smith’s crude racism.  He is careful to add European data to show that Europeans too (at least in the past) got rid of children at a high rate[5].

Scheper-Hughes allows poverty and hardship as causative of lack of maternal feeling, but still insists on the reality of the lack.  She appears not to have interviewed her cases according to standard psychological or psychotherapeutic interview methods.  Comparable research by trained psychotherapists known to me (who would wish anonymity here), as well as my own research in clinical settings, in the United States and Canada, indicates that many women do indeed so respond to poverty and substance abuse.

However, concealment or even suppression of real and intense feeling is also common, apparently much commoner than actual callousness.  Often, such hiding of emotion is related to extreme depression.  Therapy can release the hidden emotion in a dramatic, explosive way, as I have repeatedly seen in both clinical and nonclinical contexts.

The sort of brutalization described by Scheper-Hughes makes people withdraw more and more from relationships and emotional engagement, because of fear and stress (Bandura 1982, 1986 explains the general case).  Maternal attachment is probably the last to go, but it too must go eventually, in a few cases.  It is possible that the Taiwanese mothers of whom Wolf speaks were brutalized much more than they cared to admit.  It is also possible that hiding emotions had simply become second nature to them.

Barbara Tuchman (1978:51-52) has commented on the apparent lack of deep attachment of elite parents to their young in medieval Europe—though her claims are somewhat belied by the assumptions of maternal love in medieval literature such as the Lays of Marie de France.  Medieval fathers, though not mothers, tended to be absent much of the time, and often had little chance to bond with children.  So they may indeed have had little parental concern—and of course they were the ones writing the books (with rare exceptions, such as Marie).  On the other hand, Tuchman’s book and other sources document great kin solidarity in those times.  It extended even to adopted, illegitimate, and distant relatives.

In short, the picture of attachment is not simple; attachment varies with personal and cultural conditions, as Bowlby discusses in detail. Bowlby does not have the last word on attachment, but his findings from thousands of data points gathered by meticulous and psychologically informed research can be qualified only by superior data.  On the one hand, it now seems that bonding is a slower and chancier process than Bowlby thought (see esp. Hrdy 1999).  On the other hand, an absolute lack of maternal feeling in a large percentage of otherwise normal women seems beyond Darwinian possibility, and is certainly beyond ethnographic demonstration.

There certainly was a horrific prevalence of female abandonment, infanticide, and neglect in eastern Asia.  Elisabeth Croll, one of the best and most seasoned ethnographers of that tragic region, has summed up the facts (Croll 2000).  Croll establishes that many families, even in the affluent and secure present, still allow girls to die.

However, the questions of who makes the decisions and how the mothers feel remain to be answered.  Marja Anderson and I had many conversations with women who had given up young daughters, and a few with women who had seen their daughters summarily eliminated.

Usually, the boat people strongly oppose the open expression of negative emotions, particularly grief, and most particularly grief over a hopeless situation.  They have an extreme aversion, backed up by sanctions, against expressing such emotions openly.  However, boat people, in many situations, do feel it appropriate to open up.

Our interviewing was informal, private, detailed, sustained, and gentle.  We provided a calm, quiet situation and got the women to talk—minimizing actual questions.  This eliminates the possibility that we led the women into emotionality by our questioning pattern.  Actually, we tried with considerable success to get women to talk on their own, without questions intruding.  We also were privy to several interactions in which we did no questioning at all.

In such situations, after several minutes to hour, all women without exception would become highly emotional, and these interviews almost invariably ended in sobs.  These women, especially those involved in infanticide, had clearly never even begun to resolve the grief and pain.  They kept silent, dealing with it as best they could.  One saw why silence about grief was so necessary in old China.  No one could have borne the suffering otherwise.  Explicit statement of this truth is, in fact, a standard trope in classical Chinese literature.

We observed one dramatic, and thoroughly public, confrontation between a mother and her adult daughter whom she had given up shortly after birth.  Being public, this had to be managed through improvised folksong, the appropriate vehicle for expressing grief (e.g. at funerals and wakes, as well as situations like this one).  It went on for about two hours.  The singing broke into rough chanting, alternating with weeping and sobs.  Quite apart from the emotion of the two participants, the watching crowd all clearly recognized the emotions as normal, and empathized thoroughly; many of the women joined in the tears[6].

In these cases, the decisions to give up or kill girls had been made by the family as a whole—which usually meant, in reality, the husband’s parents.  They would persuade or force the husband and wife.  Some wives and mothers stood steadfast, but more often economics intervened; one had to face the fact that keeping one more child could mean that all went without, and all were in danger of dying.  We knew families where this was a genuine and serious concern.  They usually kept all the children anyway, and took their chances—but that was in the expanding Hong Kong economy of the 1960s and 1970s.  Even so, we saw children die of malnutrition.

One can only conclude, from this and other evidence (including the comments by other scholars appended to Wolf’s article—those by Chinese scholars in particular), that maternal sentiments are usually real and powerful, in China and elsewhere.  People bear what they can, and often bear in silence.

George Bonanno (2004) has recently reviewed a vast amount of evidence and concluded that people may feel grief very deeply and yet survive through sheer grit:  “Resilience to the unsettling effects of interpersonal loss is not rare but relatively common, does not appear to indicate pathology but rather healthy adjustment, and does not lead to delayed grief reactions” (Bonanno 2004:23).  Even post-traumatic stress disorder is much less common than the incidence of traumatic stress would lead us to expect.  Yet, Bonanno makes it clear that for these resilient copers the grief and suffering are real.

One might expect that parents would engage in psychological distancing if they expected the child to die.  Scheper-Hughes found this in Brazil, and I have observed at least the attempt to do it not only in Hong Kong, but also in Mexico and elsewhere.  However, parents’ success at this is generally (though far from always) poor.  Folk wisdom in Mexico holds that women have to tough it out (aguantar) as best they can, and for their own sakes and others they need to hide emotion.  The fact that hiding is deliberate, forced, and difficult is universally recognized in folksongs and other popular culture (Anderson 2005).

Certainly, culture can fine-tune or even create emotions.  Human feelings are subject to all manner of modifcations, cultural and otherwise.  The point here is not that culture is irrelevant or that emotions are some essential quality in the human animal; extreme innatism simply does not stand up under research.  However, it seems doubtful, if only on Darwinian grounds, that any large segment of the human race is without parental sentiments.  Certainly, we never encountered Chinese mothers lacking in maternal concern.  No doubt some Taiwanese women stifled any feelings thay may have had; perhaps some were indeed without feelings.  Taiwanese society is different enough from Cantonese that it may be less emotional, more disengaged—but the many ethnographies of Taiwan, including those by Wolf and his group, do not seem to show this.

People are tough.  They survive.  Hurts can be stuffed down, even more effectively than Freudians and Bowlbians knew.  Chinese mothers, and many more in this imperfect world, must often make horrible choices deliberately and with clear eyes, and keep their mouths shut about the consequences.  So does an animal that coolly gnaws off its leg to escape a trap.

I wish all social scientists knew Bertolt Brecht’s long and wrenching “Ballad of the Infanticide Marie Farrer.”  It ends:

“…her sin was heavy, but her pain was great.

Therefore I beg you not to fall in scorn;

We all need help from every creature born”  (Brecht 1947:26, my translation more or less following H. R. Hays’ on p. 27).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 6.  FISHERMEN IN A WIDER WORLD

COMMUNITY AND POLITICS

 

1

The boat people moved in a wider world, in which political identifications of various kinds cut across the boat-land distinction.

Whether maritime or land-based, a person from the Castle Peak area identified himself or herself as a Ching Saan yan, a person of Green Mountain (Castle Peak).  The area so labeled was defined by marketing structure.  As William Skinner pointed out (Skinner 1964-1965; see also the papers in Skinner 1977), China’s market geography was and is a complex set of polygons, each polygon fitting with its neighbors in theoretically neat tiling-patterns.  These polygons are centered on marketing areas.  They form a nested hierarchy, from local markets to national capitals.  Hugh Baker (1979) pointed out that, in reality, the polygons were often more like circles, separated by splinters of unused and uninhabited land; these slivers served, quite literally, as grounds for competition.  Villages tried to expand cultivation into these debatable zones.  Before the 20th century, neighboring villages often fought over the right to expand into such borderlands.

People marketed at a certain town, and within its sphere they contract marriages, transact business, find cooperation and sociability, and organize festivals.  Skinner’s use of “marketing” as the defining term betrays a certain economic determinism; a sociologist might speak of “interaction.”  But “marketing” was the Chinese term, too, as the name of San Hui (“New Market”) makes clear.  San Hui was a typical “standard market town,” center of such an area.  As such, it could supply everything that anyone needed daily or weekly, and almost everything that ordinary people ever needed.

Above it in a hierarchy of markets was Yuen Long, the central town for the western New Territories.  (Skinner’s student John Young, 1974, provided a superb study of its marketing functions.  This book must be read by anyone interested in Chinese marketing in earlier times.)  Yuen Long supplied the few things that ordinary people occasionally needed but that San Hui was not big enough to provide.  These included special government services, full emergency medical care, major manufactured and crafts goods, and such specialized services as poultry-castration (only on market days!).  As a large town, Yuen Long was part of a rotating series of major markets.  It was, if I remember aright, a “1-4-7” town:  major markets were held, in a huge open space at the edge of town, on the 1st, 4th, 7th, 11th, 14th, 17th, 21st, 24th, and 27th days of the month.  The nearest towns would then be a 2-5-8 and a 3-6-9 town.  Thus, a triangle of coordinated markets was established.  The poultry castrator, and other specialized vendors of goods and services, traveled around the circuit, resting or going to ordinary everyday markets on the zero days.  Such towns supplied things that ordinary people needed only once or twice a year (as well as all the ordinary needs).

Still higher on the scale of markets was the great Kowloon-Hong Kong metropolis, valuable to Castle Peak residents as a place for rare, exotic recreation and as a place to sell fish.  In the 1960s, many people had never been there, or had been only once.  Travel was much more common by 1974.  Such great centers had not only daily and yearly needs, but everything anyone might ever need.  To the goods and services available at lesser market towns, they added the goods and services that a normal person needed only once in a lifetime, and goods and services that special people (big businessmen, political leaders, and the like) needed more regularly.

Below San Hui in the hierarchy came local markets like the bay pier.  Here, one found items like rice, oil, salt, and tea, as well as incense and religious services, restaurants and cafes, and fish dealers—in short, the things that everybody needed every day, but nothing much beyond that.

Smallest in the marketing hierarchy were the informal daily gatherings of people at crossroads, to trade or haggle over a few vegetables, fish, or herbs that their gardens had provided, and to sell home-made snacks.  Pedlars brought folk medicines and cheap cloth.

The local markets defined three sharply separate subsections of the Castle Peak residents:  the east bay, the west bay, and the San Hui area itself.  The fishermen almost all lived in the east bay, focused on the pier.  Boat people in the other two areas had given up fishing.  They found work in the factories and service jobs around San Hui.  By 1974, the factories were booming; the bay had already been half filled.  Public apartment housing had been constructed on the former tideflats.  Private houses decorated the higher ground.  All the unfortunates living in wrecked boats or shacks in the 1960s were now well housed, usually in the new public housing, and well employed.  One exceptionally bright girl we befriended when she was a starving child in 1965 was a waitress in a restaurant in 1975, and moving up toward better opportunities.

The outcaste community described in the previous chapter had also disappeared by 1974.  Its people found homes on land, and joined the factory and service workforce.

Within the fishing community, boat type influenced sociability.  Trawlers socialized with trawlers, hand-liners with hand-liners.  Religious associations, coops, and informal leadership groups cut across these lines, and everyone met in the shops and restaurants of the pier area.

The boat people were highly mobile, and had constant interaction with people of Tai O, Ma Wan, and a couple of dozen other small or large ports of the western New Territories.  If the fishing were good or if relatives were there, a family might temporarily move to one of those ports.  Land people were more apt to have ties with other land communities, and with the larger centers, Yuen Long and Kowloon.

A community was thus less a matter of physical residence than of social interaction, and social interaction was defined, in large measure, by marketing and commercial links.

However, this did not quite exhaust the structuring of community.  Skinner tended to see religious structures as simply mirroring the marketing ones.  Some did, notably the cult of the “Earth Gods” (spirits of the locality) and, of course, the gods of the towns themselves.  However, other cults cross-cut the marketing grain, and provided another way of linking people.  At Castle Peak Bay, not only the local boat people but all the boat people from Kowloon westward came to the Tin Hau temples.  Land-dwellers from wide-flung areas came to the Three Sages Temple near the pier, and land-dwellers often worshiped Tin Hau, also.  Devout or desperate worshipers traveled farther afield, to famous temples at Tai O, Kowloon, and elsewhere.  Conversely, urbanites came to the great Taoist and Buddhist establishments in the area—but locals rarely did, for these were more sophisticated temples, for the well-educated.  Religion also integrated boat and land people, and was the only institution that did so (see following chapter).  Thus, religion served to weave the social strands into a fabric, by integrating people otherwise separated by ethnicity and market boundaries.  Judging from my experience and reading, this finding holds true throughout China.

In addition to the impersonal ties of marketing and temple membership, the world outside the family was bound by a spiderweb of friendship links.  The Cantonese word p’ang yau, generally translated “friend,” actually means “acquaintance.”  At Castle Peak, at least, it meant anyone that one knew well enough to engage in conversation without some special occasion to serve as an excuse.  By contrast, “friend” is hou p’ang yau (“good acquaintance”).  These are people with whom one trades, has tea, celebrates birthdays, talks endlessly, plays mahjongg, and generally enjoys good fellowship.  Friends were expected to look after each other; mutual aid and care were universal.  Borrowing was usually from kin, because neighbors might not be neighbors long in this mobile world, but still a great deal of borrowing and mutual favor-exchanging took place between unrelated friends.

Acquaintances and friends could be quite shameless about asking for favors, but this was reasonable in the “floating world.”  The asker knew that the chance might never come again.  The person asked knew that he or she might desperately need the other’s aid in a day, or a month, or a year.  One needed all the contacts one could get.  One never knew whose boat would be the nearest when one’s own boat wrecked.

 

2

Leadership in the boat community was a matter of some ideological ambiguity.  In nothing did the boat people agree more totally and thoroughly than in their rejection of all top-down control.  They resented government, police, and domination by local powers, whether legal (town officials) or informal (fish-dealers, local rich folk).

Of course, necessarily, they did not live as anarchistically as they talked.  They submitted to the British government, because it generally facilitated their life and fishing, rather than interfering with those.  They recognized that some sort of government was necessary to maintain markets, mark harbors, and so forth.  But they did not submit quietly or eagerly.  They talked nostalgically of unsettled times in the 1930s and late 1940s when they were outside effective control by any government.  They justified such opposition by quoting the more libertarian passages of Mencius.  That philosopher justified rebelling against evil rulers, and argued for liberty of conscience to a degree very rare in world literature.

Often, the boat people sounded strikingly similar to China’s home-grown anarchist philosophers of the early 20th century (Scalapino and Yu 1961).  The boat people had never heard of Kropotkin or Emma Goldman, but Mencius was quite enough.  Surely, few people in human history were so uncompromisingly against all hierarchy, all top-down control, and all interference with personal liberty.  This was not the American “libertarian” philosophy, which opposes big government but idealizes big business, including government support thereof.  The boat people opposed big business, big government, and anything else above the grassroots level, with equal fierceness.

A long history of free-trading, smuggling, and outright piracy lay behind all this, but it was primarily the result of the needs of the fishery.  A boat had to be a little republic.  People had to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-determining.  They had to be able to fish where they wanted, and to control their own fleets.  They had to be able to defend themselves against pirates and rivals, without waiting for distant and sluggish government agents to do it.

Almost equally important, in the minds of the boat people, was the eternal and inevitable dominance of government by land-dwellers.  Even those boat people who did not hate and fear the land people were most unenthusiastic about this dominance.  The land people had always used their position of authority to impose unfair terms, and the boat people thus wished to escape land-based control as much as possible.

However, no human community can really function or survive without a leadership structure.  Consistency thus could go only so far, and stated principles that sounded anarchic had to be qualified strongly in the real world.  The boat people made use of government when it suited them, as in the cases of the cooperatives and the government fish market.  Increasingly, they came to rely on government schools, government harbor and channel controls, and other infrastructure services.

Most of the fishermen at Castle Peak had come as refugees from Communist China.  Almost all came for economic, not political, reasons.  They described rations of two pieces of cloth a year and a catty of rice a day; neither were remotely close to adequate for a fisher’s life.  They continued to fish in Chinese waters, under license, paying a small tax.  However, in late 1965, just as we moved onto our boat, the Communist government closed all waters.  The fishermen thought is was largely an attempt to make them come home.  They did not; they simply poached.  Rolex and other imported watches began to appear, and the following dialogue took place between myself and one fisherman:  “Oh, nice new watch.”  “Yes, it’s for the cadre.”  “But I thought there was no bribery in Communist China…?”  “Oh, yes, but this is only a little gift.”  So fishing went on.  “But doesn’t this mean money is more important than government policy?”  “Of course, what else?”  The cadres did insist on the boats having Chinese licenses.

The boat people were neutral about the political philosophies of Communists, British imperialists, Americans, and others; they disliked all governments and liked all people.  In spite of the years of anti-American propaganda, we had little difficulty with the refugee community.  Only those who maintained active Chinese Communist party membership and organizing enterprise saw us as dubiously desirable.

The boat people viewed Hong Kong’s marine police with fear and loathing.  These police interfered with smuggling, collected the high license and harbor fees required by Hong Kong, and had to enforce the countless minor maritime laws adapted for bigger and more demanding vessels:  laws requiring formally trained personnel, special equipment, etc., to be on board.  The boat people accepted gladly an increasing range of government services, however:  typhoon signals, typhoon shelters, land-based police who maintained order and stopped gangsters from abusing boat women on shore, public health measures, public education, and other trappings of the modern state.              More important than these, at least in 1965-66, was the actual leadership within the boat community.  (By 1974-75, boat life was in decline and government power on the rise.)  Needless to say, boat community leadership could not be formalized, or even overtly recognized.  It was none the less real.  People recognized certain fishermen as leaders, using the terms a yat, “number one,” or taai yan, “big man.”  Marshall Sahlins, theorist of the “Big Man” (Sahlins 1972), would have been pleased.  Sahlins used the term exactly the way the boat people did:  for a man who waxed large in the social picture through his own efforts.  (Sahlins further noted that such a man was often literally big, thanks to many a feast.  The boat people, hard workers that they were, almost never got fat, even when socially considerable.)  Such terms were more often used for powerful land people, and with no friendly implication, but the boat people admitted that they too had their big men.  I found it sometimes difficult to get them to admit this, even when no one had the slightest question that the phenomenon was real.

Many women had real political and social power, but all recognized leaders were men, and the public sphere was a male realm.  On the other hand, everyone knew which women had power, and everyone knew that the wives of male leaders were often full or nearly-full partners in much of the leaders’ decision-making.

The path of a boat leader was of a strictly grassroots order.  A successful boat captain—that is, male head of family—would find himself sought out by relatives and neighbors for help.  If he succeeded in solving their problems, he gained a reputation, which could spread.  Most such grassroots leaders remained known only to close friends and immediate kin, but some rose higher.

The boat community of Ma Wan Island, a small, isolated island a few miles from Castle Peak, recognized as leader and spokesman the dynamic young Yip Yautaai.  He had begun as a particularly caring and attentive solver of neighbors’ problems.  He soon found himself spokesman for the community—a very poor and remote one, poorly served in all respects—in its attempts to improve.  He organized a coop and a Better Living Society that involved all the fishermen.  He got government services and assistance.  He then succeeded in finding nongovernmental charitable organizations that would help with housing and livelihood.  Soon the fishermen moved from their boats into well-built apartments on shore, built with the help of Canadian and other charitable associations.  Throughout all this, Yip remained modest, friendly, and unassuming. Yip’s leadership and ability in all this made him known and respected throughout the boat communities of the western New Territories.  He was widely held up as a living model of a boat leader.

Yip’s achievements were unusual, but effective leaders could be found in many ports.  Castle Peak remained somewhat unorganized; there were many small leaders but no powerful ones.  This had much to do with the divisions of the fleet and the lack of major community-wide problems to solve.  There were many boat types and many sub-communities.  Leaders rose to the level of representing 20 or 30 boats, but rarely could find much scope to move higher, or much competitive advantage over other leaders.  Of course, it also had much to do with the fact that a leader of 20 or more boats attracted many attempts to cut him down to size!

A leader had to deal with issues of face (min, Putonghua mian).  This Chinese term has developed a quite wrong connotation in English.  English-speakers have adopted the word to refer to purely superficial, often hypocritical, social slickness and prestige.  This is not how the term is used in Chinese, or at least in Cantonese (see Moore 1981).  For Cantonese, the term refers to social reputation based on actual skill at negotiating with fairness, honesty, and competence.  To be sure, a well-to-do individual with competence, honor, and connections can have face and still be a shady operator.

However, a boat person—lacking wealth, important connections, and chances to develop suaveness—could only rely on native honesty, reliability, and social skills.  He also had to have considerable courage.  He had to be level-headed, thoughtful, and judicious.  The risks—social and even physical—were not inconsiderable.  A man who blew his cool would never be a leader; he would be more apt to lose his boat.  Also, a leader had to be a good listener, since he had to deal with all sorts of people from all social spheres.  The boat world had its shady dealers and people who cut moral corners, but they had little face.  Many feared them, but few respected them.

In so far as “face” implied a slick surface as well as an integrity beneath, the term lin (lian) was pressed into service, to refer more specifically to the latter (see Moore 1981, 1988).  Face was a social quality, lin a more personal one.

Face comes from successfully navigating the difficult and slippery world of social interactions and transactions.  It is a quality that emerges from those.

To gain face, a leader had to resolve social dealings, conflicts, and disputes in such manner that others also gained face.  The typical case was a conflict among the leader’s followers, or between a follower and an outsider to the circle.  If the leader could resolve such a conflict to everyone’s satisfaction, leaving no one feeling wronged and embittered, all parties—especially the leader himself—gained face.  If the leader left the parties unsatisfied and angry, he lost face.  Negotiating non-conflict situations, such as marriage negotiations, government dealings, and organizing for festivals, also involved the opportunity to gain or lose face.

Losing face also came from any public shame, especially being discovered in a dishonorable or compromising action.  Deadly, also, was being played for a fool—wan pan chat, “played for a stupid prick,” in the blunt language of the waterfront.  A pan chat was one who had tried to pull off a social deal, but had been outsmarted because of his own stupidity.  This was even worse if he had tried to cut moral corners in the process.  Even trivial matters like not being able to respond cleverly to an insult, or being cheated in a minor transaction that anyone should have handled, made one a bit of a pan chat.

Being a running dog (informer), cheat, or deadbeat were also sure ways to lose all face in short order.  Being chou, “coarse,” here meaning “socially insensitive,” was costly to a leader, though not necessarily face-losing to an ordinary person.  A leader had to have sensitivity and polish, and had to keep calm and balanced.  General bias and uncontrolled anger were disliked in everyone and fatal to a leader’s position.  By contrast, bias in favor of one’s clients and carefully stage-managed anger in defense of them were desirable.  (It gave one face to display obviously stage-managed anger, but genuinely losing it and getting seriously angry was a face-losing proposition.  Few facts give more insight into waterfront sociability than this one.)

Crumbling under pressure was always fatal to leadership.

Honesty and fidelity to one’s followers was obviously desirable, but honesty in land-based terms was not necessary.  Yip Yautaai and many other leaders were model citizens by any standards, but many leaders were, or had once been, smugglers, pirates, and the like.  Such men were feared and not always trusted, but they were often leaders all the same; land-people’s standards of good behavior did not necessary mean anything one way or another.

Finally, a boat leader had to have something not at all related to face:  he had to be a distinctive “character.”  An ordinary, conformist, pleasant sort would never be a leader.  A leader had to have a reputation for something distinctive:  pungent wit, great knowledge of and insight into people, great knowledge of folk songs and stories, hard drinking, bonhomous feastmanship, or the like.  He had to stand out as an exciting, interesting person, revelling in life and in originality.

In short, a leader was subject to countless democratic pressures.  He had to be successful and yet not proud or haughty.  The boat people took delight in cutting down to size anyone who overreached himself.

Someone who could successfully deal with such issues soon became the spokesman for his group in dealings with outsiders, be they other boat people, government workers, businessmen, or wandering anthropologists.

A small-time leader tended to be trapped by the size of his operation; he could do only so much with his resources.  Yip, a less than affluent member of a modest community, was exceptional in being able to parlay sheer personal skill into a great deal of improvement for his people.

Leaders developed regular patterns of morning tea-drinking, so that they could be found by anyone needing their help.  A leader would have regular hours at a particular table in a particular restaurant.  Morning was the time for this, because the leader would usually have to go out to fish, or else would be taken up with social and political dealings later in the afternoon.  Part of the responsibility of a leader was attending weddings, religious festivals, and other rituals involving group members, so he had a busy life after morning teatime.  Certain tea shops and restaurants attracted leaders, others did not.  The attractive ones were those that were large, open almost all the time, and welcoming to boat people.  Boat leaders knew the restaurants to visit in Yuen Long and Kowloon as well as in all the western New Territories ports.

The exigencies of a world of highly independent people, who valued their agency and took no orders from anyone, inevitably and necessarily elevated such negotiation-experts to leadership positions.  The situation created a specific morality:  one valuing conflict resolution above almost all other things.  Independence and autarky guaranteed that conflicts would be frequent.  The needs of mutual aid and mutual dependence, and of harmony, guaranteed that solutions to those conflicts would have to be found.  This in turn guaranteed that good problem-solvers would be the pillars of the community, and their social skills would be highly valued.  The boat people were quite aware that an independent community of independent people needs more, not less, self-conscious harmony-maintenance than a community of policed conformists.   The dangers of a Hobbesian meltdown were obvious.

Thus, the boat communities of Hong Kong were amazingly orderly; of course, the efficient colonial government was also responsible, but the boat communities were largely self-regulating.  However, without the police and other trappings of modernity, leadership might not have had such beneficent consequences.  Antony (2003) describes the rise of several pirate leaders in the South China Sea who seem to have risen by similar means—in addition to ruthlessness and predatory savagery.

Other ethnographies of China have described somewhat similar processes.  In particular, the excellent, sensitive accounts in Kipnis (1997) and Yan (1996) relieve me of the necessity of giving a complete account of networking in Chinese communities.  However, in more ordered, hierarchic communities the focus shifts to drawing on “connections” (see below) and manipulating hierarchical relationships and formal political rules.  This was true of land-dwelling communities in Hong Kong as well as in Kipnis’ and other communities.  This gives a very different flavor to the process.  At best, it is more tightly bound to formal political and social rules (see Kipnis’ account).  At worst, it becomes corruption and manipulation (Yang 1994).  As in other cases, one can see the boat people of Castle Peak Bay as set within a continuum:  from accommodation to formal political rule, with corruption and favoritism as the pathological extreme, to complete grassroots autonomy, with piracy as the pathological extreme.

Leaders, of whatever sort, had to build up networks of friendship and acquaintanceship (pang yau), obligation (Putonghua guanxi, a word rare in its Cantonese form), and mutual good feeling (kamching, Putonghua ganqing).  These were the common coin of interaction.  A leader would throw feasts, invite friends and other leaders to dinner, help with religious rituals, provide charity, help in construction or engine repair, and otherwise share.  Most critical were feasts—celebratory dinners, often in restaurants.  (See Sahlins 1972 on the worldwide importance of special food in such matters.  Ordinary dinners would not count.)  More directly useful to clients were such matters as bringing a problem to the attention of the proper powers, and using one’s authority to make sure they attended to it.  An ordinary person could not get a permit to build a shack on shore, for instance, but a leader might.  A leader had to be able to travel to Yuen Long and elsewhere to represent clients too poor or occupied to travel far.  Dealing with the authorities in Yuen Long was frightening to the boat people.  I have seen veteran leaders shake and turn pale in a Yuen Long office.

A boat leader thus had to have some money, but surprisingly poor people got very far.  Yip Yautaai started with little more than a tiny boat and a change of rather worn clothes.  Our sample of leaders disclosed no correlation with wealth.  Better-off boat people had usually accumulated enough enemies to offset the advantages of money.

Perhaps commonest of all, though most unobtrusive, was providing information.  A leader was a node in the vast communication network that linked the whole boat world, from Guangzhou to Aberdeen and Macau, into one great linkage.  Clients expected their leader to be the main source of valuable information about the wider world.  Other leaders expected him to be the source of new and important items that his client network had discovered.  This could be anything from new fishing grounds to an impending marriage or a threatened government crackdown.

Sometimes leadership was courted, sometimes shunned.  In neither case was success automatic.  Leadership was negotiated with the potential clients.  They would not put up with an unskilled social dealer.  Conversely, they would force a consummately skilled man into the role, whether or not he wanted the rather onerous responsibilities.

Leaders we knew varied from people who were simply outgoing, friendly, and cheerful to people who were quietly competent—people who could talk a suspicious official into giving an honest, sympathetic hearing to problems that would have normally been beneath notice.

A trivial and thoroughly typical case exemplifies leadership at work.  A trawler from Castle Peak accidentally ran over the nets of a gill-netter from Ma Wan, ruining them.  They argued over payment; it was a clear accident, but the nets were a major loss.  The trawler was a friend of a minor Castle Peak leader, Leung Taai; the gill-netter was part of Yip Yautaai’s community.  Thus, the conflict went right to those two men.  For days they became more and more edgy, seeming to look for trouble with each other while dreading the possibility of finding it.  Both these leaders were good friends of my field assistant and myself, so we arranged a feast and invited them.  Over drinks (and they could drink as only sailors can), they worked out a compromise deal, “to give you [my field assistant and I] face.”  They were helping us become leaders too, by letting us provide the excuse for them to settle their grievance.

Grassroots leadership of this sort was successful at reducing trouble, and the local police (land-dwellers) told us that the boat people gave them less trouble than the land people did.  But grassroots leadership proved totally helpless in the face of overfishing.  The fishermen told us explicitly that they knew the fish were disappearing, but simply could not stand to put themselves under the control necessary to stop overfishing.  Unlike so many grassroots communities round the world (Anderson 1996; Berkes 1999), the fishermen could not agree on limiting their fishing.  It was a suicidal liberty.  Within a generation the fishery was destroyed, and the boat world was gone forever.

 

3

All this brings up the question of moral behavior.  Since that has been treated in great detail elsewhere (Anderson et al. 2000), I will be brief here.

A good person (hou yan) had the characteristics given above for a leader, but did not need to have—and did not normally have—so much social skill or personal courage.  He or she was responsible, first of all:  a good fisher, good family man or woman, good participant in the endless small exchanges of mutual aid that held the waterfront together.  A good person incurred obligations and discharged them faithfully.  Intelligence got praise, but more praise went to the person who thought carefully and judiciously through problems, listened to others’ opinions, and came to a sensible conclusion.  Respect of others, especially one’s elders, was absolutely essential.  On the other hand, the boat people only modestly favored the Confucian virtue of filial piety.  Deferring to elders in the family was assumed; blind obedience or excessive deference to them brought no praise (see previous chapter).  A good person was not somebody who did anything blindly.  Goodness lay in actively, thoughtfully helping others.

Goodness also involved tolerance.  People lived at close quarters.  They had to tolerate a sometimes overwhelming amount of noise, smoke, and other human annoyances.  They had to have firm rules for dealing with behavior that was completely out of line; everyone would intervene in cases of real danger, but everyone would leave everyone else alone otherwise.  This meant not noticing a most impressive range of human behaviors.  Not only defecation, but also sex, frequently could not be hidden on rocking boats or in thin-walled, close-packed houses.  The hou yan was imperturbable and tactful.

A bad person was an m hou yan, “not good person.”  People carefully avoided using words that literally meant “bad” and “evil.”  Such words were too insulting, but, also, using them could call up dangerous supernatural evil forces.  If the politely circumspect “not good” was inadequate—i.e., if the speaker were truly angry—the villain in question became a “rat,” “dog,” “devil” (kuai), or other nonhuman.  Only truly evil deeds (not persons or things) were “evil.”

“Not good” people were aggressive and tactless, but above all irresponsible, untrustworthy, and unhelpful.  They did not play their part in the endless round of incurring and discharging obligations.  Perhaps the ultimate badness was to fail of an obligation.  Any dishonesty, faithlessness, laziness, and violently aggressive behavior attracted extreme negative judgement.  Acts of this sort became known to the entire waterfront within hours of taking place, a fact which certainly had a major effect on social order.

A different kind of badness was “ignorance” (mou man “lacking culture,” or equivalent words).  An ignorant person was rude, disrespectful, and mean.  He or she was openly intolerant, insulting, or shameful.  He or she carried gossip, said stupidly tactless things, and hurt others’ feelings for no reason.  This, of course, loses face.  At first I wondered at the term “ignorant”—what did education have to do with it?  I learned that mou man refers not to schoolbook education, but to learning proper social behavior.

Illegal behavior did not necessarily make one bad.  Smoking opium and other criminal behavior led eventually to ostracism, though a bit of such was tolerated in some quarters.  Running snakes (smuggling refugees out of China), however, could make one a good person, not a bad one, though it was a crime; everyone believed boat people in China were suffering and needed any help they could get.

Heavy drinking received no censure.  It went with the sailor’s life, and people put away incredible quantities of alcohol at feasts.  (At other times, alcohol on the boats was  rare.)  An alcoholic would have been censured, but we literally never heard of or saw an alcoholic among the boat people, and we knew over a thousand people.  We knew one alcoholic shore-dweller very well; in 1965-66 he was seriously alcoholic, but just before we returned in 1974, his doctor told him to stop, and he stopped—just like that.  We knew, barely, a few other alcoholics, but the number was incredibly small for such a large community.

The secret of this low incidence of alcoholism in a hard-drinking town was simple; it lay in a set of rules that were enforced by unanimous and condignly enforced social opinion.  Drinking was absolutely confined to adults.  Heavy drinking was confined to senior adults.  Drinking, beyond an occasional beer with dinner or peg of raw alcohol on a cold morning, was confined to feasts, and these had to be for a serious occasion (religious or personal).  Drinking had to be with a large amount of fairly oily food, and both the drinking and the eating had to be spaced out over several hours.  These rules sufficed.

Far more serious was sorcery.  Everyone feared it above almost all things.  It was correspondingly rare. We knew two people seriously accused of it.  Both of them gladly admitted to the charge (see following chapter).   They were clearly mentally deranged, but people called them m hou yan rather than song (“crazy”), because their sorcery defined them.

Cynical proverbs, recited when someone let someone down, may be a good way to show values in action.  “Feelings are thinner than paper,” said one.  “Cantonese have no pity” occurs in a song.  Conversely, “even thieves have morals” reminds us that even bad people can be good; the Mencian idea that everyone was good deep inside, however much education they needed to bring it out, was the most widely known, widely cited, and widely held of Mencius’ teachings.  Even those who were unclear about his name knew that the sages held that “people are good.”

All this is very Confucian, but it is not the Confucianism of modern elite discourse.  It is, in fact, a quite different construction of the morality discussed in Confucius, Mencius, and other classic Confucian writers.  Since the days of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the great Neo-Confucian philosopher who did much to define Chinese moral culture, elites have often interpreted Confucianism to mean obedience of inferiors to superiors.  Yet, the classics spent at least as much time discussing fairness, justice, mutual aid, community spirit, civic culture, and integrity.  They also couch deference in terms of mutual support and good (virtuous) order, not in terms of blind obedience to any and every order.  As in matters of family, the boat people had a perfectly valid, thoroughly Confucian, and thoroughly Chinese way of being good—but it is, once again, very far from the stereotypes promulgated in certain books, both Chinese and western, in recent decades.

 

4

In recent decades, ethnicity has been as overwhelmingly central a topic for ethnography in China as kinship was in the 1960s and 1970s.  Especially important has been study of the differences between the highly formal and often arbitrary “minority” codings and discourse of China’s Communist government and the far more fluid, diverse, complex relationships that the ethnographers find on the ground.  This issue has led to the production of an enormous literature (e.g.—and this is only scratching the surface—Blum 2001; Brown 1996; Constable 1996; Gladney 1991, 1998; Harrell 1995, 2001; Litzinger 2000; Mueggler 2001; Schein 2000).  These studies have been important far beyond the boundaries of China, because they provide, collectively, such a superb picture of the ways an arbitrary top-down bureaucracy makes a simplified, authoritarian grid from a rich and intricate net of actual relationships.

Ethnic relations in waterfront communities in old Hong Kong were characterized by great fluidity.  It is no accident that the modern performative, anti-essentialist concept of ethnicity was pioneered by Fred Blake in his brilliant and pathbreaking studies of ethnic relations in Hong Kong (Blake 1981).  Blake’s pioneer work came well before the “postmodernists” and their ilk “discovered” this notion, and deserves more recognition than it has received.  Blake, in his studies of a Hakka town and its relations with Cantonese and other Hong Kong groups, found that individuals could and did “pass” as members of various different ethnic groups by manipulating symbols:  clothing, food, accent, association, and so on.  Often, ethnicity was a role like a role in a play, to be assumed when strategically useful.

In general, the findings of all these scholars fit with the views of James Scott (1998) and George Orwell: the power state simplifies not only for ease and convenience, but also to maintain control through a type of mental brutality.  All the authors see ethnicity as emerging from interactive practice, not as some sort of essentialist bred-in-the-bone reality.  Most see the Communists as using ethnicity for control, and being highly arbitrary in their application of ethnic labels.  For instance, the same people may be classified in two totally different ethnic groups when divided by a state line; it may literally happen that brother is set against brother, officially.  Native Americans may recognize parallels along the US-Canada border.

In China, as elsewhere, “ethnicity” is a political thing, not a cultural reality.  Ethnic groups are defined by politics.  Usually there is some cultural basis.  In China, most “minorities” and Han Chinese groups are linguistically defined, or are supposedly so.  Obviously, speakers of the same language who are classed separately on different sides of a province boundary may have something to say about that.  At least China seems free of such monstrosities as the American ethnic group “Asian-Pacific Islander,” which lacks any cultural, linguistic, political, or genetic unity, and was established purely for convenience by the U. S. Census Bureau.

The boat people are, of course, an “ethnic group”—not recognized as a minority—defined by residence and subculture.  One is reminded of the “gypsies” or “traveling folk” of the British Isles; the ethnic labels include not only Roma but other, quite unrelated, traveling groups.  Only the mobile lifestyle provides a unity.

Within the recent literature on Chinese minorities and ethnicity, there is a range of opinions.  Some scholars, such as Harrell, have a general sense that ethnicity is real, but much more complex and linked to real-world practice than the Communists allow.   Other scholars appear to see ethnic labeling as inevitably arbitrary, a reductionist classification that may or may not have any basis at all.  Certainly, languages, costumes, and other cultural markers differ, but they may not covary, and they may not go with locally recognized ethnic labels.

Many, perhaps most, are critical, explicitly or implicitly, of the zoo-like exhibitions of “minority culture” that the Communists have long favored.  On the other hand, these shows may at least having some value in keeping cultural arts and expressive means alive, and even allowing survival of minorities that might otherwise be suppressed.

I have little to add to these excellent studies, partly because I have not done much research in Communist-controlled China.  I have already touched on the nature of boat people ethnicity, and on relations with other ethnic groups, and with governments (see above; also Anderson 1967, 1970b).  Suffice it to say that the boat people are among the least marked and most arbitrarily defined of ethnic groups, and that the classification of them as a “tribe,” the “Tan,” with a long “history,” is a particularly extreme case of ethnic essentialization and the invention of an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson 1991).

Studies of such groups, defined by geography, ecology, village, or other identities, are much rarer than studies of ethnic groups marked by truly different culture.  An excellent comparative volume edited by Tao Tao Liu and David Faure (1996) does consider occupational and geographic subcultures along with “minorities.”   Also relevant are Dru Gladney’s studies of Chinese Muslims (Gladney 1991, 1998).  These have no linguistic, social, political, or cultural unity.  They are not even necessarily Muslims, since those who have fallen away from the faith may still count, for an uncertain number of generations.  Yet they are properly bureaucratized as the “Hui Minority,” with all the appropriate formalization.  Gladney supplies much detail on the inevitable problems that arise as the government tries to deal with this amorphous group, while the Hui try to revitalize their Islamic faith and society.

Chinese essentialization of ethnicity began long before the Communist government.  Labeling and arbitrary bureaucratic classification of ethnic groups has a tradition thousands of years long in China, going back to the Zhou and Han Dynasties’ attempts to label the “Rong barbarians,” “Hundred Yue,” and so forth.  It has gotten more rigid over time, the Qing Dynasty being a watershed period for ethnic sclerotization.  (A masterful, but alas unpublished, manuscript by Jeffrey Barlow on the Zhuang makes this point particularly well.)  The Communists merely continued an age-old tradition, adding Stalinist “nationality”-classification methods to the pool.

In general, it is probably safe to say that one labels people in order to deal with them in batches.  They become nameless, faceless exemplars of their ethnicities, and can thus be consigned to particular places, roles, castes, statuses, or other assigned seats.  Ethnic labeling in China always went with a certain degree of hierarchic thinking.  The old imperial system referred to minorities as “barbarians,” who could be “raw” (least like Chinese) or “cooked” (closer to, ideally assimilating to, Chinese).  The Communists substituted a Marxist-Leninist-Morganian rhetoric of stages in cultural evolution.  In practice, it seems to be little different from the old classification system.  The Han defined themselves as the highest on the Marxian evolutionary scale, so “raw” morphed into “backward.”

One therefore expects, and finds, that labeling sailors, fishermen, and longshore folk as “Tan” or “boat people” would have much to do with administrative and social convenience.  Indeed, it allowed land people, especially governments, to deal with the boat people as a separate, specific, unified population, one that could be dealt with as a unit.  It allowed the whole floating population to be held down, forced into one uniform low-status category.

This, of course, led to resistance, and thus to constant tension between land and sea.

Relations with the land-dwelling Cantonese—the Punti—continued hostile until the boat people disappeared as an identifiable group.  All boat people old enough to talk to us remembered a time when women and children were not safe on shore.  They would be beaten or even carried off and raped or sold.  (This was rare in Hong Kong, but said to be routine in pre-Communist China.)   In 1965, most women and children still refused, out of fear, to come on shore, except to walk in broad daylight along the most fisher-frequented parts of the immediate waterfront.  Almost none dared a trip into San Hui town.  In 1965-66, land children (of the sort described as mou man—this is, in fact, how I learned the phrase) still yelled taan ka lou (“Tanka guys”) after boat people, and sometimes threw pebbles or small sticks at them.  (The same bad children acted the same to foreigners, in which case the cry was faan kuai lou.  Literally “foreign ghost fellow,” this is the phrase translated as “foreign devil” in the older literature.  The phrase may refer more to ghost-like pallor and wide pale eyes than to demonic behavior.)

By all accounts, the situation by 1965 was already better than it had been a few years previously.  The change from 1965 to 1975 was dramatic.  However, even in 1975 boat women still stayed close to their menfolk or to a group of other women.  In spite of the waning of extreme tension, hostility between land and boat people—and other ethnic groups as well—was obtrusive, and warped behavior along the waterfront.  Otherwise gentle and kind people, of all ethnicities, became tense, irritable, and verbally aggressive when walking the narrow line of the beach.

The land people held the boat people to be coarse (chou), holding up their sailors’ language and hard drinking as proof, as well as the rather free and easy sexuality of the floating world.

A point of more historic significance was that the boat people lacked fixed addresses, lineages, or other marks of proper order.  Not only boat people throughout China, but also other Chinese groups, received prejudice and discrimination if they had no fixed address and no lineage base.  Strolling actors, muleteers, migrant laborers, and even wandering holy ascetics all came in for their share.   All such people had been subjected to discrimination in early Imperial Chinese times, being forbidden to take the imperial examinations, marry proper citizens with fixed addresses, go to government schools, or hold official posts; they were a true caste in those days.  Such discrimination was already waning long before the Qing Dynasty fell, but it survived locally into the mid-20th century.

Finally, the boat people suffered prejudice and discrimination because of poverty and lack of education, as well as a history of wandering and piracy.

The boat people’s corresponding negative stereotype of the land people was that they were mean, money-grubbing, snobbish, and out to take the boat people for anything they had.  Friendship between land and boat people was correspondingly rare, but it did happen, because there was clear and inescapable economic dependence; the land economy depended on the fishery as much as the boat people depended on the land for rice, oil, and incense.  The boat people had to sell their fish through land people, and the land people had to buy those fish and hire boat people to handle it.  The religious life of the community depended on harmony and cooperation between the groups.

Tai O had much better relations between boat and land people than Castle Peak; in fact, it was hard to see any tension at all, though some existed.  Conversely, relations were worse in some eastern New Territories ports we knew.  We visited ports in which we saw boat men (let alone women) attacked verbally and threatened physically.  This very rarely happened at Castle Peak, where mutual dependence, legal protection, and the presence of a very large number of very tough boat people inhibited such behavior.

Relations with Hakka and Hoklou were tense and distant, but those groups had few representatives around the bay.  A number of Teochiu lived in the area, but they spoke Cantonese as well as Teochiu, and the boat people did not see them as a separate group.  The Teochiu (called Chiuchau in Cantonese, Chaozhou in Putonghua) came from the hinterland behind Shantou in northeastern Guangdong province.  They had a reputation like that of the Scots in the British Empire: rough highlanders, fond of emigrating to make their fortune through hard work and extreme thrift.  Their music was high-pitched and played on small instruments, which caused the Cantonese to say that it sounded like tsi kei kau tsi kei—“each one for himself.”  Thus, asking for separate checks in a restaurant—a rare phenomenon in Cantonese society—was called “Teochiu music.”  Needless to say, this stereotype was no more true than others.

 

The land people differed among themselves more than the boat people did; land society had much greater extremes of wealth and poverty, conservatism and liberalism, education and illiteracy, openness and intolerance.  Many land people showed absolutely no prejudice against boat people or anyone else.  Certainly, few if any were as harsh and greedy as the boat people’s stereotype.  In many ways, the land people of Castle Peak Bay differed only in degree from the boat-dwellers.  Like the boat people, they were an independent, friendly, cheerful, sociable lot, with a society based on mutual aid, and with an amused cynicism about government.  They were, on average, closer to the Neo-Confucian ideal of order, law-abidingness, and patriarchal family relations than the boat people were, but even here one saw considerable overlap, and very little indeed that was close to the extreme conservative ideal.  Most of the land-dwelling Cantonese of the Castle Peak area lived far from lineage villages or other conservative centers.  Correspondingly, Castle Peak was a very open place, on land as on water.

I observed this continually as boat people and Teochiu “passed” with success and aplomb, thinking nothing of the matter.  The ones I knew in the 1960s were perfectly clear about their root ethnicity, but by the 1970s many were not so sure.  Young people growing up did not know whether they were more Teochiu or Cantonese, more boat or Punti—and many, probably most, of them did not care.  They were content to be members—not necessarily very focal or typical members—of two or more ethnic groups.  Younger boat people who had moved on shore in the 1960s, as children, often thought of themselves as ordinary Cantonese.  Older Teochiu who maintained their ethnicity with some militance found that their older children were saying “well, I’m really Teochiu, but I have become pretty much Cantonese,” while their younger children were not even that sure of their roots.  This was disconcerting to the old, but they adjusted.  Similar processes slowly dissolved the Shanghainese and other groups in Hong Kong, and have gone a long way toward dissolving the various mainlander groups in Taiwan[7].

As previously noted, Teochiu reaffirmed their identity by getting together to eat traditional Teochiu food.  The boat people had no such resort.  Their foods were either widely shared or impossible to get without catching them oneself.  In any case, they had no incentive to maintain an ethnic identity once they were on shore working land jobs, so they gradually merged into the Cantonese mainstream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 9.  CONCLUSIONS:  VARIATIONS ON CHINESE THEMES

 

Adaptation to a floating life has profoundly shaped the maritime subcultures of East Asia.  None has become more distinctive or more marine-adapted than the south Chinese boat-dwellers.  Whether we examine food, clothing, kinship, or social relations, all the differences between boat and land people seem clearly due to immediate ecological factors.  One need not invoke mythical tribal origins.

One could, in fact, predict, or at least explain, all of boat life by considering how traditional Cantonese society—a family-oriented, rural, tough, self-reliant Chinese social order—had to adapt to accommodate long-range traveling and fishing in a highly mobile world where people had to shift, frequently and irregularly, from port to port.  As such, the floating world provides a sort of limiting case of Chinese society.  It reinterpreted Confucianism, and to some extent Taoism, Buddhism, and the broader Chinese folk religious ground from which those grow.  It managed without land or buildings.  It was self-governing, even to the neat rows in which the boats moored every night, without duly constituted authority of any kind.  It created its own songs and peddlers’ cries and children’s rhymes.

The boat subculture was basically defined by residence and occupation—by cultural ecology.  Power relationships—political ecology—took over in making the boat people into underdogs.  Chinese prejudice always cut against anyone of no fixed address:  anyone who drifted, who did not have a proper lineage hall or residence.  The boat people tended to be less educated, more rough, more vocal and violent than “proper” land people.  Thus, they became a despised minority, and suffered accordingly.

They resisted, in all the ways described by James Scott (1985, 1998).  They developed their own world and ways.  They developed an ideology of independence and self-reliance.  This, however, could not be maintained when they had to deal with the world of fish dealers, police, and other land powers.  Thus, their self-image was of “dragons on water, worms on shore.”

Thus, from them, we learn yet another sad lesson in the endless story of human intolerance and inequality.  Yet, we also learn a more hopeful—if far from totally hopeful—lesson of resistance to those most evil of all human evils.

The Cantonese boat subculture provided real ethnic identity.  As in other ethnic cases, no one could put a boundary around the ethnic group in question, or say for sure where it began and ended.  The subculture had its own structure and principles, but these were flexible and were constantly modified by practice.

As we know from the vast literature on ethnicity and identity in China, ethnic groups are politically defined, and are defined in and by opposition to other ethnic groups.  The boat people’s structural opposite was the land Cantonese (“puntei”) cultural group.  The boat people were also situated in a wider grid, where they contrasted not only with their immediate structural opposite, but also with Teochiu, Hoklo, Hakka, British, Portuguese, and other Hong Kong groups recognized in popular speech and popular cultural awareness.

On the other hand, the boat people were not merely the figment of some bureaucrat’s imagination.  Their culturally distinctive ways were real, important, and salient.  Most were, in fact, matters of life and death:  knowledge of fishing and boatcraft, knowledge of seafaring and swimming, knowledge of community dynamics in a community lacking formal leadership.  Other cultural ways were not so obviously vital, but certainly had a major adaptive function; the worship of Tin Hau, for instance, was essential to hold the community together.  To regard the boat people’s cultural distinctiveness as mere political discourse would be to deny the boat people their record of stunning success at adapting to a terribly difficult and demanding world.  Their modern definition and status may indeed have been due to bureaucrats asserting power, but their wider worldview and behavior were not.

The same may be said for all China’s ethnic groups; those who analyze their definition and existence solely in terms of modern politics deny them a history and a record of accomplishment.  Minority people are not merely names or bureaucratic categories; they are living people, and they do have distinctive ways of living.  These groups have a long, complex record of achievement, and it should not be trivialized—whether by governmental reduction to tourist amusement or by anthropological reduction to mere “discourse.”

The boat subculture thus provides a powerful argument for culture as adaptation, and against cultural irrationalism, especially the postmodern form that sees everything as arbitrary “cultural construction” formulated without feedback from a real world-out-there.  People make decisions, and the boat subculture is the result of thousands or millions of choices; but the choices are not made by airy intellectuals in a dream-world.  They are made by people trying to make a living in a highly demanding environment.

The nature of ethnographic generalizations then concerns us.  I attempted in my previous works on the boat people to give a set of rules that would allow an outsider to anticipate appropriately (Frake 1980) what he or she might see—to know the general rules everyone was more or less expected to follow, and to understand, in a minimal way, what the boat people were thinking when they invoked those rules—why they saw the rules as appropriate in general and in the specific situation.

In the present book, I have tried to summarize, from those earlier works, some conclusions of possible interest.  Such generalizations are, broadly, true—they describe the life of most boat people, and the life of the community.  They do not take into account such matters as variation by income, boat type, personality, and, above all, gender.  I have, at least, been able to say something about that last, and about male-female relations in a world very different from that of the stereotypes of  “China.”  Male-female relations were complex among the boat people, but, broadly, more egalitarian than in any other traditional Chinese community I know through experience or description (though the Hakka studied by Fred Blake come close).  No could mistake the boat people for feminists—the patriarchal family was alive and well—but women had a great deal of independent power and agency, and men had to take women’s ideas, views, and independent behavior into account.  Children, too, started with rights equivalent to their duties, and continued to acquire both together as they grew.

The boat people, and for that matter the Cantonese, put all generalizations about China to the test.  Social historians and cultural psychologists need to consider individual and subcultural variation in their own models.

I have thus made several kinds of generalizations.

Some are universally true for all boat people, and more or less distinguish them, such as the lack of lineages.  The boat people are only one of many Chinese groups that lack lineages.  The extensive literature on Chinese kinship has focused largely on lineage dynamics.  Historians have studied the rise of lineages in the medieval period, and the sudden and rather dramatic way that lineages took their final form in the Song Dynasty (see Mote 1999).  Ethnologists have written vast tomes on the lineage.  A brief flurry of excitement arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Chinese subcultures without lineages led scholars to consider why lineages might arise and disappear, fairly rapidly, because of economic and ecological circumstances (Anderson 1972; Cohen 1976; Pasternak 1972).  This solved some major questions, but the wider issue awaits treatment by contemporary theorists, who can draw on advances in the study of cognition and practice.

Others are statements about typical or modal behavior, and in this case I have tried to indicate that many boat people did not conform; for instance, I can say that children were generally very obedient to parents, but there were families where this was most conspicuously not the case.  Their quarrels were impossible to miss on the crowded waterfront.

Other generalizations are statements of what the boat people themselves said—their discourse, in Foucauldian terms.  Such statements might or might not reflect objectively verifiable behavior.  A case in point is the personal independence that has been a theme of this book.  The boat people and land people all agreed that this truly distinguished the boat world from the land world.  The boat people stressed it in discourse.  Visible reality was a more qualified, nuanced situation—not an open-and-shut difference, but a continuum, with broad overlapping.  Certainly, many boat people not only were independent and nonconformist, but openly revelled in acting that way, sometimes with the explicit goal of shocking the land people!  These swallows may not have made a summer.  Many boat people were as sober and deferential as any land Cantonese, and were not particularly independent.   Psychological research, however, did confirm the general claim (Anderson 1992, 1998).

Barbara Ward saw the boat people in terms of cultural models (Ward 1965, 1966).  Again, one may question the generalization involved in defining a “cultural model.”  Each person has a loose network of rules, defaults, more or less organized facts, and, in general, guiding principles for action.  How much these are systematized into a model—one that could be formalized in mathematical statements—may be doubted, and, indeed, Barbara Ward saw models as rather rough-and-ready affairs.

The boat people certainly had their conscious models, as Ward reported.  Observers—ethnographer, land-dweller, government agents—had other models, often very different from each other.  And one could, with Lévi-Strauss, contrast statistical models with structural ones of all sorts.  All such models are generalizations, and, as we know, “all generalizations are false.” In short, cultural models do not exist in external reality.  They exist as conscious models in the heads of the culture-bearers or the ethnographer.

Each individual has a loose collection of more or less structured lore in his or her head, and this lore includes cultural knowledge, more or less systematized.  However, this “model” may be rather different from the model held by a next-door neighbor, and still more different from the model held by a spouse (of different gender) or teenage child.  The external observer’s model is yet more distinct.

One can make statements that are well supported and well documented, and that are beyond reasonable debate.  These never make up a cultural model, however; we have to resort to tentative formulations.  I have tried to keep these to a minimum in this book, with the result that I can stand confidently behind each statement.  It also means I cannot sell my work as an example of insightful, exciting, or brilliant interpretation or insight.  However, in documenting a way of life that has vanished, one is well advised to stick to clearly accurate data.  No one can check claims (except with the few other published sources that are actually based on ethnographic study).

Discourse—what people say to each other—may or may not reflect real basic values.  Ethnographic questioning and observation can go a long way to finding the differences, and understanding what values really animate behavior, but can never completely resolve the differences.  Conflicting values—Confucian morality, immediate wealth maximization, divine protection, community welfare, and many more concerns—are variably and contextually expressed in behavior.  In the end, the ethnographer can only record what people say and how well that predicts what they do.

Boat society fits perfectly into Anthony Giddens’ view of structuration (Giddens 1984).  Individuals make choices.  They make these with constant attention to their environment, both natural and human.  Class, caste, gender relations, historical contingency, and other social facts influence—and often determine—their choices.  Society changes according to how those choices are made.  Structure emerges, but it is a dynamic system.  It may stay very fluid. If it crystallizes into a frozen array, it may recrystallize in a very different pattern in a few years.

One can describe a social system, or a subculture, at one point in time:  Castle Peak Bay from 1965 to 1975, for example.  But this short passage is not the story.  The story is a longer one, a long tale that goes back at least 3500 years, to the sites on Cheung Jau and other islands.  One part of the story ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Castle Peak Bay was filled, ending forever its floating world.  But boat people still endure, along more remote coasts and rivers of China.

 

The ideology expressed by almost all boat people at Castle Peak was one of independence, but also of mutual aid, mutual reliance, and mutual support, growing from a dense and continual webwork of interactions, but all done without compulsion.  Kinship and spatial relations structured most of these interactions, but one attempted to maintain the widest network possible, especially if one had aspirations to leadership.  One needed to interact with land people of all sorts as well as with other fishers.  However, everyone strongly opposed the fell hand of authority.  People should do all this on their own.

We watched this ideology change in the face of reality.  The cooperatives were beginning to achieve acceptable status in 1965.  By 1975, cooperatives, schools, the government fish market, public health clinics, and other facilities had transformed waterfront views of government.  No longer was government an unqualified evil.  In fact, people admitted that they needed it.  The ideology of independence and self-reliance persisted, but in qualified form.

We might have foreseen, in this, the end of the boat world.  Perhaps it could not survive once it admitted that land-based organizations could be powerful forces for good.  In any case, almost immediately after the boat people came to depend on government economic and social arrangements, they moved on shore, blended into the Cantonese mainstream, and disappeared as an identifiable group.  Fishermen persist as a separate group at Tai O and elsewhere, but may assimilate in the near future.

A theory of society lay behind the older view.  Obviously, to summarize it and generalize it is to do violence to it, because it was based so much on individualism and individual interpretation.  Yet, discourse on the waterfront had common themes and common agreements.  Everyone took as true a few well-known claims, and followed similar paths in deducing the rest of the theory from these.

First, humans were held to be preeminently social.  The extreme form of American individualism—the self-made man alone against the world—would not have been widely accepted; the boat people knew such individuals, but did not like or respect them greatly, seeing them as too antisocial.  People loved to be around each other.  Life’s greatest joy lay in relaxing, drinking, feasting, celebrating, or just talking over tea, with one’s friends and fellows.  The love of humans for ordinary casual socializing seemed self-evident.  No one would think of denying it.  The loneliness, isolation, and monotony of life on a small boat was enough to drive some people mad—literally—and few indeed were the people who enjoyed that.  When—as often happened—mutual aid began to shade off into exploitation and using, moral alarm bells rang, and waterfront gossip dealt with the issue as best it could.

Second, people depended on each other, quite apart from joy in company.  On the water, every man’s or woman’s life depended on instant, caring, thoughtful, responsible action by others.  It is really difficult, at this remove, to provide the reader a sense of just how fast a tranquil fishing day could turn into a desperately dangerous situation.  Small boats, rather round-bottomed to increase maneuverability, were at immediate and total risk if a storm came up suddenly.  Storms on the South China Sea were sudden, unpredictable, and violent.

Thus, reliability and responsibility were the keys to all virtues, the basis of ongoing human interaction.  One could, and did, celebrate at New Year with anyone and everyone, but one’s everyday life had to be spent with people one could implicitly and absolutely trust.  This fact alone made a command-based society impossible to envision. When a typhoon hit, or when pirates attacked, no one could wait around for government mandates.  No one could rely on people without a long-standing claim of friendship and relationship.  Even the slower emergency created by a run of bad luck—several days of bad weather, a broken engine, a mast swept away—required prompt, responsible, cooperative action.  One had to rely on family and friends for loans and support.

Third, given that, people had to have tremendous autonomy and agency.  They had to be free agents.  A leader, especially, had to achieve a reputation for being a bit unpedictable, even a bit crazy.  If he were too predictable, he would seem like a dull stick.  Worse, others would soon figure out how to take advantage of him.  If they never quite knew what he would do, they never quite dared to risk a bad encounter.

On the other hand, independence had its very strict limits.  For one thing, the boat world enforced a type of surface conformity by ecological necessity.  Everyone had to dress pretty much alike, because there was, in traditional times, only one best way to dress; loose black heavy-cotton clothes and straw eye-shading hat were so superior to anything else that no one really had much option.  Everyone had to eat about the same, run a boat in similar ways, and talk the same dialect.  Thus, to stand out, one had to be self-conscious about cultivating idiosyncracy.

For another, independence could not extend to life within the boat household.  There, the senior man had to be able to command, and everyone had to know his or her station.  On the other hand, the extreme value on individual agency made it unthinkable for a senior man to command in an arbitrary fashion, without consultation.  Still less would he be able to make people do what was not in their station.  Tradition governed the roles of each person.  Seniority and gender defined these, and led to a smooth order that worked well and could not reasonably (let alone arbitrarily) be challenged.

In short, independence and firm order both derived from a deeper principle:  Life depended on reliability, responsibility, and mutual respect.  It also depended on a certain amount of grassroots solidarity, since people had to unite to deal with emergencies and to oppose the land people.  (Tension with the land people was a fading memory by 1974, but not entirely gone.)

Thus, as we have seen, the boat people adopted a form of Chinese traditional culture that fit their needs.  In doing so, they created a thoughtful alternative to many Confucian and other ideas.  They followed Confucianism in seeing basic human “goodness”—eusociality—and in a political philosophy of personal integrity and of rebellion against tyranny.  They followed Daoism in their awareness of the inevitability of change, and their flexible, sometimes fatalistic, but always creative way of dealing with it.  They followed Buddhism in seeing a need to build merit with beings beyond human and visible realms.  They failed to control overfishing, defeat poverty, or to build stable communities; they succeeded in creating a flexible, consciously planned social order that enabled them to survive.

The extreme individualist morality that follows from rational choice theory and its relatives would thus not have been acceptable.  It would not have worked.  People sometimes asked us how American society could hold together with its constant shootings, divorces, and sexual peccadilloes.  The view of American society here implied was derived entirely from Hollywood movies, so it bore little resemblance to reality; the point is that genuinely anarchic personal relationships seemed completely beyond the pale.

And, in fact, I cannot see how theories of “rational self-interest” can stand up under the test of explaining life on the boats.  Individual competition of the sort postulated as panhuman by the more extreme sociobiologists (e.g. Ridley 1996; Dawkins 1976) would have made the boat world quite impossible.  Evolutionary ecologists who study fishing have learned to accommodate cooperation in their models; Michael Alvard and David Nolin, for instance, provided a superb account of just how far rational choice and evolutionary psychology can take one in explaining cooperation in a fishery (Alvard and Nolin 2002; Aswani 1999.)  Alvard’s observations provide what seems to be a perfect simple model of how a complex network of undirected cooperation could become established in a fishery.  Aswani shows that highly competitive people can still figure out how to control and regulate their fishery.

Ironically, the boat people of south China never had the opportunity to regulate their fishery; they had to make do with creating a complex, intricate adjustment to the reality of multi-stock fishing without hope of rational management.  Other Chinese fishermen (e.g. in Malaya; Anderson and Anderson 1978) were luckier, and could invoke sea tenure, privatization of beds or lagoons, and regulation of offtake.  Once again, adaptation to local political and ecological circumstances was the rule.  Instead of broad generalizations about behavior, we can generalize here only about the vectors and motives that lie behind, and modify, behavior.

Conversely, the boat people’s social theory, like their social reality, was far from the extreme communitarianism of Leslie White (1949), Talcott Parsons, or others who see Culture or Society as a glorious, perfect, beautifully structured machine that reduces individuals to mere moving parts.  The boat people rejected—vocally—the more extreme forms of Neo-Confucianism.  Many shore-dwellers strongly advocated the family in which a wife was utterly subservient to her husband, a son to his father, and a younger brother to an older.  As common in the area, and as strongly advocated, were the communitarian ideologies of Maoism, Chinese nationalism, and the like.  The vast majority of boat people had no use for any of these moralities.  They were willing to tolerate such ideas, so long as no one tried to impose them on boat households, but they were not converted.  Even the few Communist boat people were a notably independent group, and we were not the only ones who wondered how they would fare under an actual Communist government[8].  Suffice it to say that all of them had fled from China.  Perhaps those left behind were more communitarian.

 

Today, Chinese traditional society, even the relatively loose manifestation of it seen in the boat world, seems oppressively patriarchal to many people in the western world and in modern China itself.  Indeed, it often was oppressive even by the standards of its own practitioners.  People told stories of model households in which everyone worked together in harmony without friction or oppression.  The reality was almost never so smooth.  And things had been worse in the past, when female infanticide or sale occurred (only under desperate circumstances, however, according to all our sources).  Hong Kong today has rejected the more stern variants of the Confucian order; the boat people blend in partly because society has come to meet them, and even passed them, in its move to a more liberal order.

The boat world was also subject to evils that followed from autarky:  overfishing, piracy, lack of services, lack of any certainty to life.  The boat people realized that these were the costs of autonomy, but fatalistically bore them, regarding the benefits of autonomy as more than offsetting.  Yet, given the conditions of China in the early and mid-20th century, torn by famine, war, and government rampages such as the Great Cultural Revolution, the costs seemed high indeed.

In short, the boat life was not without enormous problems and costs.  Romanticising it is a temptation, at this late date, but one that must be resisted.

Yet, the possibility of learning from the floating world, and benefiting from its achievements in everything from maritime technology to song, is certainly clear.  The world has benefited greatly from fore-and-aft rigging, watertight compartments in the holds, and the compass—all inventions of Chinese sailors.  We can now learn from the boat view of society and from its useful practical corollaries in such areas as child-rearing and dealing with close crowding[9].

They followed their own way in creating a social order, a folk song tradition, an aesthetically exquisite world of polished wood and carefully arranged tackle, a cuisine that used common ingredients to produce the best food I have ever tasted.  It was a beautiful, valid, exciting, rich, full way of life.

Without that richness, they might not have survived.  The mysteries of why we need beauty and song are locked in unexplored regions of the brain.  Perhaps, when these are unlocked, we will learn that the salt water songs and the careful arrangement of dark wood and earthenware tones on the foredeck were as necessary to life as the mutual aid and respect that they facilitated.

Through it all, the boat people of south China remained their own persons—brave in the face of constant danger, tough in the face of incredible hardships, friendly and open in the face of endless war and oppression.  A bluff, cheerful man would tell me soberly of watching people starve and of fleeing under fire from the Japanese.  A poised, gentle, centered woman would break into hysterical sobs as she talked of watching her children starve to death one by one until she finally gave up and let someone abandon the latest baby on a deserted island.  Somehow, people survived, and created from centuries of terror and suffering a valid, beautiful, indomitable lifeway.

All that is gone now, and a new and less adaptable world must face the unimaginable horrors of the future.  Population growth coupled with resource waste has destroyed the fishery.  These same forces now doom the vast majority of humanity to the conditions the boat people faced in the mid-20th century.

Perhaps the example the boat people set will not be totally lost.  Perhaps their creativity and thoughtfulness in the face of adversity will give some meaning and some inspiration in the hard years.  In the end, the human spirit endures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX 1.  SALT WATER SONGS

 

 

I recorded several traditional songs (Anderson 1972).  Especially important were the “salt water songs,” the traditional folksongs unique to the boat people.  These contrasted with several other song types:  classical poems, funeral laments, children’s songs, popular songs, and so on.  I published the Chinese texts and literal translations of my collection, with detailed commentaries, in Chinoperl News (5:8-114, 1975; see also Anderson 1972 for further detail, including some translations of songs recorded by Chinese investigators in the 1930s).  I have retranslated a few of the songs—less literally, more idiomatically than in 1975—for this book.  Many songs turn on tedious dissection of characters, or were badly sung, or were formless dialogues, and have been left out of this selection.

Most lines ended with a long-drawn-out aaaa, not indicated here.

The words give little indication of the beauty of these songs as sung on a quiet night on the still bay, with huge stars overhead and almost no other light.  Fung Sam-Jau in particular had a beautiful singing voice.  The experiences were unforgettable.

Most of the songs were recorded from Fung Sam-Tsau and Cheung Ngau-Tsai.  These were highly intelligent, paradoxical men.  Both were proud, independent, and difficult—standard boat characteristics, but ones they they took to extremes.  Both loved to display their knowledge of the old songs, but also demanded more and more money for less and less singing.  Both were unreliable about times and amounts of work.  Many boat people had a very flexible sense of obligation to set appointments, since they often found it necessary to race to another port because of a fish run or a family emergency; they might not return for days.  But Fung and Cheung were exceptionally hard to pin down.  In the end, they loved their songs, and we heard their repertoire.

We heard many women singing, and women were traditionally the main bearers of the tradition, but, tragically, women refused to record.

No one else seems ever to have recorded salt water songs, and my few tapes, miserably recorded on a cheap reel-to-reel tape recorder, are now all we have of a vanished tradition.  My original tapes are deposited in the Hong Kong Museum.  I understand that boat folk songs still exist in remote parts of south China, but, if other Chinese folk material gives any guide, the songs have probably been vastly changed by Communist policies, radio and TV singing, and other external influences.

One stray line, from an otherwise hopelessly untranslatable song, is too good to miss:  “A man of roads and villages can’t claim the sand and dust.”  A wanderer can’t be too proud; he owns not even the dust he treads.  This beautiful saying, which harks back to classical poetry, may stand as a final word on the boat people’s world and its poetry.

 

The Vegetable Song

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau and Ng Kam

 

The hollow-hearted water spinach grows on the water.

The falling eggplant splits like a mouth breaking into a smile.

The water caltrop is solid as a fool’s block head.

Watercress and spinach cool the heart.

An onion has a head without a tail;

With a head but no tail, how can a man be called a hero?

Mustard and collards are both greens;

Avoid wrong, don’t gamble, don’t fight.

Celery and celery shoots:  Work hard and win,

Work diligently and then rely on your sons.

Ivy-like bitter melon doesn’t climb beanpoles.

After it’s picked, the vine remains.

Get pork when fresh; get a girl when she’s young.

If you want her, take her this year.

Like onions chopped on a block, you won’t last long.

Water to voyage on, none to drink;

But in the cabin, the lovely girl is a barrel of fresh water.

The foreign month is four weeks;

People without money are never mentioned.

Take a water chestnut, skin it, leave the stem,

Cantonese people have no human feelings.

 

The hollow stems of the water spinach symbolize an open mind here, in contrast to the stuffed-up mind of the blockhead.  Watercress and spinach are cooling in humoral medicine, and remind us to keep cool in trouble.  “A dragon’s head, a snake’s tail” is another variant of the next couplet; it means that one starts bravely on an enterprise, but peters out.  The next couplets turn on puns:  kaai “greens” and kaai “avoid,” kan “celery” and kan “hard.”  (The tones do not match, but tones are not sung in salt water songs.)  The bitter melon is self-reliant.  The foreign month and water chestnut seem to be used only to make up a rhyming line.  “Cantonese” here means “people in general,” though it is also a bit of a slap at the land people.

 

 

Fragment of a Courting Song

Sung by Cheung Fuk-Luk

 

Because I have no money I’ll float to another place;

The poor always have to drift and wander.

Because I have no money, I have to struggle all night for a living,

Yes, through the night, because I am poor.

Corn has layers of silk, you can’t see its face.

A Buddha-image has a mouth but speaks no words.

It’s an old saying:  Without money, you suffer wind and sun.

I am too poor for us to unite.

My hat is full of holes; I put it on.

My clothes are dirty and ragged, but I make do.

Take a cross, add a hook, join a left stroke,

If I had many helpers, I’d get wealth and property.

Yesterday I made a friend and we talked together;

Even a thousand gold won’t buy a real friend on the boat.

 

The cross, hook and left stroke write the character for “wealth.”  This song would be sung by a man courting a woman, wishing he could have her as a “real friend” on his boat.  She would sing an answer, either rejecting him or saying money is mere dung and she loves him too much to give him up.

 

 

Salt Water Song

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau

 

Once more I ask the girl to go with me;

When she’s ready, she rows the boat here.

A new abacus and you pinch the wood;

You’re a sweet girl but you’re counting wrong.

“Up the bay to buy a carp, down the bay to steam it,

Steam it with bean paste and bean sauce, give me money too, I still won’t love you.”

The dried oyster opens as wide as Tai O channel.

If you want to “fire the gun,” row your boat here.

Step up and cut flowers, the boy over here,

But if he’s broke, the girl stays on her own side.

I start out to fish, see great waves,

The waves strike and sink the boat.

People have to grab the boat rail.

I buy a bowl of chicken soup for the girl,

As long as I live I will not forget.

The north star faces south.

The moon darkens, dark clouds cover silence.

The Sky God says “Open”!  Through the dark clouds we can see the sky.

Row with the sweet, pull the hand lines!  No good working too hard;

The dragon boats are tied, but we will soon know who loses and who wins.

 

An “abacus-pincher” is a penny-pincher; the girl—a professional entertainer in this song, not a prospective wife—cares only for his money.  The quoted lines are supposedly sung by the girl; she would reject even his best cooking attempts.  The dried oyster is her vagina, not at all flatteringly described; “firing the gun” and “cutting the flowers” are phrases for sexual intercourse, the violence of which makes the great waves.  The opening sky refers to hope that the courtship will lead to something.  Dragon boats race on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month; till then they remain tied up.  The implication here is that the girl has many competing suitors, and we will soon know who wins her.

 

 

Salt Water Song

Sung by Tam A-Kau and Fung Sam-Tsau

 

The girl has sea snails in her boat.

Her lover goes there, attracted.

He likes the sound of her voice;

All through the night he doesn’t interrupt her.

Buy salt-hay to tie big crabs;

If they escape, the hay’s wasted.

Little sister, go to the temple to cast lots.

The lot tells you to go with me.

It says you are still strong.

A new bamboo pole, seventeen or eighteen feet long:

First test the water, then see the girl’s heart.

I buy good pork but can’t afford two pieces,

And my little Castle Peak boat has no engine.

Miss Kam Tai goes out to fish, gets seasick and throws up—

Drop her off at Castle Peak with me to look after the house.

 

The lot in question is a stick that stands up, phallically, when several sticks are shaken together; the symbolism is obvious.  The pole for pushing the boat along is also a phallic symbol, so obvious that boat songs have used it for centuries.  Classical Chinese poets immortalized several examples.

 

 

Fish Name Song

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau and Cheung Fuk-Luk

 

The flounder has eyes on only one side.

The mud flathead’s body wriggles.

The goldenthread has a red body and white belly.

The long-tube fish swims backwards or upside down.

The hairtail comes up all rubbed with white powder.

The yellow croaker’s head wears silver and gold.

The anchovy becomes extremely large.

The sawfish becomes king.

The white-rice fish and silver fish, cut open, have no blood.

The stonefish, salted, gets its scales and head cut off.

The barracuda leaps out like an arrow.

The flying fish is a flying boat on the sea.

The purse-seiner catches minnows near shore.

Shad and ginkgo-fish swim in open sea.

Sea mullets, gray mullets, stay near shore,

Little croakers come up from stony duck-mud.

 

Just fun—few double meanings here.  The fish are well described.  The sawfish, a sacred fish, is the most powerful of all sea creatures.  The huge anchovy is probably a joke—an ironic “fish story.”

 

Ten Women Floating on the River

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau

 

The first old girl floats up to Hang Mei,

The water dries up slowly, and she asks a young man to push.

The second good woman floats to the fast current,

The fast current breaks her water jar.

On the water she uses her hand to hold it,

On the bank a cook uses his bamboo pole to carry it.

The third woman floats to San Kei,

The water dries out where the bottom is stony.

The fourth floats to San Sa,

Where some go to sea and others sstay home.

The sixth old girl floats to the First Channel,

Where some houses are on stone piles and some on wood stakes.

Of course behind the shops is a stream.

The seventh floats to Tai O pier,

Where once Miss Twenty would really give you something!

She’d ferry you at any hour, no matter how late.

The eighth floats to Tai O mooring,

Where a ferry poles to and fro.

 

The places are in or near Tai O, famous for its singing girls.  The obscene double-entendres should be obvious enough.  The drying water is the lubrication on the woman’s vagina, and so the song begins.  The “fast current” that “breaks the water jar” means just what Freud would have said it meant.  And so on.  Unfortunately, Fung could not remember all the song.

The word used for the women literally means “elder brother’s wife,” a somewhat respectful but very colloquial term for older women.

 

 

The Seasons

Sung by Cheung Ngau-Tsai

 

In spring, soon, people get married.

Spring color, flower scent, spread far off.

Spring wandering on fragrant grass is delightful.

“Spring Girl” teaches her son clearly and rightly.

The spring swallow in the roofbeams builds its nest.

In a spring hut, beadwork grows like jade fruit.

In the Spring and Autumn Period, countries fought with spears.

Spring love achieves happiness, but you pay for it later.

In the spring curtains and decorations the bridegroom meets the lovely lady.

 

Summer potted-plant leaves droop and doze,

On the summer mountain hay dries in heaps.

The Xia Dynasty’s Emperor Yu made channels and stopped floods.

Summer is very hot, people take their clothes off.

Sume days are long.  In the house

Summer makes one go as slowly as possible to the kitchen!

Summer lotuses grow, all flowers open.

 

Fall tangerines fill their branches.

Fall night rain is just the right time.

Fall colors come once a year.

The fall wind blows, stirring up clothing.

Fall exams come; people tell stories

Of “Fall Fragrance” and other famous things.

Fall moon rays shine, rain can still fall.

Fall sorrow: a stranger on the road—but he might still meet a friend.

In fall, girls smile as they walk, thinking secret thoughts.    The fall chrysanthemum grows with no thorns.

 

In winter, potted chrysanthemums look to the clear moon.

Winter makes all fresh and bright.

The East Mountain is red, its top purple and firm.

Winter cold freezes hardest in Beijing.

The eastern household lays out its lineage graves, small tower, and wall.

From winter solstice it’s 106 days to the spring festival.

Winter fruit, at the New Year, stands piled high.

In winter sun the apricots flower proud in snow and ice.

Winter-mushrooms are soft and smooth, everyone likes them;

Here’s joyful wine hidden till winter—Show what you can do with it!
Every line here starts with the season’s name, or a homonym (Xia for summer, east for winter).  The plants and animals are auspicious and thoroughly conventional.  This song is notably more refined than the preceding ones; Cheung Ngau-Tsai knew some classical poetry and preferred fairly literate diction.  But sexual references are far from absent.  Cantonese maintain that fall rain is an ideal time for lovemaking.  The colors (“color” can mean “sex”) and wind-lifted clothing drive the image.

 

 

Teasing the Bride

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau

 

He new bride, veiled, makes bridal tea very hot,

Her left hand holds the cup, her right hand pours.

The first cup for her father-in-law to drink,

The second for her mother-in-law.

The third is for her husband’s elder brother,

The fourth for his elder brother’s wife.

The fifth and sixth are for the husband’s younger brother and his wife.

The seventh for friends and relatives.

The eighth is for her husband—

On the bed very good, mandarin ducks rose one.

The new bride makes tea with Tai O river water

and offers cakes for her father-in-law.

When mother-in-law instructs you, don’t answer back.

As for your husband, if you don’t care about him, whom will you care about?

 

The italicized words were sung in English.  This song is a straight instruction to the girl on how to serve—until the last lines.  Mandarin ducks are a symbol of wedded bliss.

 

 

The Bridal Feast

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau

A pair of chopsticks iin the middle;

Next year when you have a son, invite me to eat ginger.

Pure sweet crisp meat on the bones of a fat chicken.

If you know what I mean we’ll all eat together.

The girl is pretty and good, a worthy match for the gentleman,

A properly raised girl with all the virtues.

Four sweet oranges grow on one branch,

The wife picks them and the husband peels them.

He gives them to her,

They eat and drink without separation.

If they mention separation, their parents are sad at heart.

The kite has sons, but they desert him;

When full-grown they fly off to the sky.

 

A feast with ginger celebrates a son’s birth; ginger is stimulating and healthy for a new mother.  The kite (the predatory bird is meant here, not the paper imitation thereof) is, of course, a contrast to the faithful pair.  Kites were an abundant pest in the harbors of Hong Kong.

 

 

Wine and Vegetable Song (another wedding feast song)

Sung by Fung Sam-Tsau

 

The mushrooms are delicious, sweet in the bowl.

The good-hearted Jen Gui went and conquered the east.

Di Qing had only three arrows left;

With them he shot three heroes. Fried dry shrimp look like gold tidbits.

Take up the bowls and stir all together.

This truly is the work of a master chef;

When people eat this, they cannot worry.

The whole duck is delicious in the bowl.

The wholly pure phoenix marries the gold dragon.

They will have sons, educate them, make them valuable men.

The whole household eats; all will be heroes.

In fall the tangerines are green and tender,

In fall comes the night rain; sons are made easily.

In fall fine scenery appears:  range after range of mountains.

In fall come the tangerines, and more babies will be born.

In summer the little tangerine grows buds;

In summer comes the dragon boat festival, and flowers open.

In summer days the wind comes, pearls fall in showers.

Next year there will be tangerines, and also clear tea.

 

A description of the feast segues into a short version of the following song.  The tangerines and tea in the last line are thank offerings for a son’s birth.  The sexist preference for “sons” is all too clear in this song, and all too typical.  Other wedding songs, not translated here, express the Cantonese ideal of “five sons, two daughters.”  (At least, a few daughters are desirable.)  Indeed, completed families in our sample did have seven children.

 

 

The Tangerine Song

A praise poem for a girl.  Sung by Cheung Ngau-Tsai.  (Mistranslated “orange” in Anderson 1967 and 1975, foolishly following Hawkes’ 1959 mistranslation; at least Anderson 1975:47 supplied a corrective note, thanks to editorial help.)

 

In spring the little tangerine tree’s roots grow below ground.

Spring comes with moderate rain.

In spring warmth, last fall’s branches bloom like brocade.

The spring tangerine flowers out like a phoenix lute.

 

In summer the little tangerine grows shoots. On Dragon Boat Day it puts out flowers.

The summer moon shines, the wind comes, branches and leaves sway—

Next year the little tangerine will need supporting stakes.

 

In fall the little tangerine has green fruit.

In fall in the night rain the seed should put forth shoots.

In fall after wind, the moon shines lovely on the hills.

When fall comes again, the tangerine will again grow larger.

 

In winter the little tangerine’s fruit is perfectly red.

At winter’s end, rain comes with festivals.

Winter months are cold; the flowering-apricot needs special care;

In winter the tangerines fill the whole orchard with red.

 

The tangerine is so auspicious that its colloquial name is “lucky fruit” in Cantonese.  Its red color is the perfect color of life, love, good fortune, and all wonderful things.  The tree is considered so exquisitely beautiful that people try to grow them in pots in the house.  This is why “orange” is a sorry mistake; the orange does not have these strong associations, though oranges too are auspicious.  Here, the tree is a metaphor for a young girl, marrying, making passionate love, and getting pregnant; see the “fall night rain” above.  The tree needs supporting stakes because of its heavy fruit—a lovely image for a pregnant woman.  “Flowering apricot” is a homonym for “little sister,” a pet or colloquial term for any young woman.  The flowering apricot flowers in midwinter, and needs protection from extreme cold.  Here, the special care implies care for a woman giving birth.

A famous poem in the Songs of the South, from around the time of the Han Dynasty, praises a young man using the tangerine tree as an image (Hawkes 1959:76-77).  The present poem is strikingly close to that one in imagery and rhetoric.  Since the boat people frequently learned classical poetry, via educated patrons of boat singing-girls, this is not as surprising as it might seem.  Cheung Ngau-Tsai, in fact, knew and could chant poems by Li Bai and other classic poets.

 

 

 

APPENDIX 2.  LIFE HISTORIES

 

 

These life histories (except for #3, which I collected, in English) were collected by Choi Kwok-tai, with or without my assistance.  Mr. Choi worked with the fishermen and was a trusted friend to most of them.  Mr. Choi, Chow Hung-fai and I translated them.  Mr. Choi put them in third person, because he shortened them somewhat in recording, but they were almost word-for-word.  We all edited them slightly for the initial, almost verbatim translations in Anderson 1970b.  I have now re-edited considerably, to shorten them and disguise identities, but I have tried to keep the narrators’ turns of phrase, such as “fac[ing] the challenge of sexual desire.”  All names are pseudonyms.  All the participants must now be long deceased, or, if not, impossible to trace.

 

  1. The Nouveau Riche

 

Yat was a native of Po On [a county just north of Hong Kong].  His family has been fishing at least four generations.  His father ran a gill netter, and he lived happily under his parents’ care.  He gradually came to work more and more with his father.  His father employed a private tutor, teaching the four children on the boat, when Yat was 14 years old.  He had only a few months of study, because his father decided to retire early, being sick of fishing.  Yat took over the boat when he was 15.   His parents arranged his marriage the following year.  He then built a shrimp trawler, with some money borrowed from a fish dealer.  The family fished at Po On, Tung Kun, Macau, the Pearl River, and elsewhere, and especially they came to fish the yellow croaker runs at Tai O.

At that time Tai O had a great yellow croaker fishery.   When the fishermen came ashore, they could enjoy themselves.  The restuarants were crowded, and plenty of singing girls were there.  Yat was strong and well off, so he faced the challenge of sexual desire.  It was difficult for him to resist.  Fishermen in port would form groups, wandering among singing establishments, enjoying whatever happened.  His wife became worried, and got a concubine for him, but he still visits his old friends in Tai O when there on business.  Fortunately, he could keep his business up and work hard.

Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese in 1941.  Seeing that war had broken out, thieves and robbers appeared like forests [as thick as trees in a forest].  It was hard to survive.  Yat, with his family, went to Tung Kun and hid in a small channel.  In two months he returned, and fished successfully in spite of pirates, which he discouraged by means of guns and cannons.

After the Japanese surrendered, the British government organized the Fish Marketing Organization.  Yat supported this and helped develop a unit at Tai O, but the unit went bankrupt.  In 1958, he mechanized his boat.  He then handed over his fishing business to his second brother and came to Castle Peak to buy a wooden hut and set up business on shore.  He sold rice, groceries, and salt fish, but went bankrupt soon because of lack of capital and experience.  But he had made contacts, so switched to selling diesel oil.  He started selling only a few drums of oil; lacking capital, he did badly, but he built up trust.  He could borrow some money.  More and more boats were mechanizing.  In the 1960s and 1970s, he and his family sold diesel, water, kerosene, and related products.  He became rather well off, and eventually moved to more urban parts of Hong Kong to retire in modest comfort.

 

  1. The Child Buyer

 

Yi was born in Tai O to a Po On family.  Of his three sons and one daughter, two sons were bought.  In traditional times, if a couple had no son after three to five years, people would ridicule them.  There was a saying:  Thirty no wife, forty no son—alone half your life!  So when Yi’s wife had no son after three years of marriage, he bought two sons.  The price of a baby boy at that time [mid-1940s] was very high.  Sons came from poor families who had more children than they could support, or from gamblers or opium addicts.  Intermediaries obtained a commission for selling these sons.  Another source was women whose husbands were away for long periods, leaving their wives, who were sometimes tempted.  They would escape to distant areas, and sell their illegitimate children.

Yi’s father ran a large sailing trawler.  The family fished around the Pearl River, catching croakers, shrimp, and the like.  Living was not too good, but he enjoyed his childhood.  He went to school for five years, from 11 to 16.

One cold night when he was a young man, the Japanese attacked.  Bombs and shots were everywhere, making the whole fishing port a battle scene.  The fishermen were living peacefully and did not know what was going on, since they did not read newspapers from one year to the next and knew nothing of the outside world.  They thought the war was a punishment from the Sky.  They had to flee for their lives, many being separated from their families.  Luckily, Yi was not asleep. He raised anchor and fled under the shots.  He passed a night on a deserted island, then fled to Tai O.  Japan occupied south China; the ports and markets were closed to him.  Killing, shooting, and robbing went on and on.  The fishermen could survive in Hong Kong Colony, fishing south of the main islands.  But soon the Japanese took Hong Kong.  The family moved to Castle Peak.  His father got him to marry, in spite of the war, because he was of age.  The boat was too large to opearte safely, so they bought a gill-netter and fished pomfret, goldenthread, and croaker.  Fish were common, prices low.  Once the Japanese police caught him, assuming he was a secret agent.  Only the lucky appearance of an interpreter allowed him to explain himself.

After the Japanese surrender, Yi’s mother got cholera.  At that time the fishermen did not understand this disease.  Cholera was thought to be a stomach ailment, and was treated by Chinese doctors.  With the help of the Sky, his mother survived.  She was so weak that other sicknesses came, and she lay in bed for ten months.  He had to stop fishing and pay medical fees.  His living was very bad. He went into debt and could not mechanize.  Eventually he got a mechanized boat on a loan, but repairs ruined him.  He stopped fishing and worked for a live fish dealer.  His wife and daughters-in-law made nets.  Eventually, with hard work, savings, and a network of loans from extended fammily members, they saved enough to get a bouat and get back into fishing.

 

  1. The Educated Man

 

Saam was from Cheung Chau; the family believes it came from Toisan five or six generations ago.  His mother had some education and insisted on living on land to send Sam to school.  His mother died in 1942.  The family did not do well, and turned to the land about 1950.  His father stayed at Aberdeen, while the children were raised at Cheung Chau.  From 1952 to 1955, when his grandfather died, Saam studied in Hong Kong.  Scholarship, encouragement, and a lack of opportunities for the uneducated kept him in.  He began to read enormously, for “escapism, amusement, and necessity.”  In 1955 he became the support of his family, thanks to a small scholarship.  He got tuberculosis but recovered, went through the university, and earned a BA and diploma in Education in 1961.  He then went to teach in Yun Long.  In 1964 he was able to go to England and study for a year at the University of London.  Returning, he got a post training teachers in Kowloon, which he was still doing in 1966 [I did not find him in 1974].

Saam thought that he and a lawyer of whom he knew were the only boat people to graduate from university.  He thought Chinese “overprotect” children and do not expose them to emotional conflicts, but that the carrying belt gives the children emotional satisfaction and thus helps prevent juvenile delinquency.  England convinced him that shouting at and frightening children can harm them permanently.

 

  1. The Fish Seller

 

Sei was local born.  He was the eldest of eight.  His grandfather fished and also carried fish for Macau and Hong Kong dealers.  He took to running a small ferry.  When Sei’s father was grown, small motor-powered boats took over the industry.  His father could not carry on the ferry business, and returned to fishing.  At that time [1910s-1920s], boats were few, so fishing was not bad.  At Castle Peak Pier, fish dealers and shops were scattered around the area.  Sei’s father was cheated and oppressed by his dealer, so switched to another, and eventually wnet into dealing for himself.  He and his brothers and cousins knew only the first ten numbers, so they had to draw pictures of the fish when they wanted to list fish.  Eventually, at 12, he got to school.  Schools taught by rote and were oppressive, so he tried to escape, but his father needed business help and made him stay.  Eventually the fish dealership began to pay, and the family moved on shore.

The Japanese then occupied the colony.  Pirates and rascals took the opportunity to rob and raid.  Lives and properties were in danger.  Their dealership failed.  The Japanese destroyed the pirates, but “spies” for the Japanese could raid and murder.  The family went to isolated islands to fish for a living from  small hand-liners.  They barely survived.  They lived on rice gruel and sweet-potato meal [the most despised of foods].

Finally, the Japanese surrendered; everyone rejoiced.  Sei’s father became a fish dealer on the far side of the bay.  Sei’s younger brother—the second son in the family—became a seaman; his third worked in a shop in Yun Long.  Sei and his unmarried elder sister carried on the father’s old business.  The seaman came home and joined in.  They succeeded, and threw a celebration that “set a record” for local display.

In 1947, the smuggling business was very active.  It increased steadily.  Sei started a live fish business for the smugglers.  He got capital, and began to loan it out.  He used crooked scales.  His income was “like a waterfall.”  He became creditor on more than a hundred boats.  They celebrated many weddings and feasts.

[He took to gambling and other shady pursuits, got a disease—tuberculosis or sexually transmitted disease—and came to a sad end.]

 

  1. Misfortune

 

Ng was a native of Po On.  He had a younger brother and five sisters.  Around 1960, the brother was arrested in China and jailed for interfering with economic policy.  He died in prison two years ago.

Ng had eight sons and two daughters, and fished with a motorized trawler.

Ng’s father’s business had not been good.  Ng went to school for a short time, but the boat was short of hands.  His lack of schooling made him feel the pain of ignorance, so he was sending his sons to school in the 1960s and 1970s.  The family worked hard, but their boat was wrecked in bad weather.  They joined an informal savings-and-loan group and got their boat back to functional state.

They were out fishing one day when they saw an ordinary-looking hand trawler.  They came near it.  Suddenly gangsters from it leaped onto their boat and stole all their money and equipment.  Once more they were penniless.  Relatives loaned them money and they set up again.

Before they could get ahead of debt, the boat wore out.  At this time Japan conquered China.  Ng borrowed money from arms-runners and ran arms from Hong Kong to loyalists fighting the Japanese in Guangdong.  As soon as he got enough money, he stopped this dangerous business, married, and went back to fishing.

Then the Japanese took Hong Kong.  The Japanese controlled the land and knew that spies and arms had to come by sea, so they terrorized the boat people, stopping boats to search, rob, and in suspect cases kill families and burn the boats.  Sometimes they would stop a boat, rape the young women, tie everyone with barbed wire, and set the boat afire.  The fishermen were “as frightened as birds scared by arrows, and could only sit and wait for death.”  When the fishermen saw Japanese boats, they would cut their nets and flee.

Once Ng was at a small island.  The Japanese came up suddenly.  The fishermen had no time to escape.  The Japanese charged with rifle and bayonet.  Ng had been asleep.  He was wakened by the noise.  He forgot his own life and fired a pistol.  The Japense—two soldiers—jumped into a sampan and fled for shore.  The fishermen could not follow them into the shallows.  The Japanese fired a machine gun. Ng and his family swam for shore and hid in a paddy field.

The family mended the boat once again—it was full of bullet holes—and went to Macau.  They did not know the waters.  They lived on bare rations.  Fortunately, the Japanese surrendered before Ng and his family starved to death.  They had no equipment left for fishing; they lived by carrying rice.

China closed its waters to unlicensed boats in 1957.  Ng mechanized, but his engine was constantly going out of order, so poverty came again.  A fish dealer loaned him money.  “The bad fate was the will of the Sky, but at least the spirits stretched out a hand to me”:  In the third lunar month [just before I met him] he caught a school of whte croakers worth $30,000 Hong Kong dollars.

But misfortune was not finished.  In 1965 he was secretly reported to the Chinese government as having poached on their waters.  He was caught in China, taken before a people’s court, and told to confess the amount of fish he had “stolen.”  He refused, and was jailed for a month and fined ten barrels of diesel fuel.  But he went back to fishing, did well, paid off his debts, and married off a son.  Finally, after being despised for poverty, he was respected.  [Mr. Choi here quoted one of the Chinese proverbs he loved so much: “The success is called king, the loser is called thief.”]

 

  1. The Orphan

 

Luk came from Pun Yu near Guangzhou.  His father was a very poor fisherman who could never succeed, so shipped out as a crewman.  Luk was one of three sons; the other two died of hunger and disease.  His mother died of starvation when Luk was ten.  His father could no longer fish, so Luk was taken as a boat hand by an uncle.  He was thus completely alone; he got no care or attention, and was laughed at by the other boys.  He had no one.  He saw his father only at a few festivals; when they met they would embrace and cry loudly, expressing their emotions.  His uncle then came into difficulties.  Sick and unable to support his own family, he sent Luk on to another uncle.  At 13, Luk began to serve this man; his wages were a silver dollar a month.  He sorted fish, swabbed decks, and mended equipment, working up to 18 hours a day.  After two years his wages went up to two silver dollars, then three.  Finally, another relative hired him at a good wage. He married at 23 and kept working.  Eventually, he saved enough to buy a boat, fish, carry rice, and otherwise work his way up.  His father grew sick and died; Luk spent all his savings for treatment and then for the funeral.  After that, he came down to Caastle Peak and mechanized his boat.

 

  1. The Shady Dealer

 

Chat came from Chungshan.  His father was a poor farmer and foodseller. When he was eight months old, Chat was adopted out to a childless boat family.  At 17 he married and took over the business.

The Japanese came, and he shifted to Castle Peak.  Illegal gangs terrorized fishermen.  But Chat associated with them and became friendly so was not bothered.  In the war, he set himself up running arms.  The Japanese cracked down, but Chat’s underworld contacts informed him and he escaped to Tung Kun.  He anchored at a different place every day, returning to Castle Peak after the war.  He went into dynamite fishing, another shady occupation.  When the Communists took over China, once again arms-running was profitable, and Chat smuggled arms from Hong Kong to rich merchants and mobsters.  He moved on land, built a wood hut, and sold firewood, rice, and groceries, but went bankrupt.  He fell back on carpentery, building illegal squatter structures.  Eventually he got his old shop back, and turned it into a café.  He then started to make dubiously valid identity cards, and otherwise deal less than legally.  He was made a representative for the local fishermen and for the Nationalists (on Taiwan).

His wife worked the café while he worked construction. He drank heavily and took a concubine.  His wife objected, and just at this point he lost his money in a bank failure.  [Chat was one of the least stable and most “hard” boat person I knew—a strange, troubled, dark personality.  When we interviewed him, he was living in poverty in a small room, spending much of his time dreaming of the past.]

 

 

  1. The Leader

 

Pat was a Po On man who lived most of his life at Tai O and Castle Peak.  When Pat was eight, his father died.  At 16, Pat took a job as boat hand.  He took part in the great seamen’s strike of 1925.  After that, he borrowed money and fished the Pearl estuary.  At this time he married.

By then he was already respected among fishermen, and served as local representative.  When the Japanese came, his fishing was ended.  Loyal to China, he was hounded by the Japanese and reduced to starvation.  For six years he and his family lived on sweet potato stems, rice husks, and rarely some sweet potatoes or thin rice.  His wife and two of his three daughters starved to death.

After the war, he remarried, and carried grass for mats from Chinese areas to Hong Kong, returning with salt or sugar, not bothering with minor formalities such as customs duties.  The Communist government pursued him for this and for his role in Nationalist local government, so he came to Hong Kong with a new boat, and mechanized there.

He worked his way up as representative as a group of relatives and anchorage neighbors.  He got into a conflict with land people when an outhouse was built in front of his mother’s grave, ruining its fungseui and endangering the living.  Eventually, after sharp conflict, he found a place to move her body.

[As of 1966, Pat, one of my most constant companions and superb consultants, was a bluff, powerfully built, extraverted man of 59.  He was a good talker,and had a Rabelaisian capacity for food, sex, alcohol, jokes, folksongs, and living in general.  Unfortunately, his fortunes declined, and by 1975 he was frail and living in poverty again.  He died soon after.]

 

 

  1. The Beaten Man

 

Kau was from Pun Yu.  His family ran an old sailing trawler.  Living got worse as China restricted its waters after 1957.  Men of his surname and home area built up a network of large trawlers.  (Another, intermarried surname group lost some membership to opium smuggling and smoking.)  In the Qing Dynasty the “Kau” trawlermen were rich and powerful, and some highly educated.  Their large, capacious boats proved good for smuggling.  More honest ones turned to mullet, caught when these fish run down from the rivers at the first cool weather.  The trawlermen could throw huge festivals, educate their children (“even the girls”), and marry well.  Many men went on shore and invested in land businesses, while the more beautiful girls could marry well-off land-dwellers.

The Japanese conquest drove Kau’s family to Macau.  Search for food forced them to sail back to Japanese-controlled areas, where they were once accused of smuggling arms and tied up.  Only the fortunate appearance of another Japanese ship with an interpreter on board saved them [the second case in our narratives of this common situation].  Sailing trawlers were suspect.  For one thing, they carried dynamite for fishing, and could sometimes use it on pirates or smuggle it to loyalist soldiers.  The experience with the Japanese was thus frightening; “when you talk to the tiger, you are frightened right then.”

Times were bad.  They sold their gold ornaments for food.  Kau’s elder brother got into fish dealing, was caught in China, and sent to a distant camp for reeducating such capitalists.  Others also went into fish dealing.  Kau and one brother carried on the fishing.  A typhoon destroyed the huge old boat, and Kau survived on tiny Mouse Island.  His wife prayed all night to the Sky.  They went on shore, but could never get money together to get a new boat or start a business.  They survived from relatives’ incomes, and Kau retired.  [Still fairly young and in good shape, Kau had given up; he spent his time brooding.]

 

 

  1. The Restauranteur

 

Sap was a young man, born locally to a Po On family.  In the late Qing Dynasty, unrest was severe in Po On.  Violence, piracy, feuding, and crime were common. Deserted islands became criminal hangouts.  So Sap’s grandfather came to Castle Peak, where he fished with a casting net [a small net thrown from a sampan—an exceedingly humble way to make a very slender living].  At that time, Castle Peak Bay was almost deserted.  The family caught good fish and sold them at the old market at the foot of the Peak.  Their living was stable, but the boat was overcrowded.  The grandfather erected a small wooden hut on shore.  The youths went out to sea often, but were better off than living on the boat.  Some of the family took up shore occupations.

The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong came when Sap was very young.  His father could not get hemp to make nets.  He sailed to occupied territory to find some, was caught by pirates, and was killed.  Three rival pirate gangs feuded over the extortion racket in the area; Sap’s father paid off one, and was killed by another.  Sap’s mother worried at her husband’s failure to return, and eventually got the story from an eyewitness, a fisherman.  The body was found and buried.

She continued fishing with the help of the children.  They were reduced to sweet potato meal, and even that did not always come.  Family solidarity saved them; relatives supported each other.

After the war, tourists began to come to Castle Peak.  There was no road around the bay, and visitors to Castle Peak Monastery had to be rowed across from the pier.  Sap’s mother took to rowing them.  By this time the sisters were old enough to attract many young men to the boat, and the mother, too, met many gentlemen from the land.  [In short, they became singing-girls, not necessarily a low-class occupation and not necessarily involving sex.]  Under the influence of educated tourists, the mother sent Sap to school for a full seven years.  He then worked as an employee on a live fish boat.

At this time, “high-class” urban men liked to hire boats to go out fishing.  The better boats prepared food and had pretty girls to serve it.  Sap’s two sisters—who by this time had friends in high places—got enough in this way to build two small houses on shore.  Sap sold firewood.  When local wood became scarce, he thought of converting his woodyard to a restaurant.  Business was not bad, but some of the customers were rough.  He had lived on the waterfront all his life, and [modestly put, with no boasting] “I can handle such people.”  [Sap was small and wiry, but quick and strong, not a man to fight against.]

A year later he formed a partnership with a cook who had run a movable food cart for some years.  The two opened a fish shack.  Slowly, it grew in reputation, and became a highly successful restaurant, the “Garden of Delight.”  Eventually it moved to much more capacious and showy quarters, up the bay.

[By 1965, it was already famous as far as the urban areas of Hong Kong for the incredible quality of its sea food.  By 1974, the quality of the “Garden of Delight” was showing the effects of volume feeding and the decline in local sea food quality, but the restaurant was still far above the sea food palaces of Hong Kong today.]

 

 

  1. The Convicted Man

 

Yau came from a hand-lining family.  He had no education, and his family had always been poor.  He worked on other people’s boats and on ferries.

In 1959, the Chinese government across the border called on fishermen to celebrate the Midautumn Festival and see the wonders of the new regime.  Yau went and enjoyed himself thoroughly the whole day.  In the late afternoon he was seized without warning, driven to the local town, and kept overnight.  He was brought to court the next morning and charged with murder.  This was the first time he heard anything to indicate why he was held.  The fishermen of the area had charged him, as he understood it.  He admitted that he had killed pirates during the unsettled times of World War II, but said he had never hurt anyone else.  He was questioned off and on, day and night, by different courts and officers, for nine days.  Sometimes he was interrogated seven times a day.  No on ecould establish his guilt.  He was kept in the charge room of the local police station for two months.  He was told that this was to allow fishermen to bring charges or petition for his release on grounds of innocence.  No one appeared with either of these, so he was  held till declared guilty.  He was locked in an old hut north of Guangzhou, and made to work, managing a fish-rearing pond.  Twice a day there were “re-education” meetings.  He was moved frequently to different places.  He became sick, with vomiting and pallor, and was treated in hospital.

In 1962, he was released, and returned to Castle Peak.  He held his wife tightly and kissed her.  He felt he was in another world.  He was so miserable and weak that it took him five months to recover, and the medical treatment almost ruined the family.

[This story is strange; murder would have drawn a much harsher punishment.  The tale remains inexplicable, and how much is true must be left to speculation.  He was certainly imprisoned, but why and under what circumstances remains unclear.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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White, Leslie.  1949.  The Science of Culture.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.

 

Wierzbicka, Anna.  1999.  Emotions across Languages and Cultures:  Diversity and Universals.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Wolf, Arthur.  1974.  “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors.”  In Studies in Chinese Society, ed. by Arthur Wolf.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.  Pp. 131-182.

 

—   1995.  Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association:  A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

 

—  2003.  “Maternal Sentiments:  How Strong Are They?”  Current Anthropology 44:S31-S50.

 

Wolf, Margery.  1968.  The House of Lim:  A Study of a Chinese Farm Family.  New York:  Appleton-Century-Crofts.

 

— 1972.  Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

 

Wolpert, Lewis.  1993.  The Unnatural Nature of Science.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

 

Wu Ch’ing-Tzu (Wu Chingzi).  1957.  The Scholars.  Tr. Hsien-li Yang and Gladys Yang.  Beijing:  Foreign Languages Press.

 

Wu Yuey-len (Wu Yuelin).  1936a.  “Investigation and Report on Samshui Rivermouth.”  Lingnam University Journal 2:1-53.

 

—  1936b.  “The Boat People of Shanam:  A Statistical Study of Population and Economic Conditions.”  Nankai Social and Economic Quarterly 9:613-665.

 

—  1937.  “Life and Culture of the Shanam Boat People.”  Nankai Social and Economic Quarterly 9:807-874.

 

Yan Yunxiang.  1996.  The Flow of Gifts.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

 

Yang, Mayfair.  1994.  Gifts, Favors, and Banquets:  The Art of Social Relationships in China.  Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press.

 

Ye Xian’en.  1995.  “Notes on the Territorial Connections of the Dan.”  In Down to Earth:  The Territorial Bond in South China, ed. by David Faure and Helen Siu.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.  Pp. 83-88.

 

Young, James, and Linda Garro.  1994.  Medical Choice in a Mexican Village.  Boulder: Westview.

 

Young, John Aubrey.  1974.  Business and Sentiment in a Chinese Market Town.  Taipei:  Orient Cultural Service.

 

Yu, Anthony.  1977-1983.  The Journey to the West.  (Translation/edition/commentary on Xi Yu Ji by Wu Cheng’en.)  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

 

Zajonc, Robert.  1980.  Feeling and Thinking:  Preferences Need No Inferences.  American Psychologist 35:151-175.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] The Yucatec Maya lump certain orioles that nest at the tips of branches, while separating others that look the same but nest in the crowns of palms.  Genetic research has just confirmed that the relationships do indeed go with nesting behavior, not with appearance.  The Yucatec were ahead by about 3,000 years.

 

[2] The Hong Kong fishermen could have said, with my Maya friends in south Mexico:

“Es la ley de San Garabato,

comprar caro y vender barato.”

“It’s the law of St. Hook:

buy dear and sell cheap.”

St. Hook may not be in the Catholic Encyclopedia, but his law is, sadly, much truer than a great deal of religious or economic teaching.

 

[3]  Producers’ cooperatives have a long and honorable history; we in California have known Del Monte (fruits and nuts), Sunkist (citrus), and Calavo (avocados) for decades.  Similar coops continue to flourish in many parts of the world, but have become less important with the rise of agribusiness and the cult of the “individual” in economics and economic development.  In the 1970s, microlending appeared on the scene, thanks to Bangladeshi economist Mohamed Yunus, and more or less replaced cooperativization as the popular thing to do in the world of development aid.

An interesting comparison emerged when Marja Anderson and I studied cooperatives in Chinese fishing villages in Malaysia in 1970-71 (Anderson and Anderson 1978).  Here, coops were less successful.  First, the fish buyers there were in fierce competition, which forced them to pay top dollar to the fishermen, extend credit on reasonable terms, and shave their own profit margins to the minimum; therefore, the cooperatives could not improve terms for the fishermen.  Second, the cooperatives were not always free from corruption.  Third, the government used the cooperatives as one way of managing and controlling the fishermen.  These being (like the Hong Kong boat people) a less-than-docile group, they did not take kindly to such control, and thus distrusted the coops.  Withal, coops worked, not spectacularly, but well enough to keep the fishery alive until it succumbed to the same forces that destroyed it in Hong Kong.

 

[4]  This was, interestingly, no less true of our own children than of the Cantonese; we used hikers’ baby-backpacks, not meitaai, but the real issues were doubtless more complicated.  Marja and I concluded that much of the trauma of weaning—from breast or meitaai—is the loss of contact involved.

Nothing proves the utter irrationality of the human animal better than the disappearance of the meitaai in the last 30 years.  It has gone from universality to extinction in Hong Kong, having been replaced by the baby-stroller.  Part of the reason is probably sheer laziness (babies are heavy), but most of it is clearly emulation of the west.  A custom that combined total convenience for the mother with tremendous psychological benefits for the child has been sacrificed out of abject adulation of all that is foreign.  The pattern reprises Hong Kong’s replacement—fortunately less total—of Chinese food by hamburgers and of Chinese classical music by rap.

Meanwhile, the brief career of baby-backpacks in the west has also run its course.  Today, babies suffer in strollers, unable to touch the mother, or at best are carried in frontpacks, which are as inconvenient as they are hard on the parental back and neck.

 

[5] Compared to Near East studies, China studies are relatively free of Orientalism in its more obvious forms, but Orientalism at its worst does raise its head.  Regrettably significant is the constant republishing of Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1894), one of the most viciously racist books to come out of British imperialism.  It is still in print.  Even Smith had a conflicted, self-contradictory affection for the Chinese (Smith 1899, right from the first page), but in general he was a strong critic.  No books today approach his, but Lloyd Eastman’s Families, Fields, and Ancestors (1988) included a few unguarded remarks about the brutality and callous viciousness of Chinese families.  These were, however, buried deeply in an otherwise well-done survey of Chinese society, and I do not mean to imply that Eastman is in any way close to Smith ideologically.  Elisabeth Croll’s book Endangered Daughters is a still different work, a superb, insightful, deeply moving book about the tragic wastage of girls’ lives throughout Asia.  It tells no more than the sober truth, in a sympathetic and humane tone.  The point here is that all three give us worst-case stories, and perhaps the most important thing my work can do is provide a story that may balance them out a bit.

We never saw at Castle Peak the dragooning behavior and harsh discipline that characterizes “the Chinese family” in western stereotype.  As noted elsewhere, this is clearly not because we were self-deluding romantics; we had no difficulty seeing such behavior—the local people saw it as deviant, but it was quite common—in the Malaysian Chinese communities we studied in 1970-71.  There, our children participated in the general unhappiness, though of course they were shielded from any direct abuse.

Castle Peak was a very, very good place to grow up.  My children were never happier, healthier, or better behaved—to a great extent because they were treated very much better than by the wider community at home.  This was not because we were foreign; quite the reverse; as foreigners, we were subject to prejudice and some hostility.

 

[6]  For the record, my adopted son recently and quite accidentally located his birth mother, who gave him up for adoption at babyhood in 1967.  The reunion was emotional.  She had never ceased thinking of him, with all that “thinking of” implies in such cases.  We glady incorporated her in the family.

 

[7] I set off a daunting outbreak of screaming anger in Taipei in 1975 when I addressed in Taiwanese (Hokkien) an elderly man who turned out to be a mainlander.  I believe this would never happen today.  Younger Taiwanese I meet now seem to be the offspring of “mixed” marriages as often as not.

 

 

CHAPTER 7.  RELIGION AT CASTLE PEAK BAY

 

 

1

Religion” is a western European concept that is rather unusual in world perspective.  Traditional China recognized no break between the “supernatural” and the “natural”; gods, fate, and good and evil spiritual forces were as real as the wind and the scent of incense.

Indeed, it is difficult to classify such Chinese concepts as hei—the famous “qi” or “Ch’i” of martial arts and medicine—as “supernatural” or “natural,” or to classify fungseui into any of the three classic categories of “Magic, Science and Religion” (Malinowski 1948).  Qi and fungseui seem “supernatural” to a westerner, or to a western-influenced Chinese who does not believe in them, but they are “natural” to a believer.

The Chinese do recognize approximately the same category as the western idea of “worship,” in the verb paai (Putonghua bai).  The root meaning is “to pay respect with folded hands.”  On the whole, the word is equivalent to the western idea of worshiping supernaturals, and thus to the western idea of religious behavior.  Conceptually, the invisible world of beings and forces addressed by and used in paai was a single world, Heaven or Sky (t’in/tian).  However, one can paai venerable living elders, as well as ghosts and spirit-inhabited rocks, so the paai category too is different from western concepts of “religion.”  Moreover, such forces as qi are generally outside of the realm of paai.  However, qi and fungseui are associated with such entities as dragons and rock spirits, which are given paai, and which are in the realm known as “supernatural” in ordinary English.

The western opposition of “religion” and “science” is rather similar to the Chinese contrast of intentional, willed action by a single supernatural agent vs unintentional, automatic action by impersonal forces.  However, qi, as well as such things as ch’e, impersonal evil force (see below), would certainly be seen as “supernatural” by western scientists, and were certainly assimilated by Castle Peak Bay Chinese into the realm of paai and spirit mediumship as well as the world of natural, pragmatic, rationally understood forces.

In fact, “magic, science and religion” are western categories, and are notoriously unclear even to the most self-conscious western writers[7].  They represent one way to parcel out the knowledge space.  They do not represent the only way, and perhaps not the best way.  They are useful for some analytical purposes, but not for others.

This chapter concentrates on the realm of paai—the realm in which nonvisible persons and uncanny forces are contacted through the rituals and ceremonies that are the specific concrete referents of the verb.   That realm is close enough to what anthropologists mean by “religion” that I can simply use the English word without much confusion.  However, we are really dealing with two concepts here—the western concept of religion that I use for comparative purposes, and the boat people’s concept of paai and the realm of beings that people could contact only through paai rituals.  The differences between the two concepts will appear through this chapter.

Since the pioneering book by Rob Weller (1987), China scholars in all disciplines have focused on practice as well as doctrine.  The age-old concern with “the classics”—with religious texts, especially foundational ones—is still very much alive, and going through its own revolutions, but the study of actual religious practice—either through ethnography or through available documents that can be analyzed to reveal behavior—has flourished (see e.g. Dean 1993)  Even text-based historical scholarship now takes serious account of practice (von Glahn 2004).

The boat people displayed a form of Chinese religion that was unusually loose, non-doctrinaire, and otherwise adapted to the world of wandering seafarers.

Belief in supernaturals, and in a fundamental cosmic order sustained by them, is universal among humans, and has at least some biological roots (Atran 2002).  Among these roots is the human tendency to see behavior as consciously and deliberately willed unless proven otherwise.  Intentionality is the default option in human inference about actions and states.  Therefore, without evidence to the contrary, humans everywhere seem to assume that the world and everything in it is (to at least some extent) the product of deliberate actions by conscious beings.  These beings may be gods and goddesses, local spirits, animals and plants, ancestors and other deified humans, disembodied forces, or cosmic flows of energy and power (which may or may not be conscious).  For the Chinese of Castle Peak Bay, they were all of the above.

Another clear biological root is the desperate need of humans to feel in control of their lives, or at least to understand what is happening.  Religion often serves as a back-up in this regard; when all attempts at control and understanding fail, people cling desperately to hopes of a deus ex machina.

Humans must necessarily relate emotionally and intellectually with radically different others:  the world and its natural forces, the wind, the fish and stars.  This relationship, often intense, is another wellspring of religion, as pointed out by Thomas Csordas (2004).  Religion is, in part, a way to construct socially and culturally such attempts to deal phenomenologically with what Csordas calls “intimate alterity.”

No individualist or psychological account of religion is adequate.  Countless people go to the temple, church, or mosque solely because it is the social thing to do.  Such people outnumber mystics by at least a hundred to one.  Similarly, for every penitent desperate for a thin simulacrum of control from the supernatural realm, there are a hundred seeking more immediate and social validation from their congregations.  Religion differs from individual spirituality in being inescapably communal.  It involves a communion of believers, united by beliefs and rituals.

Therefore, I follow Durkheim (1995, Fr. orig. 1912) in regarding religion as a social relationship with supernatural beings, mediated through rituals and ceremonies, and sustained by a moral system.  Religion in this sense is an emergent phenomenon of society.  It is, in Durkheim’s terms, the collective representation of a social unit.  For people who believe that fish and mountains and winds are or have intelligent spirits, society does not stop at the human border, and, as Csordas points out, this socialization of the truly different is a wellspring of religiosity.  Human society remains the focal, best-known part of one’s society, but one’s society also includes gods, demons, sacred fish, tree spirits, and spirit-inhabited rocks.

Other classic explanations for religion (explanation of origins, failed science, psychological aberration, “opiate of the masses,” etc.) do not explain or adequately account for religious practice, in China or anywhere else.  One problem with them, especially with psychological explanations (which range from “temporal lobe epilepsy” to “awe”—see reviews in Atran 2002 and Csordas 2004), was classically noted by William James (1903):  “the varieties of religious experience.”  As James found, and as common experience confirms, even a small American mainstream Christian congregation typically has a range of types—from rational intellectuals to passionate mystics, from cheerful optimists to guilt-wracked sinners desperate for forgiveness, from hardheaded skeptics (who go because their spouses or parents make them) to devout believers, from seekers to unquestioning loyalists, and from subtle folk-theologians to persons of simple faith.  Claims that “religion is X,” where X is some one psychological thing, must be rephrased:  “For some people, religion appears to be X, as shown by behavior 1 and statement 2—but the same congregation has people for whom religion appears to be W, Y, Z….n.”  The waterfront of Castle Peak Bay had all James’ types of individual-level variation, and more.

At the social level, the commonest source of variety was difference in the gods worshiped.  Each community had its own set.  Individuals might add particular devotion to a particular deity.  Women were often particularly fond of the Goddess of Mercy, while men often selected more martial patrons.

The western world often deploys an argument for religiosity known to Christians as “Pascal’s Wager” and to Jews as “Spinoza’s Wager”:  better to believe, because if you are wrong you lose nothing, and if you’re right you gain Heaven; but if you do not believe, and are right, you gain nothing, while if you are wrong, you get eternity in Hell.  Castle Peak Bay residents I interviewed gave this as by far the commonest reason for worshiping, but they had many more gods to believe or disbelieve in.  They burned incense and sacrificed food to any gods and spirits that were popular or salient, in the hope that at least one might be moved to help them.   Repeated disappointment, conversely, often convinced a worshiper that the god in question was ineffectual or indifferent.  The worshiper would then turn to a different god.  Alternatively, he or she might try other pragmatic methods of getting the god’s attention.  In times of drought, a god’s image might be taken out of the cool, humid temple and stood in the hot sun, to suffer along with the disappointed faithful.

 

Religion is universally used as a carrier for moral teachings or other basic principles of the society’s order.  Chinese religion has often been analyzed from this perspective (A. Wolf 1974).  It is not adequate to provide simple equations of Chinese society with that of the “other world,” since, at the very least, there is much slippage; the “other world” still reflects Qing imperial reality, not the state organization of  Communism.  Durkheim works at a broader level; people inject not only their image of society, but all their social concerns and social fears, into their beliefs about supernaturals.  Symbols become “multivocal” and complex (Sangren 1987; von Glahn 2004:8-9).  Actual religious practice draws on a range of meanings and ideologies, usually in the service of some immediate practical end.  However, the whole framework—the belief system, the symbols that express it, the practice that uses these symbols in ordinary life—is a social representation system, and cannot be understood any other way.

Traditional spoken Cantonese has no word equivalent to the English word “religion.”  The term “religion” in standard anthropological usage refers to the social construction of reverential belief in supernatural entities:  spirits, gods, ancestors, etc.  Religion is, by definition, a structured cultural system.  It may be loosely structured and individually interpreted, but it does not include purely idiosyncratic spiritual views.

The word kaau (jiao), “teaching,” is often translated as “religion,” but actually it refers to any organized body of doctrine.  This both excludes the folk religion and includes some philosophies that are not religious in the English-language sense.  In Castle Peak Bay Cantonese, the term kaau was often expanded to tsung kaau, “ancestral teachings.”  These were, focally, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—conveniently combined in the Three Sages Temple, the main temple for land-dwellers on the Castle Peak Bay shore.  It was dedicated to Confucius, Lao Zi, and Buddha, worshiped together.  Confucianism is considered a philosophy, not a religion, in standard academic and elite discourse on China, but at the folk level Confucius was a deity and Confucianism had, at the very least, a religious side, related to ancestor worship.  Christianity was also a kaau.

The religion of the boat people was a variant of Chinese folk religion.  In the past, Chinese folk religion was sometimes mistakenly considered a fusion of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, but it is now widely recognized as a separate thing in itself.  Archaeology has revealed that its roots are in ancient Chinese religion, which long predates any kaau.  The folk religion was a vast congeries of rites and beliefs.  Eventually, it incorporated much from the three kaau, and overlapped with them in many ways, but it had an independent existence with its own rituals and entities.  The kaau were separate from each other and sometimes competing; by contrast, the folk religion paid reverence to leaders of all three.

Some have questioned whether there is a “Chinese religion” at all, given the diversity and lack of definition.  Stephan Feuchtwang titled an article “A Chinese Religion Exists” (Feuchtwang 1991).  A Buddhist might argue against this; for Buddhists, nothing exists.  Most others will be convinced by Feuchtwang, to whom I leave the issue.  Suffice it to say that the boat people saw a single unified body of worship, sharply demarcated from, say, Christianity.

The verb paai begat the verb-object forms paaipaai (“to perform a worshiping act”) and paai san (bai shen) “to pay reverence to, or worship, deities.”  Theoretically, living elders can be reverenced, but normally the word in Castle Peak Bay Cantonese referred to sacrifice rites performed for deities and spirits.  Such beings are “supernaturals” in English, but both land and water people of Castle Peak Bay explicitly stated on many occasions that such beings were part of the order of the cosmos just as humans and animals were.  The English word “supernatural” can be used only with the understanding that it covers beings that are “above nature” to the average reader of this book, but not to its subjects.  San (shen) are supernaturals, especially gods, but by inclusion any supernaturals.  They are usually invisible and intangible, but real.  (A few—the sacred fish—are visible and tangible, though perhaps the invisible in-dwelling spirit that makes them sacred is what is really intended by the term.)  They are firmly within the natural order.  In fact, they corresponded closely with the human social order—specifically, the Qing Dynasty social hierarchy.  The Jade Emperor ruled Heaven, and had his ministers and local governors, and so it went, on down to the lowest.

Supernaturals were defined, however, by the paai rite.  Supernaturals differed from ordinary mortals in that they could be reached only through special types of rituals.  These opened communication with the other world, the realm of Heaven and Hell and of ghosts and spirits.

Usually, communication was invoked in order to obtain something, such as curing of illness, good weather, or safe fishing on the stormy sea.  The boat people extended the rule for human society:  dealing with a powerful person or agent necessitates building up relations of good feeling and mutual obligation.  One sacrifices to the gods—giving them food and wealth—so that they will reciprocate by dispensing what they control, especially health and luck.

The worshiper hoped to make the gods sifuk—happy or comfortable—so that they would be disposed to help.  (I rather irreverently titled a paper “The Happy Heavenly Bureaucracy” [Anderson 1972].)  Paai rites defined folk religion; it was the set of activities defined by the need of these rites for opening and maintaining communication.   At least a minimal paai rite—burning three sticks of incense and bowing reverently—had to occur if any contact was to be made and any communication effected.  For important transactions, far more elaborate rites were performed, including sacrifices of many pigs, whole logs of sandalwood, and much else.

“Magic, science and religion” came together in the quest for long life, numinous power, mystic enlightenment, paranormal powers such as invulnerability, and, above all, good fortune.  Fungseui and much of folk medicine (the minor traditions, such as herbs to chase ghosts away) were conspicuous examples of this realm.  Some practices were clearly magical by modern western standards; sympathetic magical practices were typical, such as serving lotus seeds (lin ji, Putonghua lianzi) to encourage the coming of abundant descendents (lin ji).  Few people took this sort of magic seriously.  They were more apt to call it “trivial” or “superstitious” (mixin in Putonghua).  However, it graded upward into serious and frightening rituals like the invulnerability cults.  Some practices were rational and empirical, and thus science-like.  Others were frankly paai.

This realm is abundantly attested in older literature.  One historical maestro of it was Ge Hong, whose writings on immortality and transcendence can be analyzed as religion, science, or magic with equal ease and equal inadequacy (see Campany 2002).  Another was Tao Hongjing, the great polymath of the 6th century, who was far more seriously involved in both science and religion, but who also devoted much of his effort to this intermediate realm.

One is reminded of the endless debates over whether Chinese classical thought—the thought of Confucius, Zhuang Zi, and their contemporaries—was “philosophy” or not.  In fact, it partakes somewhat of philosophy, somewhat of political science, somewhat of descriptive psychology.  By modern western definitions, it is not any of the three; yet, at the same time, it is all of them and more.  Chinese categories of knowing, and especially Chinese knowledge of nonordinary and uncanny matters, do not fit well into western categories.  Trying to make them do so has been the bane of sinology.

 

2

Religion in the sense of paai, and religious space, were rather sharply defined by incense.  Just as the minimal paai focused on burning three incense sticks, any paai performance was spatially defined by the incense smoke.  The sacred zone was established by the aroma, which was pleasing to the gods and necessary to any interaction with them.  In outdoor rites, incense (often, as noted, whole logs of scented wood) was constantly burning, and any ritual regulations were enforced within the area defined by constant scent of the smoke.  The secular world began at the boundary of the smoke pall.

Religious space could be anywhere.  Temples, necessarily on shore, provided the most secure and defined space (see Anderson 1970:168-171 for a detailed description of temples in the area).  The major temple for the boat people was that of the goddess Tin Hau (T’in Hau, Tian Hou, “Heavenly Queen,” known also as Ma Tsou, Putonghua Ma Zu).  This temple was in a relatively unpopulated area just under Castle Peak.  In 1965, a more venerable image of Tin Hau was brought from China by boat refugees.  This image remained on the large boat of the refugee family until a small temple was built for her; this temple was a second focus of the cult as of 1974-75.  The land-dwellers had other, quite different temples, including the Three Sages Temple noted above.  There was also a Taoist temple of the formal Taoist religion—the Tou kaau (Dao jiao)—near the Bay, but it appealed to an educated, urban clientele, and had virtually nothing to do with Bay social life.

Other defined religious spaces were small and humble.  On shore were small shrines on and near piers, wells, rocks, large trees, and other landmarks.  More important were the tiny but vital religious spaces on the boats themselves.  These consisted of the shrine of the Bow Spirit—the boat’s tutelary deity—in the bow, the Sky God (t’in san, who is in charge of weather) at the foot of the main mast, the shrine of the Sea Surface Spirit at the stern, and the boat’s main family shrine in the cabin.  Of this more will be said later.  In addition to these, at New Year, firecrackers were fired from the main masts, and red paper strips (for luck) were affixed to the stern of the boat.  The entire boat was thus guarded by strategically placed shrines.

 

In looking over the record of religion in Castle Peak Bay, one is first struck by the sheer extent of it.  About a fourth of my field notes are descriptions of religious beliefs and ceremonies.  Religion took an enormous percentage of time, money, and effort.  Following orthodox traditions of thought in anthropology, I attribute this to two things:  the great uncertaintly of life and wealth, leading to a need to assert control (Malinowski 1948); and the great difficulty in building community, leading to a need to invest heavily in the Durkheimian construction of society through collective representation.

Indeed, religion at Castle Peak Bay fit perfectly with Durkheim’s view of religion as the collective representation of the community (Durkheim 1995, French orig. 1912).  More literally and directly than most cultures’ lists of supernaturals, China’s heavenly bureaucracy mirrors the earthly one.  The major difference is that the heavenly one never faced the depressing and “disenchanting” (cf. Weber 1950) political turmoil of modernity; it retained the beauty, splendor and glory of an idealized Qing Dynasty imperial system.  It had its emperor, officials, and ordinary citizens.  However, it was more perfect, more wondrous, more numinous than anything on earth.  Its beings had special powers, fantastic appearances, mysterious natures.  It worked in strange ways, as befitted a world with more power and more access to knowledge than ours.  Yet, in the end, it was definitely a Chinese imperial order.  It differed from the earthly one primarily in having the special traits it needed to carry out its different mission.

This mission consisted of controlling those matters that we on earth cannot control, such as weather, illness, and fate.  We humans control worship rites and the goods they provide, through paai rites, to the supernaturals:  incense, food, and paper representations of all sorts of worldly material items.  The paper goods, when burned, turn into the real things in the other world.  Our earthly role in religion is to provide these things, in a reverent and structured context, for being who will, in return, be “comfortable” enough to want to provide us with good weather, good health and good luck.

The whole system was structured down to the last detail—a Lévi-Straussian dream.  This was a realm of Castle Peak Bay culture in which structuralism was particularly valuable as a way of looking at a domain.  Yet, as in other realms, structure was dynamic.  It was constantly re-negotiated and re-created by practice.

Everyday worship forms varied little between individuals or households.  For instance, everyone burned incense sticks at morning and night to the protectors of their boats or houses.  The differences became more and more apparent as rites became more spectacular.  No two weddings were alike, because of different personalities involved and differential borrowing of western customs.  No two demon-quelling ceremonies were alike, because the demons differed—or, in outsider view, the demon-haunted people and their circumstances differed.  No two spirit-medium sessions were alike, because the questions differed according to the needs of the petitioners.

The degree of structuration of particular religious rituals varied.  The great Tin Hau ceremonies, which involved tightly coordinated effort by thousands of people, were subject to countless rules, but were never the same across time and place.  At the opposite end of the spectrum of complexity were consultations by individuals with spirit mediums.  These too had tight rules, but many fewer of them.  The dynamics of the people involved, and the nature of the requests, made every consultation a different case.  Consulting with a self-admitted master of evil powers about a bewitchment was by no means similar to consultation with a worship-woman about a son’s failure in school, let alone consulting Tin Hau—in the form of a possessed fisherman at the great Tin Hau Day rite—about ill luck in the family.

 

The logical place to begin an account of Castle Peak Bay religion is with the most stable and fixed structural order: the classes of the inhabitants of the other world.

The supernaturals recognized in folk religion were many and various.  Proverbially, Chinese folk religion recognizes “gods, ghosts and ancestors” (A. Wolf 1978).  The truth, for the boat people, was more complex.

The term san, often translated “gods” in English, covered beings that were relatively powerful, at least potentially benevolent, and willing to respond to paai by broad classes of people.  At the top of the hierarchy of san was the Jade Emperor, the Emperor of Heaven, equated with the North Star (and thus locally known as pak tai, “North Emperor”; he is called Zhen Wu in some parts of China; see von Glahn 2004, esp. 157-161; his elevation seems to be a Song contribution).  The Jade Emperor was the imperial dynast.  He was worshiped in a huge old temple on Cheung Chau Island, but he was not of much note at Castle Peak.  Under him were various courtiers and officials.

Locality spirits, t’ou tei (tudi, “earth locality [spirits],” often miscalled “earth gods”), corresponded to governors of particular places, and patron deities corresponded to heads of particular communities. T’ou tei kung  (Lord of the Earth) was the “earth god”—the god of the whole world as a location.  Under him were local t’ou tei (kung), who ranged from gods of provinces and districts down to the little locality spirits worshiped in tiny roadside shrines.  Often these shrines contained phallic stones (natural or roughly carved), which were once described to me as the “airports” of the t’ou tei.  He would enter and inhabit the local stone when visiting his territory.  Large, strangely-shaped rocks and trees were homes of powerful t’ou tei, showing it by their odd forms, created—the believers said—by roiling and powerful flows of qi.  Thus these natural features were worshiped with incense morning and night and frequent offerings of tea and wine.

There were also gods of particular communities and occupations.  Most important among these, to the fishermen, was Tin Hau.  A separate and self-contained hierarchy was comprised of san for particular locations.  Tin Hau was not only patroness of fishermen in general; she was the specific patron of Castle Peak’s boat community.  Hau Wong Ye (“Marquis King Father,” the deified uncle of the last boy-emperors of Sung) was the parton of Tai O, where—according to highly dubious local tradition—he had fled from the Mongols with the last fated lad.  Hung Sing (“Great Sage”) was worshiped in some places, and reportedly was the principal patron of Shanam, up the estuary (see Burkhardt 1:19-23).  A god named Taam Kung received occasional reverence, being useful in sending good weather.

The boat people also revered the deities more popular among local land-dwellers, especially Kun Yam (Kuan Yin, the Buddhist “Goddess of Mercy”).  She was the most popular san, overall, in the area, addressed—especially by women—when any mercy, compassion, or aid was needed.  Boat people went far afield to her temples, especially the huge one in Shau Kei Wan on Hong Kong Island.  She often possessed spirit mediums.

Next most commonly seen was Kuan Kung, the former general under Lau Pei (Putonghua Liu Bei) in the 3rd Century.  Kuan Kung is one of the best-known Chinese san; his loyalty made him a symbol of fidelity, and thus he evolved into a patron of businesses, which—ideally!—rely on honesty and trust.  (It also made him a patron of soldiers, but, pace a classic mistake in western literature, he is not the “God of War.”)  Essentially all businesses, no matter how tiny, had a shrine with his image in the back of the shop.  Usually, a red bulb illuminated his ruddy features and scarlet and gold robes.  No san is more conspicuously associated with the color of blood, life, strength, and activity.  He was sometimes shown with his comrades Lau Pei and Cheng Fei (Jiang Fei); they are the Three Loyal Worthies.

There were innumerable other gods, but very few of them were important. Yama, the (originally Buddhist) King of Hell, was among the important ones, since he controlled the destiny of the sinful.  He was wined and dined at his festival, in hopes that he would relent and release one’s family’s black sheep from his punitive clutches.  The three Door Guards were pasted anew—in paper form—on every set of house doors, at the New Year.  Na Ja (Nazha), the Firewheel Prince, a possessing spirit of the most wild and disturbed spirit mediums, was, like Kuan Yin, a Buddhist borrowing.  The Kitchen God was of little note to the boat people, who had no real kitchens, but was worshiped in the stove (or equivalent) by land-dwellers.  The heroes of the famous Buddhist tale told in the novel The Journey to the West (Yu 1977-1983), Monkey and his merry crew, got attention at major festivals.  Countless other san existed in Chinese worship, but the boat people rarely considered them.

The Sky Spirit or Sky God, Sea Surface God (Hoi Hau, Putonghua Hai Ho, “sea mouth”), star gods, and other more strictly Chinese rulers of natural phenomena were also important.  Boats were protected by a Bow Spirit, who was called into the bow of the boat when it was launched; they burned incense to him in the bow.  He was the boat equivalent of the door spirit worshiped by land-dwellers at the right-hand side (as one enters) of the house door.  The Sea Surface God was worshiped at the side of the boat, the Sky Spirit at the mast foot, or, in a mastless boat, the inside wall of the cabin.  The Sky Spirit watches over the real sky, not Heaven.  These were, conceptually, very different places, though the word t’in was used for both.

Boats also had shrines in protected places—deep in the cabin, usually—where Tin Hau, Kun Yam, and other deities were worshiped.  Confucius, Lao Zi, the Buddha, and—for Christian boat people—Jesus, Mary, and God the Father were often among those present.  The few Christians simply added these last to their collections of san, and were quite mystified when Western missionaries objected. Christianity had come to Castle Peak, but the few missionaries in the area were not liked or trusted; they were considered an impoverished and foolish segment of the hated colonial rule.  They were sometimes even said to be people exiled from their homelands.  Christian converts were few, and those we talked to were more interested in free medical care and other aid than in doctrine.  Indeed, they kept images of ancestors and gods on their boats, adding images of Jesus and Mary.  When the missionaries objected, the boat-dwellers replied:  “But, they are all good people, aren’t they?”

At the stern of the boat were gold-flecked red papers, which warded away bad spirits, and sometimes a shrine as well.   The boat was thus defended on all sides from evil.

Some san had always been san, including the Jade Emperor and the t’ou tei spirits.  Others were deified humans.  Tin Hau was one of these; she had been a Sung Dynasty fisherman’s daughter who saved her father and brothers, and later other people, from storms, eventually dying in one of these salvific missions.  (At least that was one common story; several variants could be heard; see Burckhardt 1953-1958, von Glahn 2004:174).  Her festival day was the 23rd of the 3rd lunar month.  This rivalled Chinese New Year as the major festival at Castle Peak.  At least 100,000 persons were in the bay for the 1966 Tin Hau festival (see below).  Her cult is extremely popular throughout southeast China—she is the most popular deity in Taiwan, for instance.  Kuan Kung and Hau Wong Ye were other former humans.  The omnipresent door gods, posted on the two leaves of the front door and on the back door, had been the bodyguards of the great second emperor of Tang, who killed his father and brothers in a palace coup and then lived in terrror of their ghosts.  His bodyguards protected him, and came thus to be the guards of houses forever after.  Many other such saintly figures were known in local stories.

Two quite different types of patron deity reveal themselves here.  The t’ou tei are patrons of an actual area—a geographic entity.  By contrast, guardian gods like Tin Hau and Hau Wong Ye are patrons of a social group—in these cases, the boat people of Castle Peak Bay and of Tai O.  The land people there had different patrons (the Three Sages and the god Kuan Tai, respectively).   These latter have helpers; the Kuan Tai temple at Tai O had a Tin Hau image in a side alcove, showing, among other things, the unusual social closeness of land and boat people in that harmonious village.

Second in importance after san were tsou sin or tsou tsung:  ancestors.  These differed from san in that they had been ordinary people, and thus were worshiped only by their families.  For the land people, who had huge and ramified lineages, all ancestors in the lineage were worshiped collectively and sometimes separately.  These ancestors were worshiped in the form of tablets bearing the name (and if possible the photograph) of the deceased.  Ideally, these would be stored in the great ancestral halls that formed the centers of the old lineage villages of the New Territories.  Lineages without the money and space to build lineage halls rented rooms or corners in local temples.

The boat people, on the other hand, worshiped their immediate family ancestors for about five generations—in practice, until no one could remember anyone who had known them in life.  They were then “sent to the sky,” by ritual burning of their images or tablets.  Among the land people, individual families within lineages did the same with their household tablets, but then their ancestors were still available for reverence, as tablets in the lineage hall or local temple.  The boat people, lacking lineages and halls, forgot their sky-sent dead forever.  Among fishermen in Malaya, we found the same contrast:  those who maintained lineage ties could travel to a lineage hall, but those without ties sent their ancestors to the sky after four or five generations.

Being almost all nonliterate, the boat people usually had small images rather than tablets.  Particularly characteristic were the images of children who died young; the boys rode tigers, the girls rode white cranes.  (If the family uses ancestor tablets instead of images, the children’s faces were painted on the tablets, instead of names.) The land people had no such commemoration of young children, since such children contributed nothing to lineage continuity.  They found the boat images uncanny and a bit disturbing.

The ancestors worshiped in these rites were the more ethereal, heaven-related components of the human soul, the uan (hun).  The soul has several components, which cluster into the ethereal uan and the earthly p’ak.  These soul-terms have been aptly translated as “cloudsoul” and “whitesoul” respectively (Bokenkamp 1997); the words are homonyms of, and probably cognates of, words for “cloudy” and “white.”  Cloudsouls and whitesouls had subdivisions or parts, about which no one was clear.  In practice, they were treated as units.  The cloudsoul goes to Heaven at death, where it is judged.  If reasonably good, it becomes a citizen of Heaven.  If bad, it is sent to Yama’s care for a purgatory period, or even for all time.  The whitesoul stays with the body, and slowly decays with it.  As the uan was worshiped on the house altar (and, for land people, in the ancestral hall), so the p’ak received food, clothing, and graveside rites, especially on the third day of the third lunar month, the Clear and Bright Day.  On that festal spring occasion, those who could do so would visit ancestral graves and perform major sacrifice rites there.  They would then hold a picnic to consume the earthly remains of the sacrificed foods and liquors.

Components of the souls can get displaced from the body during life, thus causing blackouts, “blanking” on exams, and the like.  A spirit medium may need to invoke a spirit to recover such a missing soul-piece.  Many individuals knew only that a deceased person became an ancestor but also stayed in the grave or became a ghost.

The term kuai (kuei) included both ghosts and demons.  Ghosts were the p’ak of humans who had died unnaturally or violently, or whose bodies had not been properly buried.  (The equivalent shades of those who died peacefully stayed with the body.  There was some disagreement as to just which components of the overall soul became the ghost.)   Of particular concern to the boat community were the ghosts of those lost at sea.

During 1965-66, a mentally ill young fisherman leaped overboard and was lost.  His father, who should have been responsible for him (and who was also somewhat deranged), became more and more depressed, and eventually threw himself overboard at the same spot.  This father’s elder brother (the next up the chain of responsibility) then held a major and very expensive ritual, with Taoist officiants, to placate the ghosts, since he felt them pulling him down in turn.  These ghosts were particularly fearful since they were suicides, and drowned, and lost—any one of which three conditions would have rendered them extremely dangerous, especially to family members in positions that made them ritually responsible.

Similarly, a young wife tormented by her mother-in-law could threaten (and, very rarely, actually commit) suicide; such a suicide was a “wronged ghost,” and would follow the mother-in-law and hound her to madness and death.  This was taken very seriously, and was a major sanction.  Not only did mothers-in-law genuinely fear this, but for a wife to make such a serious threat would alert the whole extended family—and, inevitably, the whole neighborhood—to her problems.  This led to pressure on the mother-in-law to be more merciful.  This dynamic is known throughout much of China.

Many demons were of obscure origin, and may or may not have been ghosts; some were ghosts or spirits of nonhuman presences.  Animals and even inanimate objects could have ghosts.

In addition to these “gods, ghosts and ancestors,” there were many spirit beings that were harder to classify.  Dragons of many species had a role in controlling rain and storms, and thus were feared.  There were also several species of san yu, “sacred fish” (see below; also Anderson 1970, 1972).

These various dragons and fish were not focal san, because they were not conscious human-like beings.  They exercised their powers naturally, not by conscious will.  The status of the indwelling spirits of trees and rocks was more ambiguous.  Such spirits had some power, but, again, were not usually thought to have the full human-like will and agency of san.  The dragons and tigers that dwell in hills, according to fungseui (fengshui), had this same character.  They worked not through deliberate agency but through natural if subtle qualities; how much actual intention they had was debatable.

There were also completely disembodied supernatural forces.  One was ling “numinous force,” which inhered in spirit-medium equipment, temples, and other religiously charged inanimate objects, and also in natural forces.  Another was disembodied evil (ch’e or ch’ei in Cantonese).  This was a force that could be controlled by witches.  There were suspected to be other, less-known forces.  Hei, the famous qi, “breath, energy, vital force,” which seems supernatural to the Westerner, was seen as a purely natural force, and thus a different sort of energy.

Finally, as a common proverb held, “even the gods are subject to fate.”  Fate, meng (ming), was the ultimate determiner of all things.  There were various types of fate. Individuals had a particular fate assigned to them; some people, for instance, were fated to have a “hard” (ngang), bitter, aggressive nature, while others were fated to be gentle.   Major natural forces, from typhoons to the cosmos itself, were ultimately in the hands of fate.  And the proverb meant what it said:  the gods, even the Jade Emperor, could go only so far in overriding set fates.  Fate had a course of its own, incomprehensible and mysterious.  One could always seek to know it, via spirit mediums or predictive texts such as the Chinese almanac, but knowledge was always cloudy and imperfect.  It required interpretation by experts, and everyone knew they were often wrong.

Interestingly, the above structure is almost exactly the same as that described by Richard von Glahn (2004, esp.164-168) as originating in a major reorganization of religious cults the Song Dynasty.  Many paragraphs of von Glahn’s account of the new Song organization could be simply carried over without change as descriptions of reality in the 1960s and 1970s at Castle Peak Bay.  The relationships of Confucianism with Daoism and Buddhism, the hierarchic organization of tudi spirits, and the relations of demon-quellers and their demons are particularly noteworthy examples.

 

3

A religious rite required three kinds of people:  those who wanted to communicate with the gods or spirits; the gods or spirits themselves; and the religious functionaries who managed the communication process.  These last were a diverse lot.

Most prestigious, but least involved in the lives of ordinary people, were the priests of the major Taoist and Buddhist temple complexes of the area.  These highly respected people dealt largely with urban elites who visited the temples.  The boat people hardly ever saw them.

Much more visible and relevant to ordinary lives were the caretakers of the local temples, notably the Three Sages Temple on the main waterfront and the Tin Hau temple across the bay from it.  In the late 1960s, a new Tin Hau temple was built near the Three Sages Temple, providing three main temples.  There were also several minor shrines without permanent staff.

A temple caretaker’s main job was to guard, clean, and maintain the temple.  Often, he transformed it into a small local art museum, arranging the various paintings and religious sculptures that were donated from time to time by worshipers.  This was common in urban areas, but rare in isolated and impoverished Castle Peak.  He maintained the ancestor tablets of land people’s lineages that had no ancestor halls and used the temple as a virtual hall.

He also cast lots.  This involved throwing two comma-shaped blocks of wood.  When they came up favorable, he would shake, in a cup, several slips of wood with fortunes written on them.  Eventually one would work its way up, projecting above the others.  This would convey the fortune of the client.  The fortunes on the slips were written in cryptic and ambiguous style.  The caretaker’s job was to interpret.  He did this very freely, using his knowledge of the client’s actual problem and situation.  Thus, in reality, the slip merely prompted the caretaker to give his own advice.

Another major category comprised the naam mo yan, “chanting people.”  Their name comes from the Buddhist mantra nam mo o mi to fat—though in fact none of the nam mo yan were Buddhist, nor did they normally chant Buddhist mantras.  (See J. Watson 2004c; he uses the slangier term naam mo lou, “chanting guys.”)  These came in two sorts.  One was the local folk-level Taoist priesthood, the tou si (dao shi, “Taoist teachers”).  They were members of more or less organized Taoist orders (“red hat” or “black hat,” usually the latter).  They held spectacular ceremonies, usually to exorcise kuai.  Their robes were vividly colored: red and black with gold and green designs.  They performed very loudly on gongs, woodblocks, drums, cymbals, and sona (a shawm, the “Chinese oboe”), alternating this with loud chanting.  Some of the ceremonies involved dramatic rites, such as slitting a rooster’s comb, whirling the unfortunate bird around to drive away demons with its powerful blood-spray, and then sacrificing it.   These Daoists were apparently members of one of the more obscure and irregular branches of the Mao Shan tradition; they had little in common with the elite Daoists of the Castle Peak temple.  Daoism, like Buddhism, is a highly diverse religion, with many sects and levels (see Bokenkamp 1997).

More common were the naam mo yan who worked in the large barnlike establishments known as paper-goods stores.  The main business of these shops was selling religious goods:  incense sticks, red candles, paper representations of money and wealth, and the ever-present firecrackers that made even the smallest ritual audible all the way to Heaven.  However, the paper-shop men (all employees were male) doubled as chanters and spirit mediums.  As chanters, they were the ordinary staff of weddings, funerals, boat-launching rituals, shop-opening celebrations, and all the other daily events that brought color and excitement to the waterfront.  Red was the dominant color.  I often reflected that Stendhal’s color system was reversed here:  “the red” was the religious sphere, “the black” was the ordinary one of the black cotton clothes and the dark wood tones of boats and buildings.  There were three shops on the waterfront, and several more not far away.

The chanting men had to know a vast range of folk chants, spells, invocations, and other texts.   Some of these came from the Daoist canon; others, probably most, were unrecorded and are probably now lost forever.  The chanters knew how to make the huge and complex paper and foil constructions that were obligatory for all major ceremonies.  They also had to put on really artistic performances; otherwise the gods would not be sifuk.

Their activities bring us to spirit mediumship.  Spirit mediums are well known in China (especially full accounts are found in de Groot 1892-1910 and Elliott 1955; see also Potter 1978, Weller 1987, and almost any older ethnography of China).  Spirit mediumship is a worldwide phenomenon, much studied by anthropologists (there are literally thousands of references; see e.g. Sharp 1993.)   As elsewhere, a medium’s role is to put themselves into a trance state, in which he or she receives a spirit from the Other World.  This spirit speaks through the medium’s mouth, writes through his or her hands, dances and sings and acts with the medium’s body.  The medium’s own person is absent or cryptic during this séance, and the medium reports no memory of the event after the spirit leaves.  At Castle Peak Bay, trance was achieved through ritual and self-hypnotic techniques:  dancing, hyperventilating, gazing fixedly at a point of light, chanting, and the like.

The paper-goods stores each had a spirit medium.  These men had very modest power, and used their abilities to call up rather low-level spirits for minor purposes.  I watched as a woman called up her dead grandmother to ask for a cure for a sick child.  The medium quickly went into apparent trance, spoke with an old woman’s voice, and produced a perfectly good—and conventional—symptomatic remedy.  I was once present when a medium was possessed by an English-speaking spirit.  I was asked to translate, but the man was producing pure glossolalia.  I explained that “it was a different dialect of English from mine,” and everyone was satisfied.

More serious spirit work involved involved sing kung (“awakening dukes” or “star dukes”; usually male) and paai san p’o (“worshiping women,” the female counterpart).  These were older men and women calling up fairly minor spirits for small fees.  One older lady would dance and do Qi Gong in a dynamic, light, graceful manner, sustaining it for many minutes; she claimed she could not do this much forceful activity when not possessed, but she was in fact very light and active at all times.  She called up ancestors, returned soul-components scared out of child minds by hard schoolwork, told fortunes, and did minor curing.  Sing kung and paai san p’o usually served in such minor curing roles, finding lost objects, and locating strayed persons.  They did not practice black magic or officiate at ceremonies.

The really serious spirit work was done by mou si (wu shi, “shaman masters”)[7].  Very few of these individuals operated in or near Castle Peak, and those few were viewed with fear and awe.  The most prominent of these was an older fisherman who became possessed by Tin Hau every year on her festival day.  He went into a trance at dawn and stayed in it till night, speaking in a feminine voice and acting like an elite woman of olden times.  During this time he had the needle-sharp point of a long magical iron stuck through his cheek; sometimes he had one through each cheek.  The iron was heavy, and was carried by several men when the mou si moved.  The mou si spent most of the day slitting his tongue and writing charms with the blood on yellow paper; this was to be burned and the ashes drunk with herbal medical tea.  Hundreds of people lined up for this curing service. The mou si allegedly felt no pain and showed no scarring.  He did, however, visibly wince when the iron was moved.

Other mou si included two—a man and a woman, not related—who were known for black magic, and made no secret of their belief in their ability to curse people.  They had started falling into trances spontaneously in childhood.  Both appeared to us to be frankly paranoid schizophrenic; they were unable to live normal lives, and were cared for by their families.  They spent their time communing with dark forces, including some highly idiosyncratic spirits.  The woman had as one familiar the “Heavenly Police Commissioner,” worshiped in the form of a small wooden sculpture of a British policeman in shorts and pith helmet.

Mou si were, in general, supposed to be “hard” (ngang) persons, able to control ch’e (evil force; see above).  Their power depended on the san preserving the mou si’s sin kuat (“immortal bone” or “fairy bone”; see Potter 1978).  If this is lost, the mou si would die.  Mou si are apt to die early in any case.  Mou si were regarded as extremely powerful, being able to take soul journeys (like Tungus and Mongol shamans), make themselves and others invulnerable, send good or evil onto others, control the behavior of women and children, and make themselves invisible.  However, they were not genuinely terrifying, nor were they involved in seriously problematic behavior, as they sometimes are in Penang, Malaysia (Anderson and Anderson 1978; DeBernardi 2004), and elsewhere.  They were rather few and weak at Castle Peak Bay, with little of the power they have in the Chinese communities of Malaysia and of Singapore (Elliott 1955).

Spirit mediums have long been regarded as uncanny and disturbing characters in China.  Donald Sutton (2004) has recently reviewed a large literature on this topic, especially the decline of spirit mediums in status after Yuan Dynasty times.  He finds exactly what we found at Castle Peak:  spirit mediums were regarded as “wild,” unregulated, outside the bounds of ordinary hierarchic society.  He points out that a few elite scholars really doubted their abilities, but most saw their abilities as real enough; the problem was that they were free, wild spirits, not subject to the tight control of the elites and of elite ritual and religious culture.  All his conclusions fit perfectly with what we heard from relatively high-status individuals on the waterfront.  Ordinary people, however, respected the spirit mediums, feared them, and saw them as necessary.  In spite of elite opposition, spirit mediums flourished in Hong Kong, as in Malaysia and Singapore and most other well-studied Chinese areas.

Thus, the traditional religious practitioners in the area were diverse, but classified into a neat order, ranked in prestige (temple priests first) and in power (mou si first).  They formed a texture of control, management, and soliciting of powerful unseen forces.

 

4

People must supplicate, wine, and dine the officials of the other world, and give them paper imitations of money, clothes, houses, and other wealth goods.  These paper items are burned and thus sent to the Sky; the food and wine are real, but the san and kuai consume only the spirit, while the worshipers consume the material remainder.

Minor magic attempted to insure against fate.  Boats often grew medicinal herbs in the stern area, and some of these plants were there to keep away kuai.  Children wore minature life-preservers, old copper cash, sea horse eyes, and other charms.  Everyone who could afford a jade bracelet wore one, and those who could not afford one often wore a glass or soft-stone copy.  Everyone knew stories of people who had fallen and broken the jade bracelet instead of an arm bone.  Our old friend Leung Taai had experienced this himself.

Humans and supernaturals (to use the western term) are complementary.  Humans can supply food and wealth goods, and entertain the supernaturals with festivals including dances, music, and Chinese operas.  Supernaturals have control over the things that humans do not control:  luck, weather, getting sick, getting a good haul of fish.  Humans must maintain an ongoing warm relationship; the gods should stay “contented.”  If they are not, they will not send good, and may even send evil.  Life’s dramatically unexpected bad fates, such as losing a man overboard in a typhoon, result from this.  However, just as people do not always completely control food and paper wealth, so the gods do not fully control fate, as we have seen.  Moreover, people, fate, and gods all have some share in managing the world.  People can live healthy lifestyles, and thus resist or partially resist any illness that fate or the gods throw at them.  Readers of imperial Chinese texts will know that Chinese officials were supposed, at least by the “common people,” to have some power over winds, waters, crocodiles, and other phenomena.  Imperial officials were expected to read edicts to locusts or rain-dragons to bring successful protection to crops.

Thus the supernaturals were far from all-powerful.  The boat people thus viewed them with less than total awe or reverence.  Humans, for their part, had some power over things usually in the spirits’ realm.  Religion was rather pragmatic—serious, but not abject or terrifying.  People had to be self-reliant; they could not entrust themselves to an Almighty.  The gods might shower favor—the man who made $30,000 HK in one net-cast went to the Tin Hau temple to thank her—but the world was always an unpredictable place.  (On fatalism and its limits in Chinese thought, see Eberhard 1966.)

Fishermen everywhere engage in magic and religion, because of the danger of their occupation.  Malinowski (1948) noted that lagoon fishing, which is safe, had less magic associated with it than the dangerous open-sea fishery.  The boat people, fishing rough and treacherous waters, secured themselves as best they could.  They were, however, a hard-headed and pragmatic group.  They were certainly no more religious than people I have fished with in other seas, including California’s.

 

5

All this knowledge came to a focus in the actual paai rites—the practice of religion.  Rites established, maintained, or re-established good relations with the supernaturals.  They also kept away evil beings.

Simplest and most universal was a small rite, universally practiced at dawn and dusk.  The female head of household, or designated replacement (usually a daughter or daughter-in-law), burned incense at each household shrine.  She made a circuit; at each ritual point, she lit three sticks of incense, bowed with them toward the shrine, and placed them below it to provide fragrant smoke[7].

A typical circuit of the boat might begin with the bow, move to the sides and then the mast foot, and end at the household shrine in the cabin.  This corresponded with the land people’s frequent circuit from door guard shrine to main household shrine.

Common for the land people, but much less so for the boat people, was burning a trio of sticks at the local t’ou tei shrine—tree, rock, or small structure.  These often received three tiny cups of tea or Chinese wine in addition to the universal trio of incense sticks.

Above this level were more elaborate offerings, including those that might periodically occur at temples, to insure luck or give thanks for it.  A minimum sacrifice rite—for an ancestor’s birthday, a blessing received from Tin Hau, or the annual day of a minor san—included not only incense, tea, and wine, but minor food offerings.  Oranges were always present, and other citrus might occur, for these native south Chinese fruits have been sacred and ritually necessary for thousands of years in the area.  The bright red-gold color of oranges, and especially of tangerines, symbolizes religion, luck, and good things in Chinese culture, even where traditional culture has faded[7].  Nuts (generally peanuts in the period under consideration, and also often melon seeds) symbolized descendents, especially sons, and thus one tried to provide an abundance of them to the gods and ancestors, in hopes of the implied return gift.  Red jujubes often accompanied these.

Larger rites included rites of passage—marriage and death ceremonies and such lesser rites as birthdays.  Still more impressive, being at community level, were calendric rituals:  New Year, gods’ days, and other festivals.  Another class of rite was apotropaic:  rites to drive away kuai or to atone for mistakes.  This was rare above the family level on the waterfront, but nearby land communities had rituals to sacrifice to the san to get their favor back if a village leader had done wrong, or sacred sites had been cultivated or profaned, or a san had been neglected.  Normally, stages were set up in front of temple doors, facing in, so the main images had a clear line of sight.  Once, on Tin Hau’s day, the opera had inadvertently been located where Tin Hau’s image in the local temple could not see it.  Three leaders of the community died soon afterward—so said local tradition, at least.  The community had to perform a whole new ceremony.

Rites of passage may be said to start with birth, but birth was little noticed.  The baby was too apt to die, or poverty might make the family give it up.  Sheer pain had led China’s ordinary folk to the consoling belief that the soul was not fully assembled until the 49th day—seven times seven days after birth.  Before that, a baby was not really human yet, and infanticide before that time has been called “postnatal abortion” in some of the relevant literature.  At Day 49, the soul was completely formed.  A small family sacrifice rite took place, and the baby was welcomed as a member of the family and the human community.  Thereafter, birthdays were virtually unnoticed, New Year being taken as “everybody’s birthday.”

The most complex and dramatic life-passage rite, by far, was marriage.  Marriages reflected economic situation.  Many occurred in early 1966, a good time following some hard years.  Few took place on our second visit; times had grown thin once more.

No two weddings were alike; families tried to make each one unique and memorable.  However, rules tightly constrained the variation.  A go-between of some sort theoretically arranged the match.  The boat people lacked money or opportunity to hire a professional, and usually used a friend or relative with high status.  Theoretically, matches were arranged by the men in consultation with the go-between.  Actually, the women of a given neighborhood formed a tight network, constantly discussing eligible young people.  They frequently did the real arranging.  Actual matchmaking usually involved much prior discussion by all concerned, climaxing with the mother (or other older female relative) of one party seeking out counterparts in the other party’s family.  They usually arranged a suitable match, involving compatible young persons.  Moreover, the young people themselves had a say in the matter.  Very often, a couple fell in love, or even developed a sexual relationship, and then asked their parents to make the arrangements.  Usually, parents respected this.  The sight-unseen marriages and child marriages that are stock themes in foreign writings on China were rare indeed on the water.

A rapidly increasing series of events, visits, and exchanges preceded the wedding.  Ritual gifts flowed back and forth (see Yan 1996 on gift-giving in a north Chinese community).  Among the boat people, the groom’s family was expected to contribute as much as, or more than, the bride’s.  This seems to be a genuine boat-dwellers’ cultural trait; it was noted by Wu for the Guangzhou boat community in the 1920s and 1930s (Wu 1937).  It stood in sharp contrast to the land people, for whom bridal dowry was all-important, with the result that girls were a drain on the family, and therefore disfavored (see Croll 2000).  Complicated rules governed the disposal of the gifts; the couple got much of it, their families got some.  In practice, this was a matter for protracted negotiations.  At least part of the reason for the difference between boat and land customs was the fact that the bride was not leaving her lineage and family forever; first, she had no lineage to leave, and, second, she was rarely moving more than a few boats away.  She would be back for visits—sometimes daily ones.  Even moving to a different community did not cut her off, since the boat people were constantly plying their craft back and forth.

Arrangements being done, a date was set, in consultation with the almanac and the temple experts.  The almanac may provide more pretext or excuse than real advice (Eberhard 1963).  More serious was the need to set the date in fall or winter, when fish are running, the weather cool, and typhoons unlikely.

Senior men of the families officiated at a wedding, along with their wives and the chanters from a local paper-goods store.  The bride and groom received attention, but focus of the actual ceremony went to the senior relatives, because marriage cemented two families—not just two persons.

A wedding took three days.  (Sometimes, the poor shortened it to two.)  The first day was spent in preparations.  The groom and his family readied the ceremonial arrangements and gifts for the bride’s family.  The latter readied their “counter-prestations” (Mauss 1990) and devoted as much attention to the bride’s dress and makeup as families do elsewhere in the world.  Finally, on the first night, the chanters would come.  The second day began with gifts from the groom’s family to the bride’s, brought by the groom’s brothers and friends..  The bride spent the morning with her family, saying goodbye.  Traditionally—as at Tai O in 1965-66—she, her mother, and other close women relatives sang long improvised chants to each other.  These were extremely emotional and moving.  Long-suppressed feelings came out in full force.  The performances were musically superb and were heart-wringing.  The songs concerned family closeness, griefs, hurts long hidden in silence, and above all close familial love.  These sessions certainly destroy any lingering credibility in the classic colonialist stereotype of the “unfeeling” or “impassive” Chinese.  (On these laments, see the excellent studies by Blake 1978 and R. Watson 2004.)

At some point in all this, the gifts would arrive from the groom’s family.  Usually some ritual foods such as peanuts and oranges were included, as well as more valuable goods.  Preparation started for the main event, the second-night celebration.

This feast varied from strictly religious observances to huge feasts with fifteen courses (many of them sea food) and hired bands.  No two second-night celebrations were alike; creativity reigned.  The bride wore a red dress, symbolic of fertility and life.  A few well-to-do families were beginning to use western-style white lacy gowns for part of the ceremony, soon changing back to the safe red to make sure of good fortune.  (Gowns of white, which is the color of death in China, were still a matter of intense discomfort for older guests.)  The groom dressed in best-quality black clothing of traditional boat style.  At this point or earlier, he took a new name; this was a religious necessity.  Feasts typically included symbolic foods, such as long noodles for long life.  Foods of ritual sacrifice, notably chicken, duck, and roast pig, were requisite.  Lotus rhizomes were boiled to develop their sticky, glutinous character; then, during the feast, someone would break a rhizome and pull the two pieces apart, to show how they remained connected by the sticky bands, “just as the couple will stick together no matter how much they may be pulled apart!”  Many foods concerned sons, or descendents in general.  Thus one might serve duck eggs for fertility, lotus seeds for abundant descendents, taro leaves for the same reason (many grow from one root), big tubers so the sons would grow big,  pig intestines for cleverness.  At this feast or at some other point on the second day, guests, relatives, and friends were expected to contribute “red packets,” red envelopes containing presents of money.  The money had to be in multiples of two (two dollars or twenty or two hundred were especially favored).  Such packets were a feature of all major ceremonial occasions, from birthdays to New Year.

On the third day, the bridge goes to her new home, atfter a long morning of farewell festivities at her own parents’.  Her final gifts and dowry come with her or close behind her.  Then comes the final feast.  Ceremonies end in time for food in late afternoon.  As usual, the women and children eat first, the senior men after them.  Women joke about the advantages of this way of showing respect; it gets them the best food when it is hot.  The senior men get cold leavings.  Women would sometimes allege that this was the intent of the ancients who founded the custom.  The bride hands round tea and wine, getting a small present from each person as she does so.  When everyone is full and happy from alcohol (or at least tea), the entertainment begins.  The heart of this is “playing with the bride.”  She has to sing, perform, answer toasts, and withstand teasing.  This last is usually good-natured, but can be barbed and even vicious.  (This was very well described in Eileen Chang’s novel The Rice-Sprout Song [1955], in the description of a Hong Kong land-dweller wedding).  At a typical boat-dweller wedding, the teasing is thoroughly good-natured, and soon merges into a long night of singing, drinking, talking, and quiet enjoyment.

Two or three days afterward, the couple would return to the bridge’s home with a few last gifts and thank-yous.  The bride would return every few days thereafter for a quick breakfast or friendly visit.  By this time she was thoroughly married, and expected to stick with her husband.  (Calling off the marriage just after it occurred was not unknown, and was accepted.)  But she did not sever ties as thoroughly as land people often did; families remained close.  After all, the marriage had been contracted, more often than not, with an eye to cementing family relationships.  Even a love match created real family ties.

Relations between the bride and her husband’s family were generally good among the boat people, who do not have the lineage-based tensions of the land-dwellers.  However, the husband’s mother inevitably has to adjust to a new situation involving some competition for the man’s support and sympathy (M. Wolf 1968, 1972).  A range of adjustments could be found, from idyllic to seriously dysfunctional (Anderson 1992).

The other major rite of passage was the funeral.  The deceased was washed in water in which pomelo skin had been soaked.  (This was the water one had to “buy”; see Chapter 1.  For this and the whole formal funeral process, far more elaborate than the boat version, see J. Watson 2004d.)   The corpse was then dressed, pillowed in the coffin, covered with a cloth, and combed.  A woman in particular had to be carefully combed and arranged, or she would become a kuai.  Then the descendents worshiped gods and ancestors, with the eldest son officiating, and the chanters from the paper shops providing ritual texts and music.  The coffin lid was nailed on with four nails.  The deceased may lie in state for varying amounts of time, but among the boat people the coffin was very soon borne to the grave.  Among the land people, reburial in a more auspicious site would often follow after some years.  Indeed, the dead might be temporarily buried, then dug up and kept in a large jar until an auspicious site could be found.  The boat people rarely had the opportunity to perform this filial act.

The family dressed in mourning:  unbleached and undyed cloth (off-white) for the closest kin, white for the next, blue and green for collaterals.  They offered food and drink at the grave.  Animals were killed later, and a solemn and often fearful feast took place.

Seven days later, paper clothes and money burned on the grave.  At this time the soul of the dead was being judged in the Court of the Sky, by the sober judge who is shown in every Chinese temple (usually in the process of watching dancing girls—possibly not the most sombre of occupations).  Again the chanting men officiated; the ceremony required seven of them, which meant that two or three shops pooled their manpower.  They held up a red banner with the name of the deceased.  They directed their attention to the “filial piety idea hall,” a tiny shrine set up near the ancestors’ shrine in the boat hold.  Pigs’ heads, indicative of sacrifice, lay before it.  At this time the women began their laments.  These were wild keening, expressive and powerful.  The women improvised the words from traditional formulas that asked the dead why he or she had left, and praying for the soul to return.  These laments came at subsequent commemorations as well.  A major part of boat folk song, they were extremely moving and powerful (see Anderson 1975), with rapid heavy rhythms alternating with long-drawn-out vocal lines.  Like lamentations in many cultures, they were a formalization of weeping sounds and rhythms.  Relatives and friends came with candles and paper goods for offering.  Red packets were not appropriate.

Smaller but similar ceremonies followed this one for six more weeks, until a final sendoff on the 49th day.  As the baby’s soul required seven weeks to assemble, so the soul of the deceased required seven to disperse.  In cool weather, the corpse was not buried until this time, since revival before it was always possible.  A ten-day cycle (memorials at the tenth day up to ten times ten) also existed, but no one seemed to celebrate it in our immediate neighborhood.  After the 49th (or, alternatively, the hundredth) day, mourning went into a lighter grade, but immediate family continued to mourn and hold special memorial ceremonies until the beginning of the third year after death—carrying on a classic Chinese pattern.

A child, especially one dying before the 49th day, was sometimes simply wrapped up and abandoned in a basket on “Little Ghost Island,” a small island in the bay.  This island was carefully avoided by everyone.  Very small children were seen as too young to bury.  Their kuai would haunt the living, however, unless their families properly cared for them.  There they remained, therefore, on the small lovely island, looking out over the bay they had inhabited for their short lives.

Once dead, a family member is an ancestor.  Memorials then shift to the san kung, a family festival held every few years to renew ancestral connections.  This was much more important to land people, with their lineages and lineage halls, than to the boat-dwellers.  The latter had only their family members to maintain, and these received a small, unobtrusive ceremony.

In one full ceremony we observed, chanters and a minor spirit medium came.  Chanting wen ton all night.  A virgin cock was brought, its comb cut by the head chanter, and its blood scattered about periodically to drive off ghosts.  The head chanter also blew consecrated water from his mouth.  The chanters summoned the spirits, then set up a paper model of Yama, and images of Kun Yam and T’in Hau.  The usual paper goods flamed before them.  One less usual paper representation was a horse-and-rider figure, a messenger summoning Yama and his cohorts.  A pole hung with red-painted tin cans guided them to the boat.

The eldest son held a censer for the chanters all night.  The second son lit candles and incense.  The wife of the family head gave a cloth, representing her own family and its contributions.  The chanters read a paper with a list of ancestors; images or tablets of these were touched with consecrated water, to brighten their way in the dark afterworld.  Then the family read out the names of the living.  The spirit medium prayed over a range of feast dishes; these went to Yama and his legions, as well as the ancestors and the chanters’ and medium’s own spirit guides, before being enjoyed by the living.  Finally, at dawn, the suffering rooster was killed, and the ancestors and spirits sent away to the Sky.

 

6

Calendric rites began and climaxed with the great New Year celebration, a ritual that, in those days, united virtually everyone of East Asian background throughout the world.  New Year normally occurred on the second new moon after the winter solstice.

Two to three weeks before the day, the boats stopped fishing.  Not only was this a holiday; there was danger of piracy.  All debts had to be paid by New Year, and desperate debtors resorted to crime, making the last two weeks of the year a dicey time to be alone.  So the boats jammed the harbor, a solid wall of weathered brown timber.  Navigation became difficult.  Shops also began to close; every business was shuttered for the first two or three days of the new year.

Weddings and other celebrations went on everywhere.  Particularly in 1966, the sounds of firecrackers and ceremonial music came every night from some part of the water.  People bought new clothes to wear at the new year.  The new year itself began at 11:00 p.m. with a spectacular firing of firecrackers.  Chains of these, hundreds of feet long, hung from masts and tall buildings.  The noise continued uninterrupted, on all sides, for the rest of the night, and sporadically through the day.  People wandered around, visited, enjoyed themselves, and above all feasted.  Tangerines, the red-gold “lucky” fruit, piled everywhere in vast arrays.  Peach flowers graced the houses and boats of those affluent enough to afford them.  The richest land people had narcissus in pots, as well.  Afternoon was spent nibbling sweets—the new year had to be sweet—and seeds, symbols of abundant descendents.  These formed merely an appetizer for the huge feasts to come, involving whole roast pigs with gold-red sugar glaze, masses of pink buns, chickens and ducks glazed or dyed red, and other foods of the fortunate colors.  These and all the minor accompaniments were washed down with seas of beer and Chinese liquors.  People had to lay down a food reserve, since they could light no fires lit until the end of the third day; food was cold leftovers till then.  (This was all right at Castle Peak Bay—Hong Kong has perhaps the coldest winters of any tropical coastal area in the world—but our experiences in Malaya with long-leftover food were harrowing.)   On the 15th day of the year, a small festival took place, but with little attention.

The next serious festivity, then, was the day of the t’ou tei, on or around the 20th of the first month.  It could involve full-scale Cantonese opera performances, as well as the inevitable firecrackers, incense, and feasting.

This and other sans’-day fairs were largely organized by religious societies, ui (hui “society”).   Von Glahn (2004:168) found cases where the word hui was generalized to mean the god’s day itself; I did not hear this particular metonymy at Castle Peak Bay, but sometimes heard pao so used.  Normally at Castle Peak the days were simply called “gods’ days” or “temple fairs.”  Secular ui were savings-and-loan associations, similar to one found all over the world (e.g. the tontines of Europe and credit rings of Mexico).  Almost all ui, however, were religious.  Religious ones saved and invested to acccumulate money for the big day.  Sometimes this was done by straight savings—a monthly sum pledged and donated.  Other ui loaned out money in rotation, as secular ui did, but charged interest of a few percent, the proceeds going to the fair.  Religious ui often integrated both boat and land people, and thus served as the only significant corporate social bodies that cut across that boundary.  The ui organized the lion dances, operas, major sacrifices, and other performances (I provided much more detail on ui in Anderson 1970b:81-83).

Next on the calendar was a different sort of festival, ch’eng meng (Qing Ming).  This ancient spring festival, on the third day of the third lunar month, commemorated the dead.  Supposedly, it was once a fertility festival, but was later toned down and regulated into a simple visiting of tombs (Eberhard 1958).  Families visited graves and picnicked there, sharing food and the usual accompanying goods to the dead.  The waiting lines at the Kowloon bus stations were a mile long on the day morning, as virtually every urbanite tried to get to family graves.  However, the occasion was not as all-important as in Malaysia, where grief over racist oppression led Chinese to develop a real cult of the dead (Anderson and Anderson 1978).

Then, on the 23rd, came the boat people’s own festival:  the day of T’in Hau.  Castle Peak Bay, with a major temple in 1965 and two after that, was a focus second only to the great temples on Hong Kong Island and at Macau (whose name is A Ma Kau, Ma Tsu’s Temple).  In early 1966 an old fisherman in a huge, majestic, decades-old sailing trawler escaped from Communist China, bringing with him a T’in Hau image over two centuries old, which he spirited away from an ancient temple near Guangzhou.  This image was on his boat for the great festival of 1966, making it—and the whole bay—an unprecedented attraction.  Worshipers soon built a temple for this image, across the bay from the other T’in Hau temple; both survive now, many decades later.  It was on the boat with the venerable image that the mou si described above spent most of the day, writing charms; for the afternoon temple festivities, he threw ritual rice about him, and then moved, with pain and difficulty, to the temple on shore.  Here he stayed, in the dense, blinding incense smoke, writing more charms.  (James Watson [2004e:296] reports that T’in Hau cults in the old lineage villages of the western New Territories lack self-torture and spirit mediumship.  This reveals another major difference from the boat world.)

The day passed with firecrackers, lion dances, and a great deal of miscellaneous “hot noise” (or “heat and noise”; the Chinese term for festive, exciting, noisy activity).  Almost everyone visited the temple and the image boat.  The pier and waterfront were spectacularly ornamented with huge red-and-gold signboards and decorations.  Cantonese operas in a huge temporary opera hall, in front of the T’in Hau temple, blared loud enough to be heard across the bay through the firecracker sound[7].

For days, the paper shops had been working overtime, constructing large frameworks of bamboo and covering them with red paper, foil of all hues, and brilliant decorations in the most vibrant colors.  These they hung with metal rings, papier-mache sculptures, bangles, and live ginger roots.  Finally, they ornamented these with figures of mythic divinities, especially Monkey and his friends.  These objects were ritual creations known as p’au, “cannons” or “rockets.”

The festival climaxed in the afternoon.  A vast crowd gathered at the temple.  Huge logs of sandalwood were burning in great bonfires, scenting the whole shore and thus making it sacred territory for the time.  A tall bamboo platform stood in the middle of the great courtyard before the temple.  Leaders of the temple organization shot rockets from this platform—one after another to the number of sixty.  As these fell to earth, the strongest young men from the T’in Hau uis leaped up to vie for the spent rocket-heads.  Whoever got the first one to fall got the best p’au sculpture, and with it the best of T’in Hau’s blessing and good fortune for himself and his whole ui for the coming year.  He was then disqualified, and the remaining uis’ men leaped up for the next.  A good deal of fighting developed, and police had to intervene several times.  So it went, until the last, most miserably unfortunate ui got its feeble final rocket.  The p’au sculptures—magnificent works of art, built to last but a day—were disassembled at the uis’ subsequent feasts and celebrations.  Parts were auctioned off.  Getting a jade(-like) ring or a ginger root guaranteed that one would have a son that year. Everyone knew of exceptions, but there were always ready explanations for these:  the man wasn’t faithful enough to T’in Hau, the jade was really glass, the p’au was the 58th instead of the first….

The money earned this way—and it was substantial, especially if several couples wanted sons badly—went to fund the next year’s activities.

After the last rocket, as dusk began to fall, everyone dispersed to an evening of feasting and drinking.

The next major occasion on the bay was Taam Kung Day, a major occasion at Taam Kung’s temple on Hong Kong Island, but minor at Castle Peak (see Burkhardt 1953-1958, esp. vol. 1: 19-24 and vol. 3: 155-156).  At a variable time in the fourth month came the Bun Festival of Cheung Chau Island, nearby; this provided huge mountains of buns for the unfortunate dead—lost to pirates or in war.  It drew many visitors from Castle Peak, Cheung Chau being another boat center where many people had relatives.

Then came the Dragon Boat Festival, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.  This centers around boat races in light, thin boats propelled by paddles and energized by drum-beating.  The festival is formally said to commemorate the ancient poet Qu Yuan, who drowned himself to protest bad government, but the people of Castle Peak Bay denied all knowledge of this worthy, and saw the day and its races as purely a matter of placating the dragons and water ghosts.  (This is clearly the real origin of the festival, which once involved human sacrifice; see Eberhard 1958.)  Naturally, the boat people generally win the boat races, which in the main Hong Kong areas involved all ethnic groups—even the Gurkha soldiers and the colonial British.  Waterfront wisdom held that the British usually came to grief, upsetting their craft.

Hau Wong Ye, noted above as the patron of Tai O, was celebrated there on the sixth of the sixth, with a festival that was a much smaller and milder version of T’in Hau’s.

The seventh of the seventh brought unmarried girls out to celebrate the yearly meeting of the Weaving Maid (the star Vega) and the Cowherd Boy (Altair).  These stars are separated by the Sky River (the Milky Way), but every year on this date the Birds of Good Luck (hei tseuk, magpies) fly to the Sky to build a bridge with their wings, and the lovers can meet.  This festival was almost invisible at Castle Peak.  More serious was the Feast of Hungry Ghosts on the 14th of the seventh.  This Buddhist ceremony involved placating the hungry ghosts and other unfortunate spirits—the homeless, the wronged, the drowned, the wandering.  Families and religious groups provided food and goods for them.

The Moon Festival on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month was celebrated with feasts that focused on moon cakes, those round moon-like pastries stuffed with eggs, seeds, sweets, and other fertility symbols.  No one seemed to like them much[7].

Minor details of festivals differ, but much carries over from one to another.  The festivals are great religious structures, constructed not only from visible materials but also from scent, sound, timing, juxtaposition, and flow.  They manipulate and direct emotions, so that they become, at a second remove, huge constructions of emotionality—Durkheim’s intense rituals on a vast scale.  They are assembled from rather simple blocks.

The most basic of these is the paai rite, and the minimal sacrifice, building up from incense to tea to wine to fruit, peanuts, paper goods, and chicken.  In the biggest rites, worshipers offer whole roast pigs, then divide and eat them.  They are covered with a brown sugar glaze that makes them turn red-gold when roasted:  kam jyu yok, “golden pork.”  In all ceremonies, red and gold are stressed, and other brilliant colors complement them.

Silk banners and paper-and-bamboo constructions dominate the festal skyline, and range from small family-level decorations to huge “flower boards” 50 or 60 feet high.

The soundscape is dominated by endless firecrackers, but loud music dominated by gongs and drums drives the lion dances, temple ceremonies, spirit-medium performances, and ghost-expelling rites.  Scent of incense—sometimes whole sandalwood logs burning—defines sacred space and wafts through the whole landscape.  Intense flavors of wine, beer, and festive foods eclipse the bland, crisp flavors of everyday rice and vegetables.  Succulent meat and fat are the foods of a “red time.”

Activities from fighting over p’au to summoning spirits and driving off ghosts are common to most of the bigger festivals of particular gods.  In fact, spirit mediumship seems blind to the particular spirit involved, except for the minor mannerisms of the summoner.  The same questions are asked, the same charms written, the same behaviors invoked.

Each festival has its special traits, and some—such as Ch’ing Ming and “double seven”—are truly distinctive, with little shared above the basic level.  However, in most festivals, a recognizable general flowchart plays itself out with only enough variation to identify the particular san involved.

One festival that sums everything up, and brings everything together, is a world renewal.  Every sixty years, a village must throw a huge festival to renew the cycle—to begin its small world anew.  No such thing happened in Castle Peak, which had no traditional villages dominated by single lineages.   In 1974, Ha Chuen, a small village north of Castle Peak, put on such a fair.  (Actually, Ha Chuen does it every ten years, though I was told this was a special sixty-year rite.)  James Watson was studying Ha Chuen at the time, and gives a wonderful account of this 1974 fair, which I too attended (J. Watson 2004a).  It lasted over a week, after a full year of work to prepare the village and the offerings.  Huge red constructions, visible for a mile around, dominated the skyline.  Lion dances, spirit medium performances, and sacrifice rites went on day after day.  Mounds of pink-dyed buns reached high above the heads of the worshipers.  Huge groups from other villages came to worship Buddhas and Chinese gods in a vast temporary shelter set up at the village gate.  Men cooked huge caldrons of sik pun, a meat stew; cooking the proper ritual stew for such an occasion is a men’s prerogative (J. Watson 2004b).  There was a not-very-friendly rivalry between the old New Territories villages for the honor of putting on the biggest and most expensive world renewal.  The larger village of Kam Tin swore it would outdo Ha Chuen when the time came.

 

7

In addition to these relatively standard Chinese festivals and patterns of action, the boat people had a number of specific ideas of their own.

Most important and interesting were the sacred or divine fish (san yu).  These were fish that were large and powerful, and that usually seemed to be more than just fish.  They fit perfectly Mary Douglas’ concept of the anomalous (Anderson 1970; Douglas 1966, 1970).  Douglas found that animals tabooed in religion usually turn out to be those that do not fit comfortably into major, basic categories in the relevant culture’s classification system.  This was true of the sacred fish.  There were several such fish.  One the sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis, locally known as ch’am lung, “sinking dragon”), a rare and weird-looking creature thought to be both a fish and a dragon.  Another group consisted of whales and porpoises (including a mysterious “linked fish”—chun yu—that makes a pilgrimage to the Hung Sing temple up the river near Canton, and that once nodded its head when a girl offered it tea).  The boat people recognize that cetaceans, though they look like fish, behave like mammals, and are like mammals internally (“the meat and organs are like a pig’s,” as some fishermen told me).  Another sacred fish is the sawfish (ku yu, Pristiophorus sp.), which not only has its bizarre tooth-fringed snout but which also was seen as the most powerful and dominant of fish.  Finally, sea turtles were sacred fish, explicitly because “they are both turtles and fish” (in one man’s words), and because they are highly revered in Buddhist and Taoist thought.

A standard explanation for loss of a boat at sea was that the family had caught a san yu and had not treated it properly.

Fishermen tried to avoid catching such creatures.  If they did, by mistake, they immediately released them, or, if the fish had died, they took it to the Tin Hau temple and left it there as an offering.  Ancient, long-desiccated sawfish and sturgeons decorated most local Tin Hau temples.

Some other anomalous water creatures were not san yu but still had uncanny powers.  Both boat and land people shared a fear of the walking catfish or snakehead, known as seng yu (“living fish”) because it could survive out of water (it breathes air with a modified, lung-like swim bladder).  Made into soup, it could cure cancer and other degenerative diseases, but one had to be sure to cook it with pork; if the pork disappeared, the fish was not a snakehead but a “bone-transforming dragon,” and anyone who ate it would disappear, even to the bones.  Another supernaturally curative animal was a small parasite that lived in the gills of large groupers.  When the grouper was caught and died, its qi passed into the parasite, which thus concentrated all the power of the huge fish, thus becoming powerful medicine.  Conversely, the boat people did not use cormorants in fishing, because some thought the rings put around the birds’ necks to prevent them from swallowing fish would also constrict the fishermen’s flows of wealth.

Less visible to the uninitiated, but far more important, were the dragons who controlled rain and storm.  Ordinary beneficial rain was in the claws of ordinary dragons, lung.  Violent storms and typhoons were often blamed on the more savage dock-tailed dragon or dragons (kuat mei lung), whose tails the gods cut off as punishment for bad behavior.

In addition to these, ghosts sometimes took the form of fish, disappearing suddenly.

 

8

As we have seen, the boat people saw religion as primarily a matter of providing the gods with feasts and wealth in hopes of making them favorably disposed enough to send exchange goods:  luck, health, birth of sons, good weather, runs of fish.  The idea was exactly and explicitly the same as the plan for dealing with ordinary humans in positions of power.  One tries to create good feelings through doing favors (this is the classic concept of creating ganqing through guanxi, as described in Yan 1996 and Yang 1994), and one tries to use the proper social forms.  Some relations with the other world were much more mechanical and formulaic.  Others were more antagonistic, especially the great exorcistic rites.  Still others were minor and whimsical customs, like the play with lotus rhizomes at the wedding feasts.   Some festivals were deadly serious and almost universally believed to be desperately important; marriages, funerals, and exorcisms came into this category.  Others suffered general disregard and skepticism.

Religion was a social matter, and was invoked for direct and immediate pragmatic reasons.  In spite of a genuine and strong ethical component, popular worship often involved behavior toward the supernaturals that the boat people did not tolerate in the secular world.  The supernaturals were subjected to bribery, hypocrisy, favor-currying, and manipulation.  This was a pragmatic game.  It was judged on its successes.  A god who consistently failed to deliver good fortune, even after proper sacrifice rites, was a god who soon found himself or herself ignored.

On the other hand, “even the gods are subject to fate,” and so occasional failure was expected.  Moreover, in the words of Ge Hong, “Because the size [of this divine administration] is large and its network loose, they may not always respond automatically with precision” (Campany 2002:50).  This view, which seems so wonderfully off-the-wall to a western believer, was echoed almost word for word on the Castle Peak Bay waterfront, more than 1700 years after Ge Hong’s time.  Like human powers, divine powers were far from omnipotent or infallible.  Sometimes they even failed to hear a plea, or were lazy or corrupt, and one had to deal with that.

When all is said and done, it is hard to manipulate fate, hard to change the world.  The popularity of almanacks was due to the determinateness of fate.  A man or woman is born with an allotted life course, and the gods can change it only a bit—less, many said, than one can change it oneself by hard work and honest behavior!

As usual in boat life, any individual was free to manage worship and belief as she saw fit, as part of a detailed, practical, personal way of handling the world.

No one was foolish enough to rely on prayer and worship alone, when human action could affect the outcome.  Fishermen prayed to Tin Hau, but kept their sails and nets in good repair, and followed the government’s weather forecasts assiduously.

Conspicuously absent in most of this were the sense of awe, the mystical or transcendent experience, the ineffable peace and bliss, and the other fabled psychological roots of religion.  Some individuals did have such feelings; most gave no evidence of them.  Feelings were irrelevant to the rituals and ceremonies, which were done in a cut-and-dried, routine manner, though usually with a great deal of drinking, eating, and fun.

However, the great festivals aroused strong emotions.  By and large, ordinary enjoyment was paramount.  Deeper emotions arose from more serious rites.  Being in the presence of a spirit medium in possession trance could not fail to move even the most skeptical and sober viewer.  Funerals and other rituals for the dead aroused intense and unfeigned grief.  Religion served not so much to inspire unusual emotions as to synchronize and socially invoke ordinary, but deep and serious, ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 8.  FISHING PEOPLE’S MEDICINE

 

 

1

In a brilliant and insightful book, Judith Farquhar (1994) described Chinese medicine as “knowing practice.”  Farquhar worked with practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine—current forms of China’s classical elite tradition.  She describes in detail the ways in which doctors invoked a wide and deep knowledge of traditional texts and methods in dealing with particular cases.  The doctors did not mindlessly plug in this knowledge; they considered each case at length, tried approaches they thought would work, and let empirical findings drive their ways of using their skills.  They saw each case as to some extent unique, requiring its own variant of  “practice.”  Traditional medicine was not a set of rigid rules or cookbook recipes, but a vast storehouse of possibilities.

The boat people knew far less of the traditional medical system than did Farquhar’s Chinese medical teachers, but the boat people still knew a great deal of medical lore, and their application of it was “knowing practice” in exactly the same sense (cf. Anderson 1988, 1996; Anderson and Anderson 1975).  They too did the best to apply what they had, with a strong awareness of each case and of the need to use medical knowledge pragmatically in a given setting[7].

The boat people had led hard lives, with little access to medical care.  As a result, they suffered seriously from malnutrition, and even starvation.  On the other hand, in relation to the land people, the boat people got more protein and iron, but much less vitamin C, leading to characteristic patterns of deficiency.  The hard life on the water led to high rates of exposure and accidents.  The boat people had high rates of tuberculosis, and suffered from frequent bouts of measles, diarrheas, leptospirosis, and other contagious diseases.  Within living memory, smallpox and malaria had been terrible scourges, though these were mercifully eliminated by 1965.  Minor respiratory and digestive ailments, and parasite infestations, were constant companions.

The boat people relied for all specialist medical services on shore-dwellers.  They did not have a full or complete medical system of their own.  They rarely went for medical care until they were almost dead.  The shore was a dangerous environment, and medical care there was expensive by boat-people standards.  Thus, the boat people used home remedies when possible.  They tended to deny illness as long as possible, and then “tough it out” until absolutely forced to act.  This led to much chronic illness.

The boat people’s explanatory model—to use Arthur Kleinman’s (1980) term—held that, ultimately, all illness was due to fate.  One suffered according to one’s destiny.  However, this highly abstract concept broke down in practice into two possible types of direct causation: personalistic and naturalistic (sensu Foster 1998).  By far the more important of these was naturalistic.

It makes sense to dispose of personalistic afflictions first, since they were less important.  If an illness could not be successfully treated or alleviated by ordinary medicne, supernatural agency seemed likely.  This could be confirmed by going to a spirit medium, who would enter trance and diagnose the condition.  In supernaturally caused illnesses, control was outside the power of ordinary mortals, but could be gained through ceremonies.  In witchcraft-caused illness, magic could be invoked to counter the curse.

Personalistic causation could be categorized according to the agent inflicting the illness.  Gods (san) and ancestors could punish people for sin, usually the sin of neglecting proper sacrifices to the god in question.  In particular, if one caught a sacred fish and did not offer it up immediately to Tin Hau, one would suffer disaster.  Ghosts (kuai) sent sickness or other affliction to those who had wronged them.

Problems ranged from a simple cold, which might necessitate a temple prayer, to genuine crises—persistent attacks by ghosts, or real outrage of a neglected or inadvertently wronged god—that required full-scale services by Taoist priests.  These involved chanting, instrumental music, sacrifices of animals, vast amounts of incense, and much more, and cost thousands of dollars.

Normally, people assumed illnesses were natural.  Even mental illness was so considered if it was either inborn (in which case it was simply one’s fate) or explained by reference to obvious causes, as in the case of major depression following the death of a loved one.  More often, minor mental illness followed from fear, which could disrupt one’s hei or drive a part of the soul out of the body.  The boat people explained shock the same way.   Chronic neglect or abuse of children could make them insane.  Mentally abnormal people were often shunned, but sympathetic people thought (I think correctly) that this at least sometimes led to more serious mental illness.

Accidents—from getting wrecked in a typhoon to tangling with a shark—were usually just bad luck.  However, they were sometimes sent by an offended god, or caused by bad fengshui.  Clearly physical conditions, like broken bones and sprains, were usually natural accidents in everyone’s view, and were treated by physical methods.  Doctors set bones.  Sprained ankles rested.  Excellent massage was available for sore muscles.

The vast majority of illnesses were purely natural, and treated naturalistically.  In Cantonese medicine, ordinary illnesses were imbalances of heat, cold, wetness and dryness—the classic four qualities of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine.   The Hippocratic-Galenic tradition reached China early (perhaps in the 4th or 5th centuries AD, certanly by the 14th, when texts mention Galen by name).  It fused with China’s indigenous yang/yin theory, but yang and yin were rarely (if ever) invoked by the boat people in talking about illness.  Wetness was invoked rarely, and dryness even more rarely.  As in most of the world (Foster 1993), these two qualities had sunk to a minor role.

Other, more strictly Chinese, factors filled out the Hippocratic picture.  Sheer weakness—depletion of energy or hei—was a common, serious problem.  This came from overwork, exposure, and serious illness, but most of all it came from childbirth (see below).  Blocked, disarranged, disordered, or stagnant hei was vaguely recognized as problematic, but consideration of such subtleties was left to professional Chinese doctors, who were deeply concerned with such issues.  In addition, actual pathological forces were also mentioned:  Poison, dirt, wind, fright, contagion, and occasionally other qualities (Anderson and Anderson 1975; Martin 1978).  “Poison” (tuk/du) meant two or three different things, carefully distinguished by knowledgeable consultants.  First, there was actual poison, as in puffer-fish liver and sea snake venom.  Second, there was a certain mysterious quality in male poultry (and perhaps some other foods, but no one was sure) that could exacerbate cancer and similar illnesses; this was referred to as “poison,” though strictly speaking it merely potentiated or activated preexisting conditions.  Yet another poison was the womb-poison introduced by the pregnancy and birth process; it came out in measles, viewed as inevitable and necessary (Topley 1970, 1974, 1975).  This latter belief led to some opposition to measles vaccination (Topley 1970, 1975).  Wind—one speaks here not of ordinary wind, but of a wind that strikes inside the body—was a problem in itself and because it introduced cold, or cold and wet; rheumatism was due to such drafts.  Dirtiness inside the body was produced by various stresses and illnesses, and had to be cleaned away by herbal teas.

Normally, though, heating and cooling hei explained any ordinary illness.  Actual hot or cold weather, especially too much sun or too much cold and wet air, was a risk factor, but more often the problem was heating and cooling foods.  I have dealt with this system extensively elsewhere (Anderson 1987, 1988, 1996) and need not go into it here.  Suffice it to say that foods were heating (it or yit, Putonghua re) if they were high-calorie (thus literally high in heat energy); if they had been exposed to high heat in preparation; if they felt hot, like chile and ginger; or if they were hot colors—red or orange.  Foods were cooling (leung/liang—foods were very rarely hon/han, “cold”) if they were low-calorie, if they had been cooked at low heat in a lot of water (water is cooling), if they were cold-looking (icy white or pale green).  The perfectly balanced food, exactly in the middle, was, of course, cooked rice (faan); throughout the world, Hippocratic-Galenic traditions brand as “neutral” the major staple.  Other foods similar to it—medium calorie content, dead-white color—were also neutral:  noodles, white-fleshed fish, potatoes, and so forth.  Sugar was heating if brown (“red”), slightly heating if ordinary granulated white sugar, and cooling if “ice” sugar (rock sugar, which does look like ice).  Alcohol was normally heating, because it gave an instant feeling of warmth on cold days, but beer was considered cooling. Not only did it cool the body; it also was seen to be the only thing that the British consumed in enough quantity to offset their heating diet of bread and meat.  The boat people jokingly called it “Westerners’ cooling tea.”

Excess of heat caused illnesses that resembled burns in some way, such as reddening, rashes, dry skin, sores, sore throat, irritation, fever.  Also, any drying or constriction, such as constipation, was a hot condition.  This meant that “hot” diseases included what we in English call “colds.”  (English doctors once used the same Hippocratic tradition, but attributed the origin to cold draughts, and focused on the flow of mucus, rather than on the fever and sore throat.)  More focally “hot” was scurvy, the “hot” condition par excellence.  Vitamin C deficiency leads to rashes, pain, sores, dry flaky skin, constipation, and other burn-like conditions.  Another classic “hot” condition was the aftereffects of a big feast: hangover, bloating, feeling of heat, and so on.  In all these cases, it was observed that eating plain boiled vegetables and drinking herbal teas was curative.  This validated the system.

Excess of coolness led to lowered body temperature, pallor, weakness, and other signs resembling the effects of hypothermia.  The classic “cool” ailment was anemia.  In this case, eating gently warming foods—basically, lean meat, organ meats, red beans, ginger, Chinese wine, black vinegar, and a few other standards—was curative.  Again the system was validated; the iron in the meats, perhaps made more available by the wine and vinegar, cured the anemia.

Venereal diseases were considered hot and wet (sap/xi), and thus hot-wet foods like shrimp and marine catfish were avoided.  No diseases were due to dryness (kon/gan), but eating drying foods like dry-roasted peanuts led to a dry, scratchy throat.

Thus, therapy for ordinary mild illness was food.  Minor hot ailments were cured by eating cooling foods, and vice versa.  More serious or chronic cases required herbal teas.  Cleaning or purifying the body, eliminating poison, and the like required medicinal herbs, often cooked along with special soothing foods like Job’s-tears and barley.

Especially important was building strength after major crises.  Most typical and important of these was childbirth. Given the chronic poverty of the boat people, pregnant women rarely got enough good food, and childbirth left them terribly weak and malnourished; anemia in particular was essentially universal.  They thus were careful to “do the month,” as the Chinese say (Pillsbury 1976): spend at least a month (and often 40 days) lying in bed, keeping warm, and eating strengthening foods.  These were foods that were warming, but also strenghtening and repairing; pou (bu) was the term used.  Commonest of these were pork, pig’s liver, pig’s feet, chicken, and similar foods very high in protein and iron. These were usually cooked with ginger and Chinese “wine,” which are warming, and often with black vinegar, which was believed to be strengthening and nourishing.  Also important was a small red berry known as kau kei ji (koujizi, the fruit of Lycium chinense).  This fruit is literally a multivitamin pill; it is so rich in all the vitamins and minerals that a handful of the berries is roughly equivalent to a modern multivitamin supplement.  Herbal medicines such as astragalus and angelica could be added by the affluent.

An important point, frequently made, was that diet therapy had to be tailored to the individual.  People differ in their response to food.  Modern bioscience explains this as being due to allergies, personality, personal history, and metabolic or biochemical differences due to genetics or early experience.  The boat people had no such explanations, but they realized that people were different.  Often, a food that was “cool” for most people was experienced as “heating” by some; this was usually due to allergies, since allergy reactions are often classic “heating” symptoms such as rash, stuffed sinuses, and itchiness (see Anderson 1987 and references therein).  Individual experience over time, and immediate environmental context, both affected nutritional therapy.  Any caregiver would take these factors into account.

The eldest woman in the household was normally the chief caregiver; others acted under her orders.  She would often defer to, or discuss with, her daughter or daughter-in-law when these women were treating their own children, but, as grandmother, the eldest woman still was the final arbiter.  In more serious cases, she was expected to consult with the whole family—not just her household, but the extended family, often scattered over a number of boats or other residential units.  The only exception to this rule occurred when someone else in the family had special medical training or experience.   Sometimes the senior male would intrude.  He might be listened to, but just as often he was ignored, or even told to stay out of the scene.  Theoretically the leader of the family, a senior male had almost no authority in matters such as household health care.  Sometimes, women “saved the man’s face” by telling him that he need not consider himself with such lowly household matters.

When household knowledge and skills were inadequate, the second recourse was local herb-sellers.  These ranged from grocery store owners and sidewalk peddlers to trained traditional pharmacists and herbal doctors, working with Li Shijen’s Bencao Gangmu and related or derivative texts.  High-quality herbs and the services of formally trained pharmacists lay outside the economic range of most boat people.

Western medicine was a common recourse, becoming rapidly more available, more successful, and more important.  In 1965, western medicine at Castle Peak Bay was represented by a few practitioners who gave shots (sometimes mere normal saline, given for effect), antibiotic pills (usually chloromycetin, because it was the cheapest), aspirin, and sometimes worm medicine.  More elaborate Western care required travel outside the immediate waterfront area.  By 1966 this condition was changing, and by 1975 there was quite good medical care available from a number of local hospitals and clinics.  Most of these were free or reasonably priced.  This had led the boat people to use them when food and simple home herbal remedies failed.  Traditional Chinese medicine was neglected, though by no means gone.  There was little knowledge of acupuncture and other specialized systems.  I never heard of acupuncture being practiced.  Moxibustion was practiced fairly often, however, most often using arm and head points.

 

2

Individuals and family units took control of their lives.  The family unit was the normal locus of control.  People did not meekly place oneself under care of a healer.  Instead, they immediately took charge of the situation, and did everything they knew to alleviate it.

When I worked to explain Hippocratic medicine in the 1980s (Anderson 1987), I was somewhat aware of the importance of this aggressive stance in the success of the tradition, but I was more impressed by the other virtues of the system.  Most obviously, humoral medicine actually worked at Castle Peak Bay.  It made people eat vegetables when they were short of vitamin C, eat liver and meat when short of iron, drink liquids when sick, and take countless other perfectly sound empirical steps.

On the other hand, it was obviously very far from perfect, so a full explanation had to take other matters into account.  Further research in Mexico has shown me that one of the most solid pillars in the foundation of Hippocratic medicine and its success is its no-nonsense, take-charge attitude.  Of all the medical traditions in the world, it is the one that most clearly directs the patient and her household to act, now.  It works primarily through regimen:  modification of ordinary life activities—eating, drinking, exercising, resting.  It works through common sense, supplemented with a framework that is simple, straightforward, and easily learned.  Even the most humble and least educated can modify diet according to heating or cooling properties inferred in the foods.  Anyone, anywhere, can modify activity.  One does not give up control to an alien, impersonal medical establishment.

Humans need to feel in control of their situation; this is an actual physical need, and can be a life-or-death matter in cases of illness (see Anderson 1996).  The value of a take-control medical belief system is evident.  The boat people were close to the bottom of traditional China’s vast social hierarchy.   They needed to assert control whenever they could, and they did so, in no uncertain terms.

Their explanatory models and medical recourse systems were designed to maximize this.  As they were forced by experience to give up control, they moved down a predictable scale: from home care to herbalists to Chinese doctors to ritualists to full-scale rituals.  This was also a hierarchy of ease of understanding.  Nonexperts did not know the herbal formulas, but they understood herbal medicine as merely a more sophisticated form of food therapy.  There was no line separating foods (sik pan, Putonghua shi pin) from medicines.  All foods had health-relevant humoral properties.  Some foods were particularly medicinal, such as ginger.  Some foods were almost solely medicinal, such as gaugeiji, black vinegar, and foxnuts (Euryale ferox).  These merged imperceptibly into items that were considered purely medicines, such as astragalus and ginseng.  It was impossible to tell whether snow fungi and birds’ nests were “medicines” or “foods.”  The medical formulations used on the waterfront routinely mixed such medicinal foods with items considered solely medicines.

Elite medicine and religious ritual were progressively more difficult to understand and less easy to control.  They drew on explanatory models that were poorly known to the boat people, and that minimized the chance of control by laypersons.  The complex logic behind traditional Chinese medicine, involving links to cosmology, vessel theory, qi theory, yin-yang and five-phases philosophy, and much else, was beyond them.  (It still defies full analysis by scholars.)  The logic of ritual, drawing as it did on Durkheimian collective representations, was more easy to understand, but supernaturals were notoriously difficult to handle.

By 1975, Western medicine had largely replaced the latter three steps, but only in so far as it demonstrably worked better.  Its logic of germs, contagion, immunization, antibiotics, and surgery was beginning to penetrate the local medical system, but was still very poorly understood.  To local people, “shots” were more a magical practice than a scientific measure.

All students of ordinary popular Chinese medicine have found rather similar hierarchies of recourse, no matter where they were working (see Kleinman 1980).  The boat people were probably even more committed to home treatment, and even less prone to put themselves under care of a physician, than most Chinese described in medical studies.  This was partly because of poverty, partly because they wanted to retain full control.

Practice, in Farquhar’s sense, is an assertion of control, and is “knowing” because the practitioners realize that more knowledge allows more control.  Explanatory models are as logical and commonsensical as possible; only when the simpler ones fail does one proceed to the more arcane.

Thus the boat people and their world, seen in wider perspective, point up this issue of control.   The ill desperately need to have a sense of control of their situation; they need to understand it and to assert some agency within it (Langer 1983).  Ellen Langer showed that having control over one’s environment actually improves health.  For people like those of Castle Peak Bay, control is a life-and-death matter (cf. Anderson 1996).  They were at the bottom of the social scale, and needed all the sense of efficacy (Bandura 1986) that they could get.  They met the challenge; as in other aspects of their lives, they took charge assertively.  When they could do nothing else—as was all too often the case—they could at least make the patient feel that family, neighbors, and community cared and were acting to help.

 

3

In 1974-75 we carried out a focused study of cancer among the boat people.  Cancer is a hard disease to conceptualize, in any culture.  The real problem is that it is not one disease.  It is a congeries of conditions that have different causes, different courses, and different effects.  The only thing they have in common is that they take the form of uncontrolled multiplication by cells that have lost the natural restraints, checks, and balances that keep the body functioning smoothly.  This loss of restraint can be due to tobacco smoke, hard radiation, viral infection, random mutation, toxic or mutagenic chemicals, and many other environmental stressors.  Often, a given stressor causes cancer in a given site or set of sites, while leaving all others undamaged.

This conceptualization of cancer is of very recent origin.  Until cell physiology and mutation were well understood, and epidemiology had discovered many chemical stressors, no one could conceive of cancer that way.  The modern definition is a child of the cellular-biology revolution of the mid-20th century[7].

Traditional China had no concept of “cancer” equivalent to or similar to the modern English concept.  Visible cancerous growths were called by various terms simply meaning “lump” or “swelling.”  I have no idea what people would have made of things like leukemia or lymphoma or pancreatic cancer; they had no way of knowing what kind of pathology these involved.

We cooperated with Dr. John Ho in a small project on the epidemiology of cancer of the nasopharynx (Anderson, Anderson and Ho 1978).  This cancer was 100 times as common among Hong Kong boat people as among the world population at large.  Cantonese in general had a high rate, but Cantonese raised in the United States had the same low rate as Americans and world citizens in general.  Dr. Ho directed it; Cecilia Choi worked with us.  We were largely working to check out a theory of Dr. Ho, to the effect that nasopharyngeal cancer causation involved nitrosamines created by decay processes in poorly salted fish.  Nitrosamines were suspect of causing cancer when inhaled.   Dr. Ho theorized that antioxidant vitamins in fruits and vegetables would destroy these chemicals.  The boat people were typically very short on such vitamins.

This hypothesis checked out, but—to make a long story short—turned out to be part of a longer causal chain.  Many boat people were more genetically susceptible to nasopharyngeal cancer than most humans are; an allomorph of the HLA-2 antibody gene caused this.  Males were more susceptible than females, in Hong Kong.  Smoking was sometimes involved, but not with our population, few of whom smoked, and none of whom smoked much.  Infection with the Epstein-Barr virus was a major risk factor, but in those days in Hong Kong everyone, or virtually everyone, got that virus early in life, so it was not a very meaningful variable.  Living on salt fish and rice, without many vegetables or fruits, was indeed typical of all our cases except one, and that one individual had had a malabsorption syndrome that prevented her from absorbing nutrients well.  We also observed that the “cancer personality,” retiring and shy and depressive, was a major risk factor, but were maddeningly unable to get enough control data to prove it.

We found that cancer was considered to be a condition somehow involving poison (du).  Cancer sufferers avoided poultry unless they saw it killed and cut up, because, according to Cantonese folk medicine, the hei of male poultry somehow potentiates poisons in the system, making them worse.  Eating a rooster or drake would make the cancer flare up and probably become fatal.

Unfortunately, our interviewees were young and getting westernized, and if they had more knowledge about cancer than that, it was international biomedicine that they knew.  Very likely cancer would prove to have a folk etiology involving hot and cold—as it does among the Maya, who believe that a sudden cold shock to an overheated body can cause it.  (Maya beliefs about hot and cold are strikingly parallel to Chinese; both had a pre-existing medical belief system involving hot and cold that was then impacted by Galenic humoral theories.)   Certainly, disturbed or contaminated qi was involved in cancer.  I think that in earlier times a growing and pathological swelling would be considered the result of blocked or stagnating qi.

In both traditional Chinese and traditional western medicine, then, cancer was anomalous and hard to classify, since no one could see or understand what was really going on.   It did not fit well in either paradigm.  Western medicine developed from a number of practical fields, notably military medicine and sports medicine.  So it had a lot to say about bodily integrity, injuries, and surgery, to say nothing of devils attacking people.  This led to the famous (or notorious) military language that is still with us:  the body “defends” itself against “invading” germs that are “the enemy” of good health, etc.

In addition, early western medicine was much like Chinese in that it stressed the balance of heat, cold, and other qualities or influences.  From ideas of heat, cold, wetness, dryness, and the necessity of balancing these in the body, Galen and his intellectual relatives constructed humoral theory.  The Chinese fused it with earlier yin-yang ideas and with Indian medical theories brought along with Buddhism in the early Common Era.

Contagion became more and more obvious to people in both civilizations, over the centuries, and eventually led to theories of insect transmission; the Chinese began to understand the role of mosquitoes and other pests in premodern times (Elvin 2004), and, eventually, so did westerners. But cancer was not a wound or injury, was not contagious, was not related to insects, was not obviously related to diet, and did not fit any humoral paradigm.  No one could figure out what to do with it, or even how exactly to characterize it, until modern times.

 

4

All the facts in the history of medicine argue for a very specific view of how people develop medical theories.  First, people are good observers; they recognize symptoms and syndromes, and can see the more obvious causation links.   For example, lack of green vegetables produced “hot disease,” what we now call vitamin C deficiency.  Second, people are scared by diseases, and the less they understand these the more scared they are.  Third, this puts people under great pressure to come up with explanatory theories—“explanatory models” in Kleinman’s terms.  Fourth, they look for the most plausible, reasonable explanation possible.  In China, that was often a nutritional one, since the links between poor nutrition and poor health were so tragically obvious to all.  Fifth, failing a good sensible theory, metaphor would always do.  Warfare was the obvious source of these for the military medicos of the west.  In the east, flows of breath and energy in nature and the body became the metaphor field.  Chinese medicine could pile metaphors, layer on layer:  wind moves the air, breath is vital to people, so the earth too much have veins of hei energy running through it, the whole human body also has hei channels, hei can get blocked and stagnant just like air, and then make you sick just as stagnant foul air does….

Once a plausible explanatory model is in place, only overwhelming counterevidence combined with a better model can dislodge it (Kuhn 1962).  Thus, a long history of observations that did not fit dominant theories could be dismissed in both east and west, until the mid-19th century brought international biomedicine into sudden meteoric rise.  Then biomedical paradigms in turn became overextended; infection by “germs” seemed to answer all questions, until lifestyle diseases became overwhelmingly obvious after 1950.

The countertheory to my common-sense theory of medical explanations is shared by most positivists and most postmodernists:  people just pick any arbitrary idea that enters their heads.  The positivists say that this is true of all medical notions except international biomedicine; the postmodernists say it is true even of that.  This countertheory is destroyed by even the slightest acquaintance with traditional medical literature, in context, especially if one works in a society still using those traditional  ideas.  One soon learns that such people have a logical system, and that it is based on shrewd and correct observation.  The problem is that the observation is limited by lack of modern laboratory equipment. In the absence of the ability to observe bacteria and the like, one must infer spirits or winds or other invisible agents.  Once that is done, plausible logical extension does the rest—usually bringing people farther and farther from what we would now think is the “real” story.

Western views of Chinese medicine have been diverse, to say the least.  (A particularly thoughtful, insightful review of the more moderate views is found in Sivin 2000).  Many westerners have simply dismissed Chinese medicine, and indeed all Chinese thought, as a fantastic farrago of nonsense and superstition (most recently, Wolpert 1993).  Others have adulated it, seeing it as the key to the future and the great hope of the world.  Various forms or derivatives of Chinese medical traditions are extremely popular throughout the world today, comprising a large proportion of the “alternative” medicine of the United States and other countries (Bowen 1992).  Such extreme views are even held by reputable scholars, though rarely if ever by scholars of Chinese medicine[7].

The latter have, however, taken strong positions of their own.  Some have even doubted if there is such a thing as “Chinese medicine.”  At least in private debate (I find no published source that is this extreme), some have seen “medicine” as a word covering a strictly western concept, so different from yao that there can be no meeting ground.  The implication is that the word “medicine” should properly refer only to international biomedical science, which is, indeed, different from Chinese yao.  However, such restriction clearly flies in the face of ordinary English usage.  “Chinese medicine,” under that name, is widely known in the west now, along with faith-healing, naturopathy, Native American herbalism, and countless other forms of “alternative medicine.”  And restricting the term “medicine” to contemporary bioscience would force us to rename the Greek and Roman traditions that were the original “medicine”!  “Medicine” and “yao” both refer to a wide spectrum of treatment modalities, and are close enough in denotation and connotation to be good translations for each other—not perfect, but neither is any other translation-gloss.

Others have argued that the various Chinese medical traditions are so different from one another that one must speak of Chinese medicines.  As we have seen, demon-quelling, witchcraft, orthodox religious ceremonies, herbalism, acupuncture, regimen, and other modalities are all part of the healing arts in China.  This has been the case for at least 2500 years (Uschuld 1986), and presumably was true long before that.  One can only agree that there are  many different traditions in Chinese practice.  However, on the other hand, they are often combined by one individual in treating self or others.  Moreover, once again we must face English usage:  “medicine” in standard English means all healing traditions, taken collectively.

Still other scholars follow, to varying degrees, the modern practice (especially typical of China’s government today) of defining a Traditional Chinese Medicine—often capitalized and acronymized “TCM”—to separate it from the traditional therapies not included in the concept.  This modern restriction of Chinese practice consists of acupuncture, moxibustion, and much of the herbal therapy, and the formal or elite theories behind these.  It relies heavily on certain classic texts, such as the Yellow Emperor’s Classic (Unschuld 2003) and the Shang Han Lun.  It excludes folk practices and religious or magical medicine.  These latter were widely dismissed in 20th century Chinese sources as superstition (Putonghua mixin—the word is a recent coinage, probably originally Japanese).

It is possibly useful to define such an entity as “TCM,” but it is a modern concept.  Pre-20th-century Chinese were self-conscious to varying degrees about the differences of elite and folk traditions and of the differences between naturalistic and religious treatments, but did not separate them strongly at any period (see e.g. Harper 1998, Hinrichs 1998; cf. Sivin 2000; Unschuld 1986, 2003).  They certainly did not have a widely-shared, tightly-defined subset of medicine corresponding to contemporary TCM.  The Castle Peak Bay waterfront was genuinely traditional—not Traditional!—in this regard; no one except the few elite doctors separated TCM as a practice.

The Castle Peak Bay waterfront may well be reasonably typical of ordinary Chinese society for the last 2000 years or so, in regard to the broadest outlines of a sense of “medicine.”   As we have seen, they followed a hierarchy of recourse.  All the treatment modalities were seen as ways to deal with, and hopefully cure, illness.  The word yao usually covered only the fraction of this world that was specifically medical in the western sense:  herbalism, acupuncture, and the like.  Regimen was too much a part of ordinary life to be marked as yao.  Religious healing came under categories such as paai san (“worshiping supernaturals”) and the like.  Healing practice was defined by verb-noun constructions: “treating illness” and the like.

However, all these practices graded into each other.  We have seen how food graded into herbal medicine.  Herbal medicine graded into religious medicine too, because the religious officiants often provided herbal prescriptions.  Even the gods did this; spirit mediums routinely wrote herbal prescriptions while in possession-trance.  Usually, the possessing god, acting through the medium, would write a charm to be burned and the ashes drunk in herbal tea; prescriptions for the tea were a part of the process.  Healing by spirit mediums may actually have been more effective than most of the more naturalistic Chinese medicine.  All were about equally dubious in biomedical terms.  The spirit mediums’ spectacular performances evoked strong placebo effects—especially since the illnesses they treated were often neurotic, depressive, or hysterical conditions, eminently susceptible to the power of suggestion (at least in the short run).  Naturalistic medicine was less psychologically compelling; moreover, the herbal remedies often had side effects.  (The myth that herbs do not have side effects is one of the stranger bits of western medical folklore.)

Significantly, though, herbal therapy was the great mediator—the common ground, the center around which other forms clustered, and the modality that overlapped most widely with other modalities.  Western observers often think that acupuncture or hei management or some other system is the core of Chinese medicine.  Even Chinese observers may dismiss herbal practice as mere empiricism of no interest to students of theory (see e.g. Hsu 2001a:8).  Yet, throughout history (e.g. in the Mawangdui manuscripts; Harper 1998), herbalism has occupied the central place in practice that it occupies today.

From the point of view of an anthropologist talking about ordinary people trying to keep healthy, “medicine” in the singular is the more sensible usage.  When a mother is trying to save her child, or a son is caring for his aging father, they think systematically and comprehensively.  They consider all possible recourses, and decide on the basis of expected benefits and costs (see Young and Garro 1994 for a classic account of medical decision-making in a traditional society.)  They plan, in short, as if all the medicines were one.

 

Another tension among western observers of Chinese medicine has been over whether to evaluate Chinese medicine in terms of its actual curative value as tested under modern conditions, or to study it as a purely intellectual system.  The late Joseph Needham agreed with almost all modern Chinese medical researchers in preferring the former view (Needham and Lu 2000; Sivin 2000).  These parties differed in the nuances:  Needham saw the history of Chinese medicine as part of the history of world medical science, and tended to evaluate it in terms of its contribution to modern international biomedicine, whereas modern Chinese researchers tend to view it as a separate tradition, but one that is valuable in and of itself and also as a source of specific drugs and techniques for the world.

Excessive eagerness to mesh eastern and western medicine has led in the past to embarrassing mistakes.  Hsu (2001b) records two confidently-rendered and completely contradictory diagnoses (one by Needham) of an illness recorded in an early case study.  The case study is fragmentary, and both diagnoses clearly go far beyond the evidence.  This sort of guesswork has discredited the biological approach in many circles.

Thus, the vast majority of contemporary historians of medicine prefer to consider Chinese medicine purely as an intellectual creation (Hinrichs 1998; Sivin 2000).  It is a thing to study, not a thing to validate.  It is a tradition to understand as one understands a religion—not a part of world science.

This view is especially popular with those (such as Hinrichs) who study the religious side of medicine.  By definition, supernatural healing cannot be tested and verified, and cannot be explained in this-world terms.  If one believes it is a deeply basic part of Chinese medicine, as Hinrichs does, then one tends to write off the whole system.  It is seen as an intellectual curiosity, and explained purely by recourse to bookish traditions, cosmologic parallels, religious belief, or arbitrary cultural construction.  It is not seen as having any relationship with reality.

Studying boat people’s medicine allows one to take a more comprehensive view, in which both of the above approaches are useful but neither is sufficient.

Above, I have described the system in its own terms.  In general, any discussion of a medical system must begin with such a description, if one is to understand it and properly evaluate parts of it.

On the other hand, Chinese medicine had an appreciable success rate.  Many of the drugs are now internationally used in biomedicine.  Artemisin, from the herb qinghaosu (Artemisia spp.), is now the drug of choice for malaria.  Chinese massage is widely used as well.  Acupuncture shows promise in some areas, though it remains controversial.  Chinese medicine has indeed been influencing modern practice, and has influenced western medicine for a long time (Needham and Lu 2000; many of Needham’s claims have been discounted, but a large residue remains).  Chinese medicine will remain a source of practical wisdom for a long time to come.

There is, moreover, a third way to look at Chinese medicine.  It is the “synthesis” to the above thesis and antithesis.  It involves explaining the actual theories and ideas of Chinese medicine.  This involves, first, understanding the system on its own terms.  But, then, one must understand which of its components actually work—in the sense of producing effective treatment over and above the placebo effect.  Many herbs and techniques do not work well enough to compete with modern biomedical drugs, but do work well enough to have been the best things available in earlier centuries.  The most striking example is chaulmoogra oil, which for centuries was not only the best Chinese drug available for leprosy, but was the best in the world, and the drug of choice in west and east; only recently has biomedical research developed a better drug.  Some other drugs work for a few specific conditions but were vastly oversold; “dragon bones” (fossil bones) were valuable sources of calcium, but they did not have the panacea values ascribed to them in some Chinese herbals.

Once one has some sense of what actual physical effects Chinese medicine has or may have, one can go farther toward explaining it.  I have argued above, and shown at greater length elsewhere (Anderson 1987, 1996), that the heating/cooling (yin/yang) theory of foods succeeded because it was genuinely valuable in practice.  It was not scientifically correct as a theory, but it led to actual practice that did work; this validated the system and kept it alive.

The same sort of analysis, applied to vessel, correspondence, and hei theories, would surely make them more comprehensible.  These theories are “wrong” in international biomedical terms, but just as certainly they were “confirmed” in some sense by the practice of thousands of Chinese doctors, hundreds of whom recorded their findings.  To be sure, these records reflect the selective bias inevitable in true believers who do not use strict case/control experimental methods.  But there must have been a great deal of correct, well-observed medical observation that seemed to confirm the classic theories.  Needham’s attempts to explain them in these terms were premature; he knew neither the details of the Chinese theories nor the biomedical systems to which they might correspond.  Today we might succeed.

Even religious practice has some value.  Not only does it provide ideal conditions for the placebo effect; it also, in many cases, involves long, intimate, personal conversations or consultations between patient and religious healer.  These are comparable to the “talking cure” in western psychotherapy, and seem effective as such.  (My experience in this is confirmed by more trained observers:  Bowen 1992; Arthur Kleinman, personal communication over many years.  Kleinman, a highly expert psychotherapist, was struck by this in his field research.)  Many of the chronic conditions brought to religious healers are, in fact, psychological problems, ranging (at Castle Peak Bay) from “blanking” on exams to major depression over loss of loved ones.  (See also Kleinman 1980, 1986.)  The “talking cure,” as delivered by a sensitive and empathetic spirit medium, is convincing to the patient, and presumably beneficial.22222222223

As Thomas Kuhn (1962) pointed out, a scientific theory is usually underdetermined by facts.  Traditional medicine, in any culture, tends to be an extreme case of this.  People are desperate for cures, and they are desperate to understand illness.  Theorists are thus under enormous pressure to come up with the best possible systematization of observations.  On the other hand, there are facts underlying all theories, and the facts guide thinking even if they do not wholly determine it.

In a culture without organic chemistry laboratories, humoral theories of foods—notably including the Chinese humoral theory—are probably the very best combination of simplicity and utility that the human brain can devise.  Similarly, in a culture without neuropsychology labs but with a widely-believed religious system, the success of psychotherapeutic counseling can best be explained supernaturally.

Many matters are so obvious that they require no leaps of explanatory imagination.  Broken bones are hard to miss, nor is the method of dealing with them.  Arrowhead wounds and dog bites are of obvious causation and straightforward treatment.

On the other hand, infectious disease defies all attempts at explanation unless one has not only microscopes and laboratories but a few hundred years of scientific observation using same.  Leeuwenhoek first saw bacteria, but not until Koch and Pasteur did anyone seriously maintain that they were the agents of infectious disease, and not until the 20th century did further investigation turn up viruses and other tiny agents.

It is to the credit of the Chinese that they did not simply write off infectious disease as supernatural, but tried their best to come up with credible explanations for it.  If those explanations froze early and became fossilized in the literature—and they did—this was not so much a matter of “Chinese conservatism” as of the well-known fact that only a better theory can replace a widely-held theory (Kuhn 1962).  No better theory came forth until the 19th century.  So China continued to reprint the Yellow Emperor’s Classic.

This leaves us with countless questions.  Why, for instance, did Chinese theories so completely silence anatomy?  China developed a science of anatomy and forensic medicine (see e.g. McKnight 1981), but orthodox doctors took little account of the findings.  The standard explanations are either “Chinese conservatism”—a myth summarily disposed of by Hsu and others (Hsu 2001a, 2001b)—or the more reasonable point that a dynamic flow theory needs no static structural base in anatomy.  There is probably more to be said.  Why, also, did Middle Eastern medicine have rather little effect on China?  It was imported in literally encyclopedic proportions under the Mongols (Kong 1996—a modern edition of a Mongol Empire work).  Western Asian veterinary medicine came at about the same time, and almost totally replaced China’s indigenous veterinary tradition.  Why did medicine for humans not have a similarly transformative effect?  Part of the answer is that some of it was already there; another part is that medicine for humans was presumably not as deficient—in the eyes of Yuan and Ming practitioners—as veterinary practice.

The greatest problem facing our analysis is that we know too little of “practice” in past times.  We cannot observe doctors at work.  However, recent historical research often focuses (to varying degrees) on reconstructing practice, rather than solely on analyzing texts (see e.g. Furth 1999, as well as the above-cited works).  Another promising source that has only begun to be studied is the body of literature that China produced over time.  Novels such as the Hung Lou Meng record vast amounts of realistic description of actual medical practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[8]  From what I have been able to glean from limited personal observation and from only slightly fuller observations by Ho-fung Hung and others, the boat people of China have indeed maintained a running low-key resistance to Communist collectivism and dragooning, and they have, in the end, been successful.  Many, probably most, have followed those of Hong Kong onto shore and merged with the general population, but some still live quite independent lives on the rivers and seas.

 

[9]  One exceptionally brilliant and experienced ethnographer of China has frequently commented to me that she cannot deeply value any of the art, literature or music the Chinese created, because the society was so cruelly abusive to women.  This seems to me a sad self-limitation.  Yes, the evils were real, but so were the achievements.  Many of the writers and artists were women, after all.  Many others were champions of women, treating them as equals or reasonably close; one thinks of Mei Yaochen and Yuan Mei.  I fear that if one condemns a society’s arts, or anything else, because of that society’s worst features, no one will ever be able to enjoy anything from any society.

 

Poems: Nature and Environment

September 7th, 2015

Some Poems

 

A selection of poems about nature, the environment, and closely related concerns.  Most of my favorite poems are in here, but the message is really about the less humanized environment as experience, subject or backdrop, symbol or metaphor.  Many of these poems achieve the goal of late-medieval European verse: a poem should be a brilliant and clear direct image, but that image should be a symbol, the symbol a metaphor, and the metaphor an allegory.  The very first cut below—a traditional Delta Blues verse—does this perfectly; decode if you can.

 

 

LEADING OFF

 

 

I Got the Key to the Highway

 

I got the key to the highway, I’m booked out and goin’ to go,

Gone to leave here running, walkin got too doggone slow.

Gone walk the cold highway, until the break of day,

You don’t do nothin but drive a good man away.

When the moon gets over the levee, I’ll be on my way,

Gone roam this cold highway until the break of day.

Traditional blues song

 

The train done gone, and the Greyhound bus is run,

But walkin’ ain’t crowded, and I won’t be here long.

Traditional blues

 

I been down on the river in the year nineteen and fo’,

You could see a dead man, Lord, at every turnrow.

Traditional blues

 

I lay down, trying to take my rest,

My mind got to rambling like the wild geese from the west.

Traditional blues verse

 

On the Birth of His Son

 

When you were born into this world, my child,

Loud you did weep while all around you smiled;

So live that, going into your last sleep,

Calm you may smile while all around you weep.

Abu Said ibn Abu ‘l Khayr, medieval Arabic; tr. William Jones, modernized; I thought of this a lot when my grandchildren were born.

 

 

EAST ASIAN

 

 

From the Book of Songs (ca 500 BCE):

The brown-pepper plant’s fruits

Spread and go out so far;

That gentleman over there,

He is great without equal.

(Karlgren 1950:75, 76, again retranslated; the brown-pepper plant’s fruits look exactly like miniature male genitalia, and were a standard euphemism for same in old China.  This type of gently erotic poetry, using natural symbols, is extremely common in Chinese tradition, far more so than the very proper translated anthologies suggest!)

On the Book of Songs: See Karlgren 1950 for scholarship and literal but hard-to-read translations.  It is worth explaining the actual title, Shi Jing.  “Shi” means a short lyric poem that is sung or chanted.  “Jing” means a basic text; the root meaning of the word is the warp of a fabric.  “Warp” books were the foundational classics in a given area of literature.  “Weft” books were commentaries and secondary literature.

 

 

 

The Best Advice

 

The clever man wears himself out,

The wise man worries.

But the man of no ability

Has nothing he seeks.

He eats his fill and wanders idly about.

Drifting like an unmoored boat,

Emptily and idly he wanders along.

Zhuang Zi (tr. Burton Watson, 1968, p. 354)

 

 

Tao Yuanming on Nature

 

I built my hut in a zone of human habitation,

Yet near me there sounds no noise of horse or coach.

Would you know how that is possible?

A heart that is distant creates a wilderness round it.

I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,

Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.

The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;

The flying birds two by two return.

In these things there lies a deep meaning;

Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.  (Waley 1961:105)

Literal translation: I built my hut     among people’s dwellings,

Yet lack     horse coach sounds.

You ask    how can this be?

My heart is distanced     from the world.

I pick chrysanthemums    under the east fence,

Look far     to the south mountain.

Mountain air     freshens with evening,

Flying birds     together come home.

In this     lie thoughts of truth;

Want speak   Can’t remember words.

(Note the deliberate ambiguity: who wants to speak?  The poet?  The reader?  And has he forgotten just the words for this, or all words, or all language?)

 

Here are a few of the “Three Hundred Tang Poems,” a set of classical verses memorized by every educated Chinese, and some other Tang poems.  (The Tang Dynasty ran from 618 to 907 CE.  Westerners never realize just how widely known Chinese “elite” culture was.  I heard a semi-literate fisherman chant one of the 300 in Hong Kong in 1966, and the audience, most of them totally illiterate, recognized the poem and saw nothing unusual in the feat.)

The monk from Shu [Sichuan] with his green silk lute-case,

Walking west down O-mei Mountain,

Has brought me by one touch of the strings

The breath of pines in a thousand valleys.

I hear him in the cleansing brook,

I hear him in the icy bells,

And I feel no change thought he mountain darkens

And cloudy autumn heaps the sky.                         (Tr. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu, 1929:57; free—“thousand” should be “myriad,” for instance—but captures the spirit better than other translations).

 

 

Liu Zongyuan:  The lonely boat

 

Thousand mountains     no bird flies

Ten thousand paths     no human track.

Solitary boat    old man, split-bamboo raincloak,

Fishing, alone   cold river snow.

My translation, to give some sense of the Chinese.  This poem is telegraphic and ambiguous even by classical Chinese standards, and I have tried to preserve that.  The anonymous figure (the poet?) is invisible; we see only his raincoat.  The doubled loneliness of “solitary” and “alone” is notably intense in the Chinese text, and became a famous image.  There are probably literally millions of Chinese paintings of this scene; a particularly beautiful one showed up in an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art around 2012.

 

Liu was a great statesman, a major reformer of the Tang Dynasty.  Here is a longer poem by him, explicitly political—and the bad governance of the forest is intended to stand for the whole government:

“The official guardians’ axes have spread through a thousand hills,

At the Works Department’s order hacking rafter-beams and billets.

Of ten trunks cut in the woodlands’ depths, only one gets hauled away.

Ox-teams strain at their traces—till the paired yoke-shafts break.

Great-girthed trees of towering height lie blocking the forest tracks,

A tumbled confusion of lumber, as flames on the hillside crackle.

Not even the last remaining shrubs are safeguarded from destruction;

Where once the mountain torrents leapt—nothing but rutted gullies.

Timber, not yet seasoned or used, left immature to rot;

Proud summits and deep-sunk gorges—now brief hummocks of naked rock.” (Elvin 2004:18).

 

The Empty Room

 

In the morning I leave my empty room

And ride my horse to the censorate.

I spend the day there, working at trivial jobs,

Then return again to my empty room.

Bright moonlight glimmers through cracks in the dark wall.

My lamp burns down, the ashes crumble.

And I think of the road to Hsien-yang—

Her funeral hearse returning last night.

Yuan Zhen, tr. Jonathan Chaves

(Yuan Zhen is one of the most striking characters in Chinese history, a fearless defender of the right during a corrupt time.  He rose to very high position in government but was constantly in trouble for fearless and forthright criticism of the Emperor or anyone else who did wrong.  His devotion to his wife, and his poetry on losing her, stand as one of the emotional peaks in all world literature, and refute all the nonsense about the universality of Chinese male chauvinism.  This poem captures perfectly the complete devastation of having one’s whole life and world utterly destroyed.  One goes on automatic pilot, doing the “trivial jobs,” completely empty inside [the room is both real and metaphoric].  I’ve been there.  Believe me.  Some have asked how Yuan Zhen could write a perfect eight-line poem in that state.  The answer is: as one of the three or four greatest scholars in China in his time, he was so trained in poetry that it was like breathing.  He couldn’t not do it.)

 

Later, remembering, still devastated:

Remembering My Dead Wife

 

Oh youngest, best-loved daughter of Hsieh,

Who unluckily married this peniles scholr,

You patched my clothes from your own wicker basket, and I coaxed off your hairpins of gold, to buy wine with; for dinner we had to pick wild herbs

And to use dry locust-leaves for our kindling.

Today they are paying me a hundred thousand

And all that I can bring to you is a temple sacrifice.

Yuan Zhen, tr. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu

 

 

Checking on a painting

This time I think

I got it:  one pine real

As the real.

 

Think about it:

Search in memory, is it

Real, or not?

 

Guess I’ll have to go

Back up the mountain…

South past Stonebridge,

The third one on the right….

(Ching Yun, late 9th century, tr. Jerome P. Seaton; Seaton and Maloney 1994:76).

 

 

Life and Death

 

If you want an image of life and death,

Look to ice and water.

Water cools, turns to ice,

Ice melts and again becomes water.

Whatever dies must be reborn,

Whatever is born must then die.

Ice and water do each other no harm;

Life and death are both beautiful.

Han Shan, 8th century; my translation.

 

More Han Shan

 

The Tiantai Mountains are my home

Mist-shrouded paths keep guests away

Thousand-meter cliffs make hiding easy

Above a rocky ledge mid ten thousand streams

With bark hat and wooden clogs I walk along the banks

With hemp robe and pigweed staff I walk around the peaks

Once you see through transience and illusion

The joys of roaming free are wonderful indeed.

(Tr. Bill Porter, “Red Pine.”  Zhuang Zi mentioned the pigweed staff—a walking stick made from a pigweed [=goosefoot] stalk—as a symbol of poverty and noble rustic life; it was, inevitably, picked up and replayed as a symbol, not only by Han Shan but by Du Fu and others, and even by Basho in Japan and by a self-pitying Korean singer who said it was his “only friend” (O’Rourke 2002:132).  Of course I had to make one, and I have it by me right now, wrapped in a Mongolian blue sacred cloth.)

 

Another translation of the same poem:

 

My home base is in Heaven’s Terrace;

Misty paths, foggy depths, cut short guests’ arrival.

Thousand-foot cliffs and crags, where I can hide deep inside,

Ten thousand streams and torrents, stone towers and ledges.

In bark hat and wooden clogs I walk beside brooks,

With hemp robe and pigweed staff, I go round the mountain and return.

Once you see through floating reality, illusion and change in all,

The sharp joys of roaming the Way are truly marvelous indeed.

 

 

Passing through South Lake Again:  A Buddhist Prayer

 

Approaching South Lake, I already begin to dread the journey.

A place of old memories; each corner reopens a wound.

Watching plum blossoms in a small courtyard could be but a dream fulfilled;

Listening to rain in a quiet room is like entering another life.

Autumn waters are bluer for reflecting my graying temples;

The evening bells sound crisper for breaking a sorrowful heart.

Lord of Emptiness, take pity on this homeless soul—

Out of this incense smoke make me the City of Refuge.

Anonymous, 18th century Chinese, tr. Shirleen S. Wong

 

 

The Woodpecker

 

Where is the woodpecker?

Far in the high trees.

Fragile, he works so hard;

All day I hear his sound.

He works so the woods will flourish,

No worms gnawing trees away.

Woe to the crowds of humans—

Never a heart like this bird’s.

Ni Zan (a great Yuan Dynasty artist and writer)

 

This inspired a much more famous, but (sadly) anonymous, Korean poem:

 

Can tiny insects

devour a whole great spreading pine?

Where is the long-billed

woodpecker?  Why is he not here?

When I hear the sound of falling trees

I cannot contain myself for sorrow.

(Trans. Richard Rutt, 1971, poem 15.  In both poems the insects are symbols of evil courtiers, the trees are the country’s welfare.  This is not just metaphor, it is ganying, resonance or homology: the insects are exactly the courtiers in their desires and actions, the trees really are valuable.)

 

 

Anchored Overnight at Maple Bridge

 

Crows caw the moon sets frost fills the sky

River maples fishing fires care-plagued sleep

Comgimn from Cold Mountain Temple outside the Suchou wall

The sound of the midnight bell reaches a traveler’s boat.

Chang Chi, tr. Red Pine (Bill Porter); wonderful example of how a literal translation, lack of punctuation and all, can really work

 

 

Drinking Wine on Grave-Sweeping Day (Qing Ming Day)

 

North and south of the mountain peak, many graves in the fields,

Qing Ming sweeting graves, much mess and noise.

Paper ashes fly, become white butterflies,

Tears from broken hearts stain azaleas red.

Sun sets, foxes and wildcats sleep in the tombs,

Night, going home, boys and girls play in the lamplight.

Everyone born, if you have wine, drink till drunk—

Not one drop reaches the Nine Springs.

Kao Chu, tr. Red Pine but heavily modified.  The Nine Springs is the Other World.  The poem is a bitter parody of the sappy sentimentalism of most Qing Ming poems, but it goes far beyond bitterness.

 

Daoist Poem

 

Stone pools and pure water are my mind.

Spreading and all-covering peach flowers: their reflections sink down.

One road to Gui Mountain, the office left empty,

In leisure or red dust, the seven-string qin.

Attributed to Lu Dongbin (not even close to believably); see Mark Halperin, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, p. 117

 

Fish

 

I fish for minnows in the lake.

Jiust born, they have no fear of man.

And those who have learned,

Never come back to warn them.

Su Dongpo, tr. Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, p. 84

(The west sees big fish eating little fish as its classic fish metaphor for people; this is the classic Chinese metaphor, in its greatest poetic statement)

 

 

Planting Trees

 

Seventy, and still planting trees….

Don’t laugh at me, my friends.

I know I’m going to die.

I also know I’m not dead yet.   (Yuan Mei, 18th century; tr. J. P. Seaton, 1997:92; I planted an almond on my seventieth birthday, reciting this.)

 

Chan Master Whitecloud:
A fly drawn by the light bumps the window paper

Uanble to pass it tastes much suffering

Suddenly it chances on the route it came by

And knows its eyes have fooled it all through life.

cited by Yuan Mei; tr Denis Mair; V. Mair et al, p 571.

 

And by Li Xiaocun:

Garden Gone to Waste

 

Whose courtyard consummates its own spring?

Moss on windowsill, dust on desk

At least the dog next door still cares

Over the fence barks at a flower thief.

Denis Mair in V. Mair et al., p 570

(The first line means that the garden left to celebrate itself, no one else being there)

The Song Dynasty (960-1279) produced enormous amounts of superb nature poetry, but it broadly followed Tang patterns.  Song travel literature has been beautifully described and translated by Cong Ellen Zhang (2011).  Chinese loved to travel and enjoy the scenery, and especially to visit places made famous by earlier poets, to share the experience.  Chinese officials were reassigned to new posts every three years or so, and also were subject to exile for being too outspoken.  They thus had many opportunities to travel—more than they wanted, since going to a remote and isolated post could take months and could be dangerous.  Most of our information on Song travel comes from poems and accompanying literary accounts, which gives a skewed but still revealing view.

Interestingly, the most productive poets were also some of the greatest moral teachers in Song.  Let Su Shi, generally considered the greatest poet Song, sum it up:

The old monk has already died, they’ve already built a new pagoda.

There is no way to see the old poem on the ruined wall.

The rough going of that past day, do you still recall?

The road was long, the people in difficulty, and the lame donkey brayed.

(Zhang 1997, p. 97.)

The old monk’s poem is lost, the rough trail forgotten.  What remains is Su’s warm and compassionate identification with the suffering people and the suffering donkey, the latter a symbol for Su himself.  (Su’s compassion morality came from Buddhism and Confucianism, but went well beyond the usual teachings.  He may, in fact, be recording here one of his exiles for emphasizing the costs of imperial policy in terms of the sufferings of the common people.)

 

Japanese

 

Japan followed Chinese conventions in much of its poetry, but from the beginning there was a split between Chinese poetry—written in Chinese and imitating Tang styles—and Japanese poetry, often in much less regular patterns.  The Japanese developed an even more direct, fresh, intense way of viewing nature than the Chinese usually achieved.  Contemporary with the Song poets of China, Saigyö, hearing a cricket when he was in a sad mood, combined Japanese love of insects with recognition of the brevity of life:

“At that time

on my pillow

under roots of mugwort

then too may these insects

cheer me with friendly notes”

(tr. Burton Watson, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home, Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 129).  This poem requires some ecological unpacking; medieval Japanese would have known that mugwort is edible but intensely bitter, and that it grows on ground that has been disturbed and then abandoned—such as neglected graves.

 

However, ossification occurred in Japan as in China.  Tanka, haiku and other poetic forms became so forced into conventional modes that they could be, and were, endlessly generated by formulas like those of modern computer-generated music.  The cherry blossoms signal spring, the hawk-cuckoo cries for sorrow.  Bush-clover, miscanthus grass and spring rain are even commoner in haiku than in reality.  Possibly the greatest haiku writer, Matsuō Bashō, wrote in 1686:  “Like a rootless plant without flower or fruit, [poetry] today is merely vulgar banter and sporting with words” (Bashō 2005:103).  He was able to bring real originality to it, but even his work sometimes gives us layer on layer of references to older poets and shopworn images.  Still, his genius in turning a cliché into a spark for a striking new image revived poetry for another century.  The old Chinese proverb, “a bird in a whole forest can perch on only one branch,” inspired him:

“Wren on a single branch:

fragrance of its apricot flowers

throughout the world”

(Bashō 2005:101, tr. David Barnhill, slightly corrected).

 

Written on a Painting of the Chinese Zen Master Raisan (ca. 8th century)

(Landscape art and poetry came together in paintings with poems inscribed on them, and here the philosophy of Buddhism, nature mysticism, and nature appreciation was combined.  A Japanese example in the Los Angeles Museum of Art shows a Chinese Buddhist sage meditating in mountains, with the verse–in Chinese, though by a Japanese author):

Deep in the emerald cloud of Meng Peak

The recluse Raisan dwells alone.

Emperor Te-tsung himself addressed words to him

But the Zen master never even rose.

Imperial messengers came and urged him repeatedly;

Not once did he answer them.

His face glistening with cold tears,

His world was that of the wild yam;

Beyond that he did not seek enlightenment

Nor did he shun birth and death.

Nothing whatever bothered him,

No vexatious matter entered his ears.

There was no self and no others;

No troubles. No good.

No shouts issued form his mouth,

No blows from his fists.

He was one dark hard old man.

(Takuan Sōhō [1573-1645], tr. Stephen Addiss in notes to this painting in Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

 

 

On the Chinese proverb “A bird in a forest can perch on only one branch”:

 

Wren on a single branch:

fragrance of its apricot flowers

throughout the world  (Bashō 2005:101, translation slightly corrected).

 

 

Cherry blossom

Most loved when it falls

Nothing is meant in this world

To last forever

Medieval Japanese, from the Tales of Ise

 

 

The mountain wind

 

Akikaze ya!

Hyoro hyoro kama

no kageboshi

 

The mountain wind!

It shakes

the mountain’s shadow

Issa (my favorite haiku; my translation; the image is a symbol of worldly power and what it is worth)

 

 

Also from Barnhill, p. 58:

The Takekuma pine was a noble pine tree.  The monk Nōin saw it, came back to find it cut down by a boorish governor to use for bridge pilings, and wrote:

“Pine of Takekuma:

at this time 

there is no trace of it;

have a thousand years passed

since I last came?”

 

It was replanted, and Kyohaku wrote, thinking of Noin:

“The Takekuma Pine:

show it to him,

late-blooming cherries”

 

Which caused Basho to seek it out (it had probably been replanted yet again by then):

“Since the cherries bloomed,

I’ve longed to see this pine:  two trunks

after three month’s passage.”

 

This poem exhibits fūryū, “’all art,’…an extraordinarily complex term, including associations of high culture, art in general, poetry, and music, as well as ascetic wayfaring and Daoist eccentricity.”  Barnhill, Basho’s Journey¸ 159

 

 

Korean  (The Koreans adopted Chinese civilization but with a distinct and frequently cynical eye, evaluating, so that when they state Chinese goals they have thought harder and do better than the Chinese ever did; or they can be world-class skeptics about it all.  Many of the best poems are anonymous.  Remember these are really songs: they rhyme, have meter, and have beautiful tunes in the original.)

 

I live at the foot of the mountain;

Even the cuckoo embarrasses me.

It laughs at the size of my cooking pot when it peeks into my house.

Believe me, bird,

It’s plenty big in terms of my interest in the world.                                     Anonymous, tr. Kevin O’Rourke (2002:166.)

 

Red-necked mountain pheasant over there,

Duck hawk perched on the branch,

White egrets watching for the fish

In the watered paddy field out in front,

If you were not around my grass roof

It wouldn’t be easy for me to pass the days.

Anonymous, tr. Jaihiun Kim (1994:190.)

 

Night falls

 

Night in a mountain village;

A dog barks far away.

I open the window and look:

The moon is a bright leaf.

Be still, stop barking at the moon

Drifting alone over the face of the mountain.

-Chungum, unknown woman poet, ca 1568; redone from a couple of translations

 

Old age (a poem with a very personal ring these days….)

 

Bamboo stick, the sight of you

Fills me with trust and delight.

Ah, boyhood days when you were my horse!

Stand there now

Behind the window, and when we go out,

Let me stand behind you.

Kim Kwang’uk, tr. Peter Lee

 

And another:

Even fools can know and do

Is it not easy then?

Yet even sages cannot know all.

Is it not difficult then?

Pondering whether it’s easy or hard

Makes me forget I grow old.

Yi Hwang (16C), tr. Richard Rutt  (What is “it”?  The Way, the Meaning, the Answer?  Or maybe just the question?  The point is the last line.)

 

 

The Koreans are the only people who seriously explored old age in poetry—here’s another:

 

Wine, why do you redden a white face?

Instead of reddening a white face why not blacken white hair?

Should you really

Blacken white hair, I’ll drink and drink, I’ll never sober up again.

Tr. Kevin O’Rourke

 

And another:

 

My ageing affections

I’ll beguile with chrysanthemums,

My tangled skein of worries

I’ll beguile with ink drawings of grapevines,

The white hair tarying under my ears

I’ll beguile with one long song.

Kim Sujang, tr. Richard Rutt; the grapevine is a “plant dragon,” and therefore paintings of it are protective and give good luck.

 

Getting away from old age, here is the world’s finest poem on tolerance:
Is the crow black because someone dyed it?

Is the heron white because someone washed it?

Are the crane’s legs long because someone pulled them out?  Are the duck’s legs short

because someone cut them off?

Black, white, long, short, what’s the point in endless wrangling?

Tr. Kevin O’Rourke

 

This anonymous woman’s poem just has to be the greatest love poem in the world:

 

Pass where the winds pause before going over,

Pass where the clouds pause before going over,

High pass of the peak of Changsong

Where wild-born falcons and hand-reared falcons,

Peregrine falcons and yearling hawks,

All pause before going over,

If I knew my love were across the pass

I would not pause a moment before I crossed.

Tr. Richard Rutt

 

Chong Ch’ol, a fearless political poet, writing the world’s absolutely greatest poem on loyalty to a movement:

 

We’ll strain sour wine and drink

Till we can’t abide the taste.

We’ll boil bitter greens and chew till they become sweet.

We’ll stay

On the road till the nails that hold the heels to our clogs are worn away.

Tr. Kevin O’Rourke

 

Yun Sundo, another political classic, referring to the age-old East Asian metaphor of measuring tools, correctly used, as symbols of good government:

 

How is a house built?

It is the work of a master carpenter. Why are the timbers straight?  They follow the line of ink and ruler.

Knowledge

Of this home truth will bring you long life.

Tr. Kevin O’Rourke (the poem refers to the Confucian use of architects’ tools as concrete examples of how to regulate the world)

 

But the inimitable Chong Ch’ol savagely satirized this theme:

 

Huge beams and rooftree timbers

Are rejected and thrown away;

While the house is falling down

They argue with one another.

Carpenters, when will you stop

Running around with your ink-cups and rules?

Tr. Richard Rutt

 

More loyalty, from Yu Huich’un:

 

A little bunch of parsley,

Which I dug and rinsed myself.

I did it for no one else,

But simply to give it to you.

The flavor is not so very pungent;

Taste it, once more taste it, and see.

Tr. Richard Rutt.  The parsley is a very modest gift; Yu offers his talents, such as they are, to the nation.  (In the event, this poem was probably his finest offering; it has inspired literally millions of Koreans since he wrote it in the 16th century.)

 

Another anonymous love poem, so understated that it’s ten times as powerful for the low key—I reread it after some deaths in the family and found it the most heartbreaking poem I could find, and it remains the greatest poem on age and grief that has ever been written.

 

In this world medicine is plentiful

And sharp knives abound, they say:

But there’s no knife to cut off affection, no medicines to forget true love.

So be it:

I’ll leave my cutting and forgetting till I go to the other world.

Tr. Kevin O’Rourke

 

Vietnamese

Vietnam also produced great environmental poetry, usually but not always in Chinese style.

 

Less Chinese than most is a farmers’ folk song:

 

“Some folks transplant rice for wages,

But I have other reasons.

I watch the sky, the earth, the clouds,

Observe the rain, the nights, the days,

Keep track, stand guard till my legs

Are stone, till the stone melts,

Till the sky is clear and the sea calm.

Then I feel at peace.”

Tr. Nguyen Ngoc Bich (1975:40).

 

The Vietnamese were freed from the archaic, long-forgotten ancient pronunciations of Chinese.  Writing in Vietnamese, women could revive rhyme and tone schemes that actually sounded as they were supposed to sound, and they created world-class poetry.  Thus Ho Xuan Hu’o’ng in the early 19th century:

Dung cheo trong ra canh hat hiu

Du’o’ng di thien theo quan cheo leo

Lo’p leu mai co gianh xo xac

X ke keo tre dot khang khiu

Ba gac cay xanh hinh uon eo

Mot giong nu’o’c biec co leo teo

Thu vui quen ca niem lo cu

Kia cai dieu ai gio lon leo.

 

Leaning out, I look down on the valley,

path winding to a deserted inn,

thatch roof tattered and decayed.

Bamboo poles on gnarled pilings

bridge the green stream uncurling

little tufts in the wavering current. Happy, I forget old worries.

Someone’s kite is struggling up.

(Tr. John Balaban, 2000, 40-41)

Tone marks are left out here, because they are simply too confusing to a non-Vietnamese-speaker, but tone patterning was as complex and effective as the rhyme and alliteration visible in the transcription above.

Ho Xuan Hong, after her husband died, was supposedly reduced to being a high-class courtesan for a while, and seems to have taken to the role.  The double meaning of this poem should be easily penetrated (if you get my drift).  Again the tones carry half the beauty of the sound-poem, especially in the spectacular sound-cascade of the last line, but sadly must be ignored here.

Mot deo, mot deo, lai mot deo,

Khen ai kheo tac canh cheo leo.

Cua son do loet tum hum noc,

Hon da xanh ri lun phun reu.

Lat leo canh thong con gio thoc,

Dam dia la leiu giot suong gieo.

Hien nhan, quan tu ai ma chang…

Moi goi, cho chan van muon treo.

 

A cliff face.  Another.  And still a third.

Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:

The cavern’s red door, the ridge’s narrow cleft,

The black knoll bearded with little mosses?

A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,

Showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.

Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary

And shaky in his knees, to mount once more?

(Tr. John Balaban, 2000:46-47.  I do not know Vietnamese, but the poem is in Chinese characters, and I might respectfully suggest that the second line could read “Who could be so skilled as to delineate this craggy scene?”)

 

Ho Xuan Huong’s lament for her husband, who died after only a few months of marriage; tone marks left out, but the tone harmonies are as beautiful as the vowel sounds; together they make this one of the most devastatingly beautiful laments in the world.  Also, this gives you an idea of the incredibly complex and beautiful rhyme, internal rhyme, recurrent rhyme, rhythm, vowel harmony, and other poetic tricks that are lost in modern translations of classical Chinese and Korean songs.

 

Tram nam ong phu Vinh-Tuong oi

Cai no ba sinh da gia roi

Chon chat van chong ba thuoc dat

Nem tung ho thi bon phuong troi

Can can tao hoa roi dau mat

Mieng tui can khon that chat roi

Hai bay thang troi la may choc

Tram nam ong phu Vinh-Tuong oi

 

One hundred years.  Oh, prefect of Vinh-Tuong,

Now your love debt is all paid off.

Your poetic talents buried three feet down.

Your fine ambitions windstrewn.

The heavenly scales got dropped and lost.

The mouth of earth’s bag is cinched up.

Twenty-seven months seemed so short.

On hundred years.  Oh, prefect of Vinh-Tuong.

                        (Tr. John Balaban)

 

 

Love Poem

 

In our next life, we will take care to be born again as male and female,

But we will be two wildgeese flying high in heaven.

The blinding snow, the seas and waters, the mountains and clouds, the dust of the world

We will see from afar, but we will never fall.

Nguyen Khac Hieu   (early 20th C; from Huard, Pierre, and Maurice Durand.  1954.  Connaissance du Viet-Nam, p. 274.  Hanoi:  École Française de’Extrème-Orient; Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.  My trans. of their French trans.  My second favorite love poem.)

 

CELTIC

(As with the Asian poems, the translated ones below are masterpieces of rhyme, internal rhyme, off-rhyme, phoneme harmony, and so on in the original—If at all interested, pick up enough Celtic languages to get it)

 

Promise

 

Oh King of the starry sky,

Lest Thou from me withdraw Thy light,

Whether my house be dark or bright,

My door shall close on none tonight.

Irish, 9th century, tr. Sean O’Faolain

 

 

Creide’s lament for her husband Cael, drowned at sea:

 

The harbour roars out

over the fierce flow of Rin Dá Bharc.

The hero from Loch Dá Chonn drowned;

the wave mourns it against the shore.

 

The heron is crying

in the marsh of Druim Dá Thrén.

She cannot guard her young:

the two-colored fox is stalking them.

 

Mournful is the whistle

of the thrush on Druim Caín.

And no less mounrful is the call

of the blackbird on Leitir Laíg.

 

Mournful the music

of the stag on Druim Dáa Léis:

The doe of Druim Silenn is dead

and the great stag roars at her loss.

 

My grief

that hero dead, who lay with me,

that woman’s son from Doire Dá Dos

with a cross set at his head.

 

My grief that Cael

is fixed by my side in death,

that a wave has drowned his pale flank.

His great beauty drove me wild.

 

Mournful is the roar

the ebbing wave makes on the strand.

It has drowned a fine and noble man.

My grief Cael ever went near it.

 

Mournful the sound

the wave makes on the northern shore,             rough about the lovely rock,

lamenting Cael who is gone.

 

And mournful the fall

of the wave on the southern shore.

As for myself, my time is over,

my face the worse, for all to see.

 

There is unnatural music

in the heavy wave of Tulach Léis:

It is tellings its boastful tale

and all my wealth is as nothing.

 

Since Crimthann’s son was drowned

I will have no other love.

Many leaders fell at his hand

but his shield on the day of need was silent.

Tr. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe.

Creide’s lament for her drowned husband is one of the truly great poems in the Irish (Gaelic) language, and it’s very well worth learning to read it in the original, pronouncing it more or less correctly—we aren’t quite clear how it was pronounced in its own time, but one can get the idea.  Of course it’s always interesting that she could spontaneously mourn in perfect, extremely complex and high-styled Irish prosody…well, with a little help from a later writer (it is not even clear if Creide existed in the first place, since this poem is from a basically fictional work).

 

 

Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh’s lament for his wife, ca 1200 AD.

 

Last night my soul departed,

a pure body, most dear, in the grave,

her stately smooth bosom taken

from me in a linen sheet,

 

a lovely pale blossom plucked

from a limp downcurving stem,

my heart’s darling bowed low,

heavy branch of yonder house.

 

I am alone tonight, O God.

It is a crooked, bad world you see.

Lovely the weight of the young flank

I had here last night, my King.

 

That bed there, my grief,

The lively covers where we swam

–I have seen a fine lively body

and waved hair in your midst, my bed!

 

One of a gentle countenance

Lay and shared my pillow.

Only the hazel bloom is like

her womanly dark sweet shade.

 

Maol Mheadha of the dark brows,

my vessel of mead, by my side,

my heart, the shade who has left me,

a precious flower, planted and bowed.

 

My body is mine no longer.

It has fallen to her share:

a body in two pieces

since she left, fair, lovely and gentle

 

–one foot of mine, one flank

(her visage like the whitethorn;

nothing hers but it was mine):

one eye of mine, one hand;

 

half my body, a youthful blaze

(I am hjandled harshly, O King,

and I feel faint as I speak it)

and half of my very soul.

 

My first love her great slow gaze;

curved, ivory white her breast;

nor did her body, her dear side,

belong to another before me.

 

Twenty years we were as one

and sweeter our speech each year.

Eleven babies she bore me

–great slender-fingered fresh branch.

 

I am, but I do not live,

since my round hazel-nut has fallen.

Since my dear love has left me

the dark world is empty and bare.

 

From the day the smooth shaft was sunk

for my house I have not heard

that a guest has laid a spell

on her youthful brown dark hair.

 

Do not hinder me, you people.

What crime to hear my grief.

Bare ruin has entered my home

and the bright brown blaze is out.

 

The King of Hosts and Highways

took her away in His wrath.

Little those branched locks sinne,d

to die on her husband, young and fresh.

 

That soft hand I cherished,

King of the graves and bells,

that hand never forsworn

–my pain it is not beneath my head!

 

Tr. T. Kinsella , The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1989:95-97; note the level of passion after 20 years and eleven children).  The original Celtic of this poem is incredible—a torrent of rhyme, internal rhyme, half-rhyme, alliteration, sound progressions, and every other word-music device, all with an extremely lamenting sound.  Only a handful of the greatest poets can make their sounds unite in driving the full emotional message of the poem, and this poem does it to a supreme degree, unique in the world to my experience.

 

 

Mad Sweeney’s Song of the Wild

 

There was a time when I preferred

the turtle-dove’s soft jubilation

as it flitted round a pool

to the murmur of conversation.

 

There was a time when I preferred

the mountain grouse crying at dawn

to the voice and closeness

of a beautiful woman.

 

There was a time when I preferred

wolf-packs yelping and howling

to the sheepish voice of a cleric

bleating out plainsong.

 

You are welcome to pledge healths

and carouse in your drinking dens;

I will dip and steal water

from a well with my open palm.

 

You are welcome to that cloistered hush

of your students’ conversation;

I will study the pure chant

of hounds baying in Glen Bolcain.

 

You are welcome to your salt meat

and fresh meat in feasting-houses;

I will live content elsewhere

on tufts of green watercress.

(Tr. Seamus Heaney, 1983:72-73.)

Kenneth Jackson memorably translates the last two verses:

“Though you think sweet, yonder in your church, the gentle talk of your students, sweeter I think the splendid talking the wolves make in Glenn mBolcáin.

“Though you like the fat and meat which are eaten in the drinking-halls, I like better to eat a head of clean water-cress in a place without sorrow…”  (Jackson 1971:255).

The “wolves” are actually “hounds” in the text, as translated by Heaney, but I think Jackson is right in assuming that “hounds” here is used, as it is in some other texts, to refer to God’s hounds—the wolves.

 

 

Mt. Cua

 

Sliabh gCua, haunt of wolves, rugged and dark, the wind wails about its glens, wolves howl around its chasms; the fierce brown deer bells in autumn arund it, the crane screams over its crags.

Early medieval Irish; traditional; tr. Kenneth Jackson.  Sliabh gCua means “Mt. Cua” and is pronounced “sleeve cua” or “sleeve gua”

 

 

Love song

 

She’s the white flower of the blackberry, she’s the sweet flower of the raspberry, she’s the best herb in excellence for the sight of the eyes.

She’s my pulse, she’s my secret, she’s the scented flower of the apple, she’s summer in the cold time between Christmas and Easter.

Traditional song (rhyming in Irish), tr. Kenneth Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany (1971); this just has to be the most beautiful of men’s love songs

 

 

Mythic encounter

 

“Another beautiful shining island appeared to them.  Bright grass was there, with spangling of purple-headed flowers; many birds and ever-lovely bees singing a song from the heads of those flowers.  A grave gray-headed man was playing a harp in the island.  He was singing a wonderful song, the sweetest of the songs of the world.  They greeted each other, and the old man told them to go away.”  (again from Kenneth Jackson, 1971:162).

 

Celtic

An Irish poem from the 18th century uses a dead bittern as a symbol for the poet, Cathal Buidhe MacElgun.  The bittern is more than metaphor; it is an alter ego.  This is no raffish drinking song.  The poet is destroying himself by drink and he knows it.  He is trapped in grief—for the bittern, for himself, and and for a great deal of unspecified tragedy that the bittern symbolizes. The poet drinks in a notably unsuccessful attempt to drown the sorrow.  One reason to quote this poem here is that the translator successfully approximates the complex internal rhyme and alliteration of the original, thus giving readers a sense of what Irish poetry really sounds like.

 

The yellow bittern that never broke out

In a drinking-bout, might well have drunk;

His bones are thrown on a naked stone

Where he lived alone like a hermit monk.

O yellow bittern!  I pity your lot,

Though they say that a sot like myself is curst—

I was sober a while, but I’ll drink and be wise

For fear I should die in the end of thirst.

 

It’s not for the common birds that I’d mourn,

The blackbird, the corncrake or the crane,

But for the bittern that’s shy and apart

And drinks in the marsh from the lone bog-drain.

Oh! If I had known you were near your death,

While my breath held out I’d have run to you,

Till a splash from the Lake of the Son of the Bird

Your soul would have stirred and waked anew.

 

My darling told me to drink no more

Or my life would be o’er in a little short while;

But I told her ‘tis drink gives me health and strength,

And will lengthen my road by many a mile.

You see how the bird of the long smooth neck,

Could get his death from the thirst at last-

Come, son of my soul, and drain your cup,

You’ll get no sup when your life is past.

 

In a wintering island by Constantine’s halls,

A bittern calls from a wineless place,

And tells me that hither he cannot come

Till the summer is here and the sunny days.

When he crosses the stream there and wings o’er the sea,

Then a fear comes to me he may fail in his flight—

Well, the milk and the ale are drunk every drop,

And a dram won’t stop our thirst this night.

(trans. Thomas MacDonagh; Kathleen Hoagland 1947:235-236.  This is a song, sung in both Irish and English today.)

 

The medieval Scots were Irish.  In ancient times Scotland was inhabited by the Picts, who spoke a Briton-type Celtic language.  The Scoti, an Irish tribe, invaded and took over in the early middle ages.  So their early Gaelic poetry was thoroughly Irish in background and quality.  This has persisted, in attenuated form, and much folk material demonstrating it has been collected.  Notable is Alexander Carmichael’s huge collection of folk charms (1992).  Carmichael provides countless charms involving plants, animals, and natural phenomena, and showing close relationships with them.  The sun, plants, and the sea are addressed personally (as St. Francis of Assisi did).  Carmichael notes that a young man going hunting was consecrated, and instructed not to kill wantonly or unnecessarily, nor “to kill a bird sitting, nor a beast lying down,…the mother of a brood, nor the mother of a suckling,” or young animals in general (Carmichael 1992:601).

Early Welsh poetry known to us is largely battle verse, rather thin on natural images, but in the high middle ages Welsh nature poetry explodes in pyrotechnic variety and virtuosity.  Usually, nature is merely a backdrop for light love.  However, wisdom literature, teaching texts, passages in long narratives, and sharp images in historical sources all indicate that Wales must not have been very different from Ireland in its early concern with forests and waters.  We have several early poems indicating this quite strongly (Jackson 1935).

In the meantime, there is one medieval Galician poem that sums it all up.  Galician (Gallego) is a language very close to Portuguese.  The word“Galician” is, however, cognate with Gaul, Gallic, Gaelic, and Galatian.  The language resulted from Celts learning proto-Spanish; it carries over Spanish innovations like borrowing the German plural –s from the Visigoths in place of Latin plurals.  But Galician and Portuguese maintained the Celtic fondness for complex vowel systems and for nasalization.  Also, they maintained a number of Celtic words, many of which—specifically tree names—migrated into Spanish.  A great deal of beautiful romantic poetry was written in Galician, which in fact became the language for romantic songs throughout the medieval Iberian Peninsula.  Richard Zenith (1995) has given us a study of this phenomenon, with translations.  The one that captures the spirit of Celtic poetry best, for me, is a brief, simple song (alas, we have lost the melody) titled “Song about a Girl’s Beloved Who Hunts.”  Most readers of the present work will be familiar enough with one or another Romance language to appreciate the wonderful prosody and rhyme of this work.  Since, alas, Gaelic poetry is impossible to read or sound out without some knowledge of the language, this is probably the reader’s best chance to get some sense of  Celtic word-music.  The poem is by Fernand’ Esquio, around 1300.

 

Vayamos, hirmana, vayamos dormir

Nas ribas do lago, hu eu andar vi

A las aves, meu amigo.

 

Vaiamos, hirmana, vaiamos folgar

Nas ribas do lago, hu eu vi andar

A las aves, meu amigo.

 

E nas ribas do lago, hu eu andar vi,

Seu arco na mano as aves ferir,

A las aves, meu amigo.

 

E nas ribas do lago, hu eu vi andar,

Seu arco na mano a las aves tirar,

A las aves, meu amigo.

 

Seu arco na mano as aves ferir,

E las que cantavan leixa las guarir,

A las aves, meu amigo.

 

Seu arco na mano a las aves tirar,

E las que cantavan non nas quer matar, a las aves, meu amigo.

 

(Come with me, sister, and we’ll go sit

Alongside the lake where I have seen

My beloved hunting for birds.

 

Come with me, sister, and we will walk

Alongside the lake where I have watched

My beloved hunting for birds.

 

Alongside the lake where I have seen

His arrows shooting birds in the trees,

My beloved hunting for birds.

 

His arrows shooting birds in the trees,

But he never aims at birds that sing,

My beloved hunting for birds.

 

His arrows shooting birds on the water,

But he never aims at birds that warble,

My beloved hunting for birds.

Tr. Richard Zenith, 1995:234-235.)

This poem perfectly captures, in very short space, three pillars of medieval Celtic life:  love, hunting, and song.  The focus on love and nature, the love of hunting, and the implied equation of all three, is pure Celt.  The equation of birds and young women is a standard Celtic and Germanic linguistic trope, seen in “bride”—originally the same word as “bird”—and of course in the endless slang uses of “bird” and “chick.”  Hunting for birds is still a metaphor in English.  The lover’s sparing of songbirds is also very Celtic.    The Irish and other medieval poems speak of hunting deer and other game, but never of killing a songbird. By contrast, many European peoples hunted songbirds assiduously.  Mediterranean people still do.  North Europeans such as the French and English did also, in the middle ages, and indeed until quite recently.

 

 

Now the holy lamp

 

Now the holy lamp of love

Or unholy if they will,

Lifes her amber light above

Cornamona’s hill.

Children playing round about

Decent doors at edge of dark

Long ago hve ceased to shout.

Now the fox begins to bark.

 

Cradling hands are all too small

And your hair is drenched with dew; Love though strong can build no wall

From the hungry fox for you.

Holy men have said their say

And those holy men are right,

God’s own fox will have his way

This night or some other night.

Patrick MacDonogh (20th century)

 

The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

 

The king he sits in Dumferling town,

Drinking the blood-red wine;

“Oh where shall I get good sailors

To sail this ship of mine?”

 

Then up and spake an elder knight,

Sat at the king’s right knee:

“Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor

That sails upon the sea.”

 

The king has written a broad letter,

And signed it with his hand,

And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens

Was walking on the sand.

 

The first line that Sir Patrick read

A loud laugh laughed he;

But the second line Sir Patrick read

The tear did blind his eye.

 

“Make haste, make haste, my merry men all,

Our ship it sails the morn.”

“Oh say not so, my master dear,

I fear a dead ly storm.

 

Last night I saw the elder moon

With the new moon in her arm,

And I fear, I fear, my master dear,

That we will come to harm.”

 

The Scottish nobles were ich laith                  [very loath]

To wet their cork-heeled shoon;

But long long e’er the play were played

Their hats did swim aboon.                             [above their bodies]

 

Oh long long may their ladies wait

With their fans into their hand,

Awaiting for Sir Patrick Spens

Come sailing to the land.

 

And long long may their ladies wait

With their gold combs into their hair,

Awaiting for their own dear lords,

For them they’ll see nae mair.

 

Half oer, half oer, to Aberdour,

It’s fifty fathom deep,

And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens

With the Scots lords at his feet.

 

(Scottish traditional.  According to legend—unconfirmed—the king wished to get rid of Sir Patrick Spens and other nobles, and was too cowardly to do it directly, so he sent them on a death-voyage to Norway in winter.  This ballad was supposedly composed to rebuke him.  The old sailor in Verse 6-7 knows that the only time it is clear enough to see “the old moon in the new moon’s arms” on the foggy North Sea is when a howling north wind is blowing; such a wind can easily raise 50-foot waves, and to put out in such conditions in medieval sailing craft was frank suicide.  Dumfermline Castle—“Dumferling town”—still exists, a darkly brooding medieval ruin, and you can actually stand there and see the hall where the king sent Sir Patrick to death.  The tune is magnificent and mournful.  See Child 2:17.)

 

 

The Unquiet Grave

 

The wind blows cold today, my love,

And a few small drops of rain.

I never had but one true love,

In cold grave she was lain.

 

I’ll do as much for my true love

As any young man may;

I’ll sit and mourn all on her grave

For twelve month and a day.

 

The twelve month and a day being o’er,

The dead began to speak:

“Oh who sits mourning all on my grave

And will not let me sleep?”

 

Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,

And will not let you sleep;

I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips

And that is all I seek.

 

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips

But my breath smells earthy strong;

If you had one kiss of my clay-cold lips

Your days would not be long.”

 

Tis down in yonder garden green,

Love, where we used to walk,

The finest flower that ever was seen

Is withered to a stalk.

 

“The stalk is withered dry, my love,

So will our hearts decay;

So many yourself content, my love,

Till God calls you away.”

 

(British Isles, traditional ballad, in many versions.  The tune to this one is sad and resigned, and incredibly beautiful.  See also Child 2:234.)

 

 

Poems by Edward Thomas (Welsh poet, early 20th century, died on the battlefield in WWI)

 

Adlestrop

 

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because on afternoon

Of heat the express train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

 

The steam hissed.  Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform.  What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

 

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

 

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

(Note, for rhyme, the last word is pronounced “glostershur”)

 

 

The Ashgrove

 

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made

Little more than the dead ones made of shade.

If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:

But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

 

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval—

Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles—but nothing at all,

Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,

Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

 

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

 

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

And I had what most I desered, without search or desert or cost.

 

 

Old Man

(The plant is southernwood,  Artemisia)

 

Old Man, or Lad’s-love: in the name there’s nothing

To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,

The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,

Growing with rosemary and lavender.

Even to one that knows it well, the names

Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:

At least, what that is clings not to the names

In spite of time.  And yet I like the names.

 

The herb itself I like not, but for certain

I love it, as some day the child will love it

Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush

Whenever she goes in or out of the house.

Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling

The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps

Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs

Her fingers and runs off.  The bush is still

But half as tall as she, though it is as old;

So well she clips it.  Not a word she says;

And I can only wonder how much hereafter

She will remember, with that bitter scent,

Of garden rows, and ancient damson trees

Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,

A low thick bush beside the door, and me

Forbidding her to pick.

As for myself,

Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,

Sniff them and thin and sniff again and try

Once more to think what it is I am remembering,

Always in vain.  I cannot like the scent,

yet I would rather give up others more sweet,

With no meaning, than this bitter one.

I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray

And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;

Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait

For what I should, yet never can, remember:

No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush of lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,

Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;

Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

These poems are from The Works of Edward Thomas (Thomas 1994), a book I treasure, and I hope it goes to someone who cares.  This particular poem is intensely personal for me; I have the same responses to the plant, and my daughters had the same early experiences with it as Thomas’ daughter—because I planted it by our door in honor of the poem.

 

 

OTHER CULTURES

 

The Last Kamassian Poem

The Kamassian language (distantly related to Finnish and spoken by a tiny group of reindeer herders) died out in the early 20th century.  In 1914 one old man was located who still spoke it fluently, in a tiny community of speakers in the arctic Yenisei River area of Russia.  He gave a few word lists, then sang this song and would say no more.  (The final lines refer to coverings of the traditional lodge; they curl when long abandoned.)  So this is all we have of Kamassian.  It is a lament not only for his language and his people, but for the entire world, as much as he knew it.

 

My black mountains

Where I used to wander

Have remained behind.

The soil I walked on grew

A belt of golden grass.

My black mountains

Have remained behind,

My white mountains

Have remained behind,

Our strength

Has remained behind.

From many families

Have I remained behind.

I have gone astray from my kinsmen,

And I am left alone.

My lakes where I was wont to fish

Have remained behind.

I do not see them now.

The poles in the middle of my tent

Have gone rotten,

The birch-bark slices that were sewn together

Have all curled up.

(Tr. T. Vuorela 1964)

 

 

Permanence

 

The crest of the mountain

Forever remains, forever remains

Though rocks continually fall

Paiute, tr. J. W. Powell (1970:123; many other almost as good Paiute songs there)

 

 

Ancient Greek:  Small farms immortalized

 

Here is Klito’s little shack.

Here is his little cornpatch.

Here is his tiny vineyard.

Here is his little woodlot.

Here Klito spent eighty years.

(Translated by Kenneth Rexroth; in Jay 1981:102.)

 

Dear earth, take old Amyntichus to your heart,

Remembering how he toiled upon you once:

Fixing in olive-stocks, and slips of vine,

And corn, and channels where the water runs.

He made you rich with herbs and fruit: in turn

Lie soft on his grey head; and bloom for him.

(Anonymous epitaph, trans. Alistair Elliot, in Jay 1981:327; “corn” means “any grain” here, the possibilities being wheat and barley, not maize.)

 

Spare the mother of acorns, man.  Cut down some paliurus,

old mountain pine or sea-pine, or ilex or dry arbutus.

But keep your axe out of the oak: remember our forefathers

said that once upon a time the oaks were our first mothers.

(Diodoros Zonas, ca. 100 BCE; trans. Alistair Elliot; Jay 1981:169.)

 

Medieval Provençal

In the late 12th century, the Provençal troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn perfectly summarized the new mood in a transcendently impulsive outburst of song:

 

Ca l’erba fresch’ e.lh folha par

E la flors boton’ el verjan,

E.l rossinhols autet e clar

Leva sa votz e mou so chan,

Joi ai de lui, e joi ai de la flor

E joi de me e de midons major;

Daus totas partz sui de joi claus e sens,

Mas sel es jois que totz autres jois vens.

 

(When fresh gass-blades and leaves appear

And flowers bud the branching plants,

And the nightingale most loud and clear

Uplifts its voice and song descants,

I joy in it, and in the flowered air

And take joy in my self and lady fair;

All round I’m wrapped with joy and girt indeed,

But this is a joy all other joys exceed.

Translation by Hubert Creekmore (1952:578.)

 

 

SPIRITUAL

 

Easter

 

Most glorious Lord of life that on this day

Didst make thy triumph over death and sin,

And having harrowed hell didst bring away

Captivity thus captive, us to win:

This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,

And grant that we for whom thou diddest die

Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin

May live forever in felicity.

And that thy love we weighing worthily,

May likewise love thee for the same again;

And for thy sake that all life dear did buy

With love may one another entertain.

So let us love, dear love, like as we ought;

Love is the lesson that the Lord us taught.

Edmund Spenser

 

The Song of the Sky

I will sing the song of the sky.  This is the song of the tired salmon panting as they swim up the swift current.

I go around where the water runs into whirlpools.

They talk quickly, as if they are in a hurry.

The sky is turning over.  They call me.

Traditional Tsimshian song as sung by William Beynon (Tsimshian chief); tr. by Beynon and Benjamin Munroe, early 20th century.  Recall that the salmon give birth and die.  The sense of sacrificing one’s life for one’s people is clear in the poem.

 

 

Education is all right, I’ll tell you before you start,

Before you educate the head, try to educate the heart.

Washington Phillips, Texas bluesman (recorded 1930)

 

 

Life and Death

 

My heart is a lamp, moving in the current,

Drifting to some landing-place I do not know.

Darkness moves before me on the river,

It moves again behind,

And in the moving darkness

Only ripples’ sounds are heard,

For underneath the ripples moves

The current of the quiet night.

My lamp, as if to seek a friend, goes drifting

By the shore.  Both day and night

My drifting lamp moves searching

By the shore.  My Friend is ocean to this river.

My friend is the shore to this shoreless river.

The current bends again.

At one such bending he will call to me,

And I will look upon his face,

And he will catch me up in his embrace,

And then my flame, my pain, will be extinguished.

And on his breast will be extinguished, in my joy,

My flame.

Bengal folk song (Tr. Edward Dimock 1966)

 

 

On the story of how the tale of the Buddha’s conversion to religion got into the Christian world, and the Buddha and his charioteer wound up being considered Christian saints, Sts. Barlaam and Josaphat (saints’ day Nov. 27):

Was Barlaam truly Josaphat,

And Buddha truly each?

What better parable than that

The Unity to preach—

 

The simple brotherhood of souls

That seek the highest good:

He who in kingly chariot rolls,

O wears the hermit’s hood.

 

The Church mistook?  The heathen once

Among her saints to range?

The deed of that diviner dunce

Our wisdom would not change.

 

For Culture’s pantheon they grace

In catholic array.

Each saint hath had his hour and place

But now ‘tis All Saints Day.

Israel Zangwill (a great Jewish author), 1895 (quoted Lang1966:7)

(This is, in the end, my favorite religious poem)

 

 

The Slidin’ Delta

 

The Slidin’ Delta run right by my do’,

I’m leavin here, baby, honey don’t you want to go.

I’m leavin here, baby, honey don’t you want to go,

I’m goin somewhere I never been befo’.

My bag is packed, my trunk’s already gone,

I can’t see, baby, honey what you waitin on.

I’m leavin here, baby, don’t you want to go,

I’m goin up the country and I ain’t comin back no mo’.

John Hurt (blues singer; from traditional material, elaborated by him.  The Slidin’ Delta was a local train.  The train is a standard symbol in blues for parting, and thus for death, and thus for mystic experience—all of which are fully invoked here.  The Medieval “image, symbol, metaphor, and allegory” all perfectly captured.  Hurt’s performance of this song on his record “Worried Blues,” 1963, is to my mind the greatest blues performance ever recorded)

 

 

A Young Girl’s Tomb

 

Wir gedenkens noch.  Das ist, als muste

Alles dieses einmal wieder sein.

Wei ein Baum an der Limonenkuste

Trugst du deinen kleinen leichten Brüste

In deas Rauschen seines Bluts hinein:

 

–jenes Gottes.  Und es war der schlanke

Flüchtling, der verwöhnende der Fraun,

Süss und glühend, warm wie dein Gedanke,

überschattend deine frühe Flanke

Und geneigt wie deine Augenbrau’n.

 

(We think of it still.  It is as if

All of this must be again.

Like a tree on the lemon coast

You raised your small light breasts

Into the rushing of his blood—

That God.  And it was the slender

Fugitive, ravisher of girls,

Sweet and glowing, warm like your thought,

Overshadowing your free flank,

Arched above you like your eyebrows.)

Rainer Maria Rilke (my translation, but be sure to read the exquisitely beautiful German.  Compare “The Unquiet Grave” and the laments by Yuan Zhen and O’Dalaigh, above.  Love drives the hardest grief, and the greatest poems about it do not hide the sexual loss.)

 

 

Robinson Jeffers

 

Bixby’s Landing

 

They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down here in an iron car

On a long cable; here the ships warped in

And took their loads from the engines, the water is deep to the cliff.  The car

Hangs half way over in the gape of the gorge,

Stationed like a north star above the peaks of the redwoods, iron perch

For the little red hawks when they cease from hovering

When they’ve struck prey; the spider’s fling of a cable rust-glued to the pulleys.

The laborers are gone, but what a good multitude

Is here in return: the rich-lichened rock, the rose-tipped stonecrop, the constant

Ocean’s voices, the cloud-lighted sspace.

The kilns are cold on the hill but here in the rust of the broken boiler

Quick lizards lighten, and a rattrlesnake flows

Down the cacked masonry, over the crumbled fire-brick. In the rotting timbers

And roofless platforms all the free companies

Of windy grasses have root and make seed; wild buckwheat blooms in the fat

Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.

Two duckhawks darting in the skiy of their cliff-hing nest are the voice of the headland.

Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,

Men’s failures are often as beautiful as men’s triumphs, but your returnings

Are even more precious than your first presence.

 

Nova

 

That Nova was a moderate star like our goo0d sun; it stored no doubt a little more than it spent

Of heat and energy until the increasing tension came to the trigger-point

Of a new chemistry; then what was already flaming found a new manner of flaming ten-thousandfold

More brightly for a brief time; whjat was a pin-point fleck on a sensitive plate at the great telescope’s

Eye-piece now shouts down the steep night to the naked eye, a nine-day super-star.

It is likely our moderate

Father the sun will sometimes put off his nature for a similar glory.  The earth would share it; these tall

Green trees would become a moment’s torches and vanish, the oceans would explode into invisible steam,

The ships and the great whales fall through them like flaming meteors into the emptied abysm, the si-mile

Hollows of the Pacif sea-bed might smoke for a moment.  Then the earth would be like the pale proud moon,

Nothing but vitrified snad and rock would be left on earth.  This is a probable death-apssion

For the sun’s planets; we have no knowledge to assure us it may not happen at any moment of time.

 

Meanwhile the sun shines wisely and warm, trees flutter green in the wind, girls take their clothes off

To bathe in the cold ocean or to hunt love; they stand lughing in the white foam, they have beautiful

Shoulders and thighs, they are beautiful animals, all life is beautiful.  We cannot be sure of life for one moment; We can, by force and self-discipline, by many refusals and a few assertions, in the teeth of fortune assure oiurselves

Freedom and integrity in life or integrity in death.  And we know that the nermous invulnerablle beauty of things

Is the face of God, to live glady loin its presence, and die without grief or fear knowing it survives us.

(1937:111-112)

 

Hooded Night   [at his house at the tip of Monterey Peninsula]

 

At night, toward dawn, all the lights of the shore have died,

And a wind moves.  Moves in the dark

The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than manlike,

Not to be compared; itself and itself.

Its breath blown shoreward huddles the world with a fog; no stars

Dance in heaven; no ship’s light glances.

I see the heavy granite bodies of the rocks of the headland,

That were ancient here before Egypt had pyramids,

Bulk on the gray of the sky, and beyond them the jets of the young trees

I planted the year of the Versailles peace.

Bnut here is the final unridiculous peace.  Before the first man

Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses,

And the pallid region in the stone-rough dome of fog where the mooon

Falls on the west.  Here is reality.

The other is a spectral episode; after the inquisitive animal’s

Amusements are quiet:  the dark glory.

(1929:129)

 

Oh, Lovely Rock

 

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.

The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,

Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts

Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.

Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves

On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again.  The revived flame

Lighted myh sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall

Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen:  it was the rock wall

That fascinated my eyes and mind.  Nothing strange:  light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,

Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fer nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were

Seeing rock for the first timde.  As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily

And living rock.  Nothing strange…I cannot

Tell you how strange:  the silent passionk the deep nobility and childlike loveliness:  this fate going on

Outside our fates.  It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child.  I shall die, and my boys

Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,

And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive:  the energies

That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above:  and I, many packed centuries ago,

Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

 

Robinson Jeffers (1937:124-125.)

 

One who sees giant Orion, the torches of winter midnight,

Enormously walking above the ocean in the west of heaven;

And watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight

Waver like a spent rocket, wavering toward new discoveries,

Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;

And watches the long coast mountain vibrate from bronze to green,

Bronze to green, year after year, and all the stream

Dry and flooded, dry and flooded, in the racing seasons;

And knows that exactly this and not another is the world,

The ideal is phantoms for bait, the spirit is a flicker on a grave;

May serve, with a certain detachment, the fugitive human race,

Or his own people, his own household; but hardly himself;

And will not wind himself into hopes nor sicken with despairs.

He has found the peace and adored the God; he handles in autumn

The germs of far-future spring.

Sad sons of the stormy fall,

No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you

To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside,

Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds,

Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain,

But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

 

1935

 

 

DOGS

 

How cruel it is, I think, that men will take the name of “dog” in vain,

When of all creatures dogs will least forget good deeds.

Surely, if some person makes you cross enough to curse,

The proper insult is “You man, son of a man”!

 

(and in another poem)

I set off with Qatmir, my dog, a fellow traveler

Whose presence warmed my heart along the way.

For every time I paused to rest, he’d pause by me,

Regarding me with looks of love and tenderness.

Fulfilling all the dues of good companionship,

As if he were of all friends the most true.

And this while my own people—of the human race—

All treat me with a meanness that’s insatiable….

Abu’l-Barakat al-Balafiqi, medieval Andalusian; tr. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (in Saudi Aramco World, 2013.  I have a big dog named Kitmir, a variant of Qatmir.  I didn’t know about this poem when I named him!)

 

The Hare Hunt (excerpt)

In his several-volume poem Polyolbion, Michael Drayton (ca 1600) describes a rural hare hunt.  He says of the hare:             She riseth from her nest, as though on earth she flew,

Forced by some yelping cute to give the greyhounds view.

He explains “cute” as a local dialect word for a mongrel dog.  It has no connection with the modern word.

 

FINAL CYNICISM

 

The good old days (Mexican folksong)

 

Este es un son que bailaba Carmelita

Aquellos tiempos, los tiempos de don Simón,

Que amarraban los perros con longaniza

Y ni siquiera les ponían atención.

(This is a song that Carmelita danced

Back in the days of Don Simón,

When they tied up the dogs with sausages

And they didn’t even pay attention.)

(My tr.  Times were so good the dogs didn’t even notice the sausages.  For exaggeration of the goodness of the old days, this is rivaled only by a line heard by Alan Beals in India:  “Yeah, back then if you needed rain you just reached up and pulled down the edge of a cloud.”)

 

The World

 

I asked of the Sage the nature of this world.

He said:  “As long as you live it is wind and incantation.”

I said:  “What do you call him who sets his heart on it?”             He said:  “He is either intoxicated, or blind, or mad.”

Medieval Arabic (from a history of Oman in the old days)

 

Knowledge and wealth are like narcissus and rose,

They never blossom in one place together;

The man of knowledge possesses no wealth,

The wealthy man has scant store of knowledge.

Medieval Persian song verse, trans. A. J. Arberry (probably from his Persian Poems; I’ve lost the reference)

 

Two poems on gratitude:  Great minds run in the same channels (no chance of mutual influence here)

 

Medieval India:

 

You gave me feet to tire of travel,

A wife to leave me, a voice for begging

And a body of decrepitude.

If you never are ashamed oh God,

Do you not at least grow weary of your gifts?

Rajasekhara (medieval India), tr. W. Ingalls (1968)

 

Nineteenth-Century Russia:

 

My thanks for all Thou gavest through the years:

For passion’s secret torments without end,

The poisoned kiss, the bitterness of tears,

The vengeful enemy, the slanderous friend,

The spirit’s ardor in the desert spent,

Every deception, every wounding wrong;

My thanks for each dark gift that Thou has sent;

But heed Thou that I need not thank Thee long.

Mikhail Lermontov (tr. Babette Deutsch; in Creekmore 1952)

 

 

Anonymous Daoist Poem; the most absolutely cynical poem I know

 

The grain cart enters, the manure cart exits,

They take turns coming and going.

When will it come to an end?

Even if (people can) cause their life to span over a hundred years,

That is only 36,000 days.

Tr. Erlandson 2004

 

 

Partial List of Sources (for this and Environment Poetry; many of my sources are long lost and range from personal communications to field recordings)

 

Balaban, John. 2000.  Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Hong.  Port Townsend, WA:  Copper Canyon Press.

Bashō, tr. David Landis Barnhill.  2005.  Bashō’s Journey.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Basho, Matsuo.  2008.  Basho:  The Complete Haiku.  Tr. Jane Reichhold.  Tokyo:  Kodansha.

Bynner, Witter, and Kiang Kang-Hu.  1929.  The Jade Mountain.  New York:  Knopf.

Child, Francis James.  1965 (orig. 1885).  The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.  Vol. 2 (of 5 v).  New York:  Dover.

Creekmore, Hubert (ed.).  1952.  A Little Treasury of World Poetry.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Dimock, Edward.  1966.  The Place of the Hidden Moon.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elvin, Mark.  2004.  The Retreat of the Elephants:  An Environmental History of China.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Erlandson 2004:  God only knows where I found this one.  Some anthology of Chinese writing.

Han-shan.  2000.  The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain.  Tr. Red Pine (Bill Porter).  Revised edn.  Port Townsend, WA:  Copper Canyon Press.

Hoagland, Kathleen.  1947.  1000 Years of Irish Poetry. New York: Welcome Rain.

Huard, Pierre, and Maurice Durand.  1954.  Connaissance du Viet-Nam, p. 274.  Hanoi:  École Française de’Extrème-Orient; Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.

Ingalls, W. H.  1968.  Sanskrit Poems.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone.  1935.  Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

—ururls  1971.  A Celtic Miscellany.  Harmondsworth, Middlesex:  Penguin.

Jay, Peter (ed.).  1981.  The Greek Anthology.  Rev. edn.  Harmondsworth (England):  Penguin.

Jeffers, Robinson.   1929.  Dear Judas.  New York: Horace Liveright.

—  1937.  Such Counsels You Gave to Me.  New York:  Random House.

Karlgren, Bernhard.  1950.  The Book of Odes.  Stockholm:  Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.

Kim Jaihiun.  1994.  Classical Korean Poetry.  Fremont, CA:  Asian Humanities Press.

Kinsella, Thomas.  1989.  The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Lang, David M.  1966.  The Balavariani (Barlaam and Josaphat): A Tale from the Christian East.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Lee, Peter.  1974.  Poems from Korea.  Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim.  2013.  “A Menagerie.”  Saudi Aramco World, Jan.-Feb., 10-13.

Mair, Victor; Nancy Steinhardt; Paul R. Goldin (eds.).  2005.  Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture.  Honolulu:  University of Hawai’i Press.

Nguyen Ngoc Bich.  1975.  A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry.  New York: Knopf.

O’Rourke, Kevin.  2002.  The Book of Korean Shijo.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rutt, Richard.  1971.  The Bamboo Grove:  An Introduction to Sijo.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Seaton, J. P.  1997.  I Don’t Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei.  Port Townsend, WA:  Copper Canyon Press.

Seaton, Jerome P., and Dennis Maloney.  1994.  A Drifting Boat:  Chinese Zen Poetry.  Fredonia, NY:  White Pine Press.

Thomas, Edward.  1994.  The Works of Edward Thomas.  Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions.

Vuorela, Toivo.  1964.  Finno-Ugric Peoples.  Tr. John Atkinson.  Ind. U. Res Center, Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 39.

Waley, Arthur.  1961.  Chinese Poems.  London: George Allen and Unwin.

Wong, Shirleen (alas, lost the ref, an obscure article years ago)

Zenith, Richard.  1995.  113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems.  Manchester, England:  Carcanet is association with Calouste Gulbenkain Foundation and Instituto Camões.

Zhang, Cong Ellen.  2011.  Transformative Journals:  Travel and Culture in Song China.  Honolulu:  University of Hawai’i Press.

Zhuang Zi.  1968.  The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu.  Tr. Burton Watson.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Gao Lian and Ming Dynasty Nutraceuticals

August 26th, 2015

 

 

Essays on Drinks and Delicacies for Medicinal Eating

Yin Zhuan Fu Shi Jian 飲饌服食箋

 

By Gao Lian (Ming Dynasty)

 

Chinese edition edited by T’ao Wentai

 

Translated by Sumei Yi, 2008-9

 

English version edited by E. N. Anderson

 

ROUGH DRAFT; HELP SORELY NEEDED WITH THIS.  We have taken major pains to get the plant and animal names right—many defy translation—but the details of the recipes are often unclear and needing further research.

 

English Editor’s Note:

Gao Lian was a 16th-century playwright, litterateur and practitioner of the arts of healing and longevity. He wrote or compiled several treatises on these matters, collected in his “eight treatises” published in 1591 (Wikipedia).  The present translation is of the material on food and drink from this collection, including a good deal of alchemy and medicine.  Since late Ming has unaccountably been relatively neglected by students and translators of Chinese food texts, this work seems worthy of presentation, even in a rough translation.

Gao’s approach is totally eclectic.  He reproduces a great mass of odd advice and recipes, many of the latter so hard to follow that one doubts strongly if Gao ever tried them or even knew anyone who had. Reproducing any old advice that might help someone live long was a Ming Dynasty practice.  In this book, thoroughly practical village advice is mixed with arcane alchemy.  Most of the recipes are for medicines or preserves, but many are for regular dishes; few, however, are in a state that would allow them to be used easily today.

The book is of interest largely to show what a refined gentleman of the 16th century would think worthy of attention, but some of the recipes are good or historically important.  Particularly interesting is the Sweets section, for it includes several Near Eastern recipes, including several for halwah—specifically so called (“hai luo”) in one case.  Evidently, Near Eastern foods continued to be of interest in China, as they had been in Yuan (Buell et al. 2010).  The nativist reaction after the fall of Yuan had largely eliminated this interest, but it persisted, as shown not only by recipe books like this but also by government reprinting of Yuan works.

In the medical sections, Gao shows a striking fascination with Solomon’s seal, lilyturf, Atractylodes spp., and a few other plants. Sumei Yi and I are not aware if this is his personal devotion or a general Ming idea, but the Yinshan Zhengyao of the Yuan Dynasty also liked Solomon’s seal, reprinting a long paean of praise to it from Ge Hong.  Gao is also interestingly careful about separating the three kinds of cardamom:  baidoukou (the white cardamom familiar in the west), caokou (Ammomum tsaoko, a large round brown cardamom), and sharen (Ammomum villosum and sometimes similar species), very large coarse musky cardamoms from south China and southeast Asia.  He carefully distinguishes their uses and often calls for two kinds in one recipe.  Most of his medicine, alas, is uncritical reprinting of a low order of alchemical and Daoist herbal literature, far from anything verifiable or usable in the non-Immortal world.  By contrast, much of his nutritional advice, and his advice on the few medical recipes that are grounded in normal life, is very good.

Significantly, Gao’s book appeared at almost the same time as Li Shizhen’s great herbal, the Bencao Gangmu (1593).  Both were part of a wide cultural renaissance in the late Ming (Mote 1999) that almost broke through to modern science.  If Ming had not crashed and burned, China might have participated in a worldwide development.  Certainly Li’s book was as advanced as any herbal in Europe in his time, and Gao’s was equal to or at least not far behind what passed for nutritional knowledge in 16th-century Europe.

The Wikipedia entry intriguingly says he described bipolar disorder; we eagerly await details on this.

In translating, we have given scientific names and common popular ones but have not been exhaustive (so far) about identifications (or consistent about citing “authorities” with names).  A cleaned-up translation with all this made consistent will take time, and the editor is lacking that commodity at this point, but needs to make the work available.  Further time and research is sorely needed.

Gao’s health writings have been the subject of an article we have not seen, cited in the Wikipedia entry “Gao Lian, dramatist” (retrieved Oct. 20, 2009):

Carpenter, Bruce E.  1990.  “Kao Lien’s Eight Treatises on the Nurturing of Life,” Tezukayama University Review 67:38-51.

See also:

Buell, Paul D.; E. N. Anderson; Charles Perry.  2010.  A Soup for the Qan.   Leiden:  Brill.

Source on many of the food traditions on which Gao drew.

Clunas, Craig.  1991.  Superfluous Things:  Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China.  Urbana:  University of Illinois Press.

Some discussion of Gao; an excellent account of his world.

Hu Shiu-Ying.  2005.  Food Plants of China.  Hong Kong:  Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.

By far the best modern work on Chinese food plants.

Huang, H. T.  2000.  Science and Civilisation in China.  Vol. 6:  Biology and Biological Technology.  Part V:  Fermentations and Food Science.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Definitive work on fermented and prepared food in China, giving full details on almost everything of the sort mentioned by Gao.

Katz, Sandor Ellix.  2012.  The Art of Fermentation.  White River Junction, VT:  Chelsea Green Publications.

This encyclopedic work has full details on Chinese fermentations, including details that even Huang missed.

Li Shizhen.  2003.  Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu).  Tr. Li Zhenguo and group.  Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Excellent translation and edition of the greatest of Chinese herbals, one of the great works of premodern science.  Authoritative identification in modern Linnaean terms of the Chinese plants Li listed.

Mote, Frederick.  1999.  Imperial China 900-1800.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

This translation is made from an edition published in 1985 by the China Commercial Press in Beijing.

Translator’s and English-language editor’s comments in text are in square brackets.  Comments in parentheses are parenthetical notes by Gao Lian or his sources, including characters to explain our translation (or lack of it).  Thus Chinese characters and names are in regular parentheses, being part of the original text.   Most of the footnotes—the ones in Chinese—are by the Chinese editor, Tao Wentai, and consist largely of explanations or relevant quotes from other sources.  The translator, Sumei Yi, has contributed footnotes (the ones in English) that are confined to brief comments on translation, including identification or failure to identify.

Many of Gao’s plant names defy all search through the Bencao Gangmu and dictionaries and encyclopedias in Chinese or English; we have searched a wide range of sources. This is unsurprising, as a great deal remains to be recorded about local and specialized usages even in contemporary Chinese.  We have tried to be accurate.  Mei, for instance, is simply turned into an English word (mei), since “plum” is wrong (there are real plums mentioned in some recipes, so confusion is possible) and “flowering-apricot” more accurate but rather clumsy.

The translations for the strictly medicinal recipes are so fiendish that we have included the Chinese, since we are often at somewhat of a loss.

 

 

 

Gao Lian’s preface

 

Mr. Gao said: “Drinking and eating are the basis of life for humans.” Therefore, in the body, yin and yang move and are used, and the five phases mutually produce each other.  This is not unconnected with drinking and eating. After drinking and eating, the qi of grains will fill one. When the qi of grains is full [has filled one], the qi of blood will thrive. When the qi of blood thrives, the tendons and strength will be improved. The spleen and stomach are basic to the five [major] internal organs. The qi of the [other] four internal organs come from the spleen. The four seasons [sic; presumably life in the four seasons] are based upon the qi of the stomach. Drinking and eating helps support the qi. When qi is generated, the essence is improved. When the essence is generated, the qi will be nourished. When the qi is full, the spirit will be generated. When the spirit is full, the body will be completed. This is because they need and use each other.

A man should not feel indifferent to his daily use of nourishment in his life養生. He should not let those nourishing him harm him or turn the five flavors into killers of the five internal organs. Then he obtains the way of nourishing life.

In my writings, I put teas and waters first, then congee and vegetables, then meat dishes, liquors, flours, cakes, fruits and so on. I have only collected what is proper and useful and do not seek the abnormal. As for cooking living creatures or flavoring precious food with pepper and spices, these are for chefs serving the Office of Grand Official[1] under the Son of Heaven.  Such things are not for a hermit mountain-man山人 like me. I do not collect them at all.

Other food records in the literature of immortals have benefited the world. Recipes consistently proved effective should be made using the proper rules. It is up to the cook to make the recipe in a spiritual and wise fashion. One should choose what can be eaten, and record ones that help cure illnesses and prolong life. Individuals are different based upon their hidden yin (yincang阴藏) or hidden yang (yangcang阳藏). They should take cold or hot medicines accordingly. One must have one’s qi and nature harmonized and peaceful, and have simple desires. The power of what have been taken and eaten will be then effective. If the six desires are too strong, the five sense organs[2] will malfunction, and then a person will be recorded in the register of ghosts even if he takes food based on the immortal recipes. Then what is the benefit of taking it? The knowledgeable should think for themselves.

I have edited the recipes into one group of notes: drinks and foods and how they can be taken and eaten.

 

 

Preface on Various Previous Treatises

 

The Perfected Man[3] said: “the spleen is able to nourish the other organs like a mother.” Men knowing how to nourish life called it Yellow Elder Lady (huangpo黄婆)[4]. Sima Chengzhen taught people that one should keep the yellow qi and cause it to enter into the Muddy Pill (niwan泥丸)[5], which enables him to achieve longevity. Chuyu Yi said that if one can eat when he is ill (angu安穀), he will live beyond his allotted span.  If he cannot eat when he is ill, he will not live up to his allotted time. Therefore, we know that if the spleen and stomach are complete and strong, the hundreds of illnesses will not be produced.

An old man in Jiangnan was seventy-three years old and as strong as the youth. When asked how he nourished himself, he answered, “I have no special formula. Just that all my life I have not been used to drinking soup or water. Ordinary people will drink several sheng a day. I drink only a few he, and merely let them touch and moisten my lips. The spleen and stomach dislike wetness. If one drinks little, his stomach will be strong and the qi will thrive and the liquid flow. If a person risks taking a long journey, he will not feel thirsty either.” These can be considered true words, and not trivial.

Eating and drinking should take time. The degree of hunger and fullness should be moderate. Water and food should change such that the collected qi flows are harmonized. Then the essence and blood will be produced. The circulation of qi and that of blood (rongwei榮衛) will keep going smoothly. The internal organs will remain balanced. The spirit will be peaceful. The upright qi will be full inside the body. The mysterious and pefected will meet the outside [world?]. The inner and outer vicious illnesses (xieli邪沴)[6] will not attack him, and the various kinds of illnesses will not be able to arise.

For proper drinking and eating: if one does not take food till he feels hungry, he will not be satisfied with chewing sufficiently. If one does not drink till he feels thirsty, he will not be satisfied with drinking slowly. One should not wait to eat till he feels very hungry and he should not overeat. One should not wait to drink till he feels very thirsty and he should not drink too frequently. One should not be concerned about how delicate the food is or how warm the drink is.

The sixth in the “Essay on Seven Taboos” (qijinwen七禁文) composed by the Perfected Man of Grand Unity (taiyi zhenren太乙真人) says: Refining the drink and food will nourish the qi of stomach. Peng Helin said that the spleen is an internal zang 臟[7]organ and the stomach is an internal fu腑 organ. The qi of spleen and stomach will compensate each other. The stomach is the sea of water and grains, mainly receiving water and grains. The spleen is in the middle, grinding and digesting them. They will turn into the blood and qi, nourishing the whole body and irrigating the five internal organs. Therefore, the man practicing the technique of nourishing his life cannot eat without refining his food. This does not mean preparing all sorts of things growing in the water and on the ground, or strange and precious dishes. It means not eating the raw or the cold, nor the gross or the hard, nor forcing oneself to eat or drink. One should eat when he feels hungry and should not overeat. One should drink when he feels thirsty and should not overdrink. Otherwise, he will encounter the situations mentioned by Confucius [actually said to be avoided by Confucius]:  the food spoils, the fish stinks, and the meat decays, so that they cannot be eaten. All these situations harm the qi of stomach. Not only will they make people sick, they harm life. If one hopes to gain longevity, he should be deeply alarmed about this. Those who want to support their elder relatives, or those who want to live happily and support themselves, should also know it.

Huang Tiingjian said:  “In Tongzhou, people steam lamb till it is mashed and then add apricot-kernel congee (xinglao杏酪) and eat it with a knife instead of chopsticks. In Nanyang, they add sophora sprouts to the Stirring-Heart Noodle (boxinmian撥心面) and wash them with warm water. The adept’s rice-covered dish (san糝) should be the plastered pork (mozhu抹豬) from Xiangyang. The rice (chui炊) should be the fragrant rice from Gongcheng. The offering (jian薦) should be steamed young goose. Let a chef from Wuxing chop a perch caught in the Songjiang River and then cook it with water taken from the King Kang Valley on Mt. Lu. Use a small amount of the highest-grade tea from Zengkeng. Then take off your [formal] clothes and lie down. Let someone read aloud the first and second Rhymed Essays on the Red Wall (qianhou chibi fu前後赤壁賦) composed by Su Shi. These are enough for one to have an enjoyable break.”  [Or “a laugh,” but Su’s essays on the tragedy of the Red Wall are anything but funny, so something gentler is intended.] Although this is only a fantasy (yuyan寓言) told by Huang Tingjian, we can imagine the refinement of those foods. Would that we might gather them together and offer them to the elders as delicious sustenance.

Su Shi says in his “Rhymed Essay on Gourmets” (laotao fu老饕賦): “The chef waves a knife—Yiya [the mythical super-chef of ancient China] is cooking and stewing! The water should be fresh and the pot clean. The fire must not be old and firewood must not be rotten. Nine times steamed and sunned, more than a hundred times boiled and floated and sunk in the hot stock to make the soup! Taste a piece of meat from the neck. Chew the two pincers [of a crab] before the frost descends (shuangjiang霜降). Cook the mashed cherry with honey. Steam the lamb with almond congee. The clam is to be half cooked with liquor. The crab is served a bit raw, with lees. Therefore, gather the tenderness and tastiness of every food and nourish me as a gourmet. A lovely girl, docile, her face is as fresh as plum and peach, plays the jade se瑟 of Consort Xiang and the cloud ao (yun’ao云璈)[8] of the draughts of the Heavenly God. Ask the immortal lady E Lühua萼綠華 to dance according to the ancient song of Yulunpao郁輪袍. Take the glasses from the southern sea and hold the wine from Liangzhou. They wish me longevity when I divide the remaining wine among the attending boys. My face gradually turns red and I am surprised when the pipa made from sandalwood is played. The song is as wonderful as a string of pearls and as long as a thread spun out of a cocoon. I feel pity for her tired hands and ask her to rest for awhile. I suspect that her lips are dry and some ointment should be applied. Pour a jar of milk, which is as white as snow. Place as many as one hundred jade ship-shaped serving trays. The guests’ eyes are as wet as the water in the fall. Salt and bones are mashed in the liquor made in the spring. The pretty girl asks for leave and then the clouds disperse [probably an arcane erotic reference]. The gentleman suddenly escapes into Zen. The wind passing through the pine trees, as the water is boiled with bubbles as tiny as crab eyes. The rabbit-hair brush is floating above the snow-white paper. The gentleman rises up with a laugh. The sea is broad and the sky is high.”  [Like Huang’s, this is a fantasy, but it is even more surrealistic and visionary.  Su Shi could be a very down-to-earth poet, but he could leap the void too, and this is as far out as he gets.]

A perch dish from Wu Prefecture: collect perch no longer than three chi during the eighth and ninth month when the frost descends. Mince it. Wash it in water and wrap it with a piece of cloth. Let the water completely evaporate. Spread it on a plate. Pick both flowers and leaves of aromatic madder (xiangrou香柔, Elsholzia ciliata) [9]. Mince them and add them into the minced fish. Stir it till it is evenly mixed. The perch caught when the frost descends has meat as white as snow and is not smelly. It is called gold and jade minced fish. It is a wonderful dish from southeast.

It is said in Youyang zazu酉陽襍俎 [The Youyang Miscellany, a well-known Tang Dynasty work by Duan Changshi]:  “A [good] pastry food (geshi餎食) is wonton made by the Xiao family. When the soup is filtered, it is not greasy and can be used to cook tea. The zongzi粽子 made by the Yu family is as white as jade. The cherry biluo [unclear; just possibly a transliteration of “pilau”] made by Han Yue can change color. He can also make cold fish pastes (leng hutu kuai冷胡突膾), thick soup of snakehead fish (liyu yi鳢鱼臆), continuously steamed deer (lianzheng lu連蒸鹿), and river deer skin noodle (zhangpi suobing麞皮索餅). General Qu Lianghan can make roasted (zhi炙) donkey and camel hump.”

He Ying was luxurious in taste. When he ate, he had to have food that filled a square one zhang on each side. Later he reduced his food intake somewhat, but still had white Hemiculter leucisculus fish (baiyu白魚)[10], dried eel (shanla鱓腊), and sugared crab (tangxie糖蟹). Zhong Yuan held that “when the eel is dried, it bends sharply; when crab is added to sugar, it moves restlessly; when a humane man uses his mind, he feels deep empathy.”  [This is one of those striking parallelisms so universal in Chinese literature.]

As for the che’ao clam (che’ao車螯)[11], blood clam (ark shell; han蚶), and oyster, they do not have eyes or eyebrows inside their shells, which shows the strangeness of the undivided (hundun渾沌). Their mouths are closed outside but not because they are bronze men who cannot speak. They neither thrive, nor turn weak, unlike grass and woods. They have no voice or sense of smell. What is the difference between them and tiles and gravel? Therefore, they are suitable for being used in kitchen as food at any time.  [This idea that motionless shellfish are more mineral than animal and thus fair game for vegetarians survives today.]

During the Later Han, Guo Linzong used to stay in the house of Mao Rong (his zi is Jiwei). The next morning, Mao Rong killed a hen and made a dish with it. Guo Linzong thought it was made for him. However, it turned out to be that Mao Rong offered the whole hen to his mother and had a vegetarian meal with Guo Linzong. Thus Guo Linzong rose and bowed to him, saying: “You are really virtuous!” Mao Rong accomplished virtue by showing filial piety.

It is said in Tiaoxi yuyin苕溪漁隱 that Su Shi composed poems and rhymed essays to describe the wonderfulness of food and drinks, such as the Rhymed Essay on the Gourmet [above], and Poem on Bean Congee. The Poem on Bean Congee reads:

River mouth, a thousand qing of snow-white reeds.

From the thatch, a lonely smoke plume appears and disappears.

Mortar and pestle, set on the ground, hull jade-like rice.

A sandpot cooks the beans, as soft as butter.

I am old and have no place to go.

I sold books to ask the landlord to stay at his house.

I lie listening to the crowing rooster, till the congee is ready,

Then come to your house with head disheveled and slippers on.

[This evocation of poverty in a beautiful seven-syllable-line poem shows Su in more realist style.  A thousand qing is 15,000 acres. A samdpot is a sand-tempered earthenware cooking pot, still necessary for Chinese cooking.]

Another poem [still by Su] on a fried pastry (hanju寒具)[12] reads:

Sim hands twist up jade-like stuff several xun in length.

Fried in blue-green oil, it turns light yellow.

On a spring night, the girl tosses about unconsciously,

With her gold bracelet pressed flat.[13]

Hanju is also called “twisted head” (niantou捻头), which comes from a much-told story recorded by Liu Yuxi.

My son came up with a fresh idea that he uses wild yams to make the Jade Crumb Soup (yusan geng玉糝羹). Its color, fragrance, and taste are extremely good. It is unknown how its taste is compared to the Heavenly Cheese (tiansutuo天酥酡)[14]. In this world it is can be confirmed that there is no match for it. The poem reads,

Fragrance like dragon saliva, [color] pure white.

The taste is like that of milk but it is totally clear.

Do not hastily compare Golden Minced Fish from the Southern Sea (nanhai jin?kuai南海金?膾),

To Dongpo’s Jade Crumb Soup.

The Poem on Vegetarian Soup (caigeng菜羹) composed by Yang Wanli also reads,

Use a spoon to take mica-like rice, fragrant and fresh, colored like jade [i.e., white].

The vegetarian soup is newly cooked; in it are thin kingfisher-green slices.

There is no meat or roast like this in the human world–

Vegetarian food from heaven might be as sweet.

The Song Emperor Taizong ordered Su Yijian to explain Wenzhongzi文中子[15] to him. In this book, there was a saying about “wild herb soup and solid food (gengli hanqiu羹藜含糗)” from the Classic of Food composed by Yang Su杨素 and intended to be handed down to his son. The emperor asked, “which food is the most precious?” Su Yijian replied, “the food does not have a set flavor. What suits one’s taste is the precious one! I only know that the [strange plant name; character not in our sources , possibly a miswriting] juice is delicious. I can remember that one night it was extremely cold. I drank a lot by the stove. At midnight, I was thirsty. The moon in the courtyard was bright and there was a basin of [?] juice covered in the remaining snow. I ate several pieces without interruption. At the time I told myself that the phoenix meat made by the immortal chef in heaven would not be as good as what I had eaten. I have tried to compose a biography of Mr. Jade Bottle and record this story, but have not found opportunity and thus have no results to report.” The emperor laughed and agreed with him.

At Tang times, Liu Yan went to the court at the fifth beating of drum. It was in the middle of the coldest days at the time. On the road he saw a shop selling steamed Iranian pancakes (hubing胡饼; [Iranian nan or something similar]). The pancakes were steaming. Liu Yan asked people to buy it for him.  He wrapped it in his sleeves and [then] ate it. He told his colleagues that it was so delicious that it could not be described in words. This is also because food does not have a determined flavor hierarchy; whatever suits one’s taste is the precious kind!  [Food can taste different to different people and under different situations; each to his own.]

Ni Si [Song Dynasty] said that Huang Tingjian composed an essay of Five Seeings at Meal Time (shishi wuguan食时五观). His words were deep and profound. He could be called a person who knew shame. I[16] used to enter a Buddhist temple and saw fasting monks. Whenever they ate, they would have three bites of little flavor. The first bite was to know the right taste of rice. If a person ate too much and mixed up the five flavors, he would not know the right taste. If he ate light-flavored food, the food was delicious by itself and did not need to borrow other flavors. The second bite was to think where food and clothes came from. The third bite was to consider how strenuous the farmers were. These were the five seeings and the meanings were prepared in the process. It was very simple to use this method when eating. If one had three bites first, more than half the rice was eaten. Even if there was no soup or vegetables, he could also finish eating by himself. This was a way of being satisfied with poverty.  [Also a way of satisfying the standard Buddhist directive to think seriously about what you eat, every time you start eating.]

In the Essay on Thinking of Returning (sigui fu思归赋) Wang Fengyuan [of whom little is known] said:

My father was eighty years old and my mother’s hair had also turned white. I am still a clerk, staying far away from my parents. The black bird chirping in the morning even knows to feed his parents. How can I be less than a bird? Whom can I tell my sorrow? The qi of autumn is chilly and moving. In the day my sorrowful thoughts arose and I looked askance at the river bank. I remember that when I was a child, every kind of fruit had been just ripe and the precious ones were offered frequently. Sometimes there were long-waist purple water chestnuts (ziling changyao紫菱長腰), round and solid red foxnuts [17](hongqian yuanshi紅芡圓實), persimmons in shape of a cow’s heart, with green pedicels (niuxin ludi zhi shi牛心綠蒂之柿), chestnuts individually wrapped in yellowish skin (dubao huangfu zhi li獨包黃膚之栗), greenish taros growing in linked [levee-divided?] fields (qingyu lianqu青芋連區), blackish barnyard millet (Echinochloa crus-galli) with five calyxes (wubai wuchu烏稗[18]五出), colorful duck-claw wood with small seeds (yajiao shoucai hu weihe鴨腳受彩乎微核), quinces that grow as if carved out of cinnabar (mugua loudan er chengzhi木瓜鏤丹而成質), breast-like greenish pear (qingru zhi li青乳之梨), oranges in shape of a reddish bottle, salted bee pupae (fengyong yancuo蜂蛹醃醝), honey-covered areca nuts and crab apples [19](binzha zimi檳楂漬蜜). Meat dishes included cormorant[20] (jiaojing鵁鶄) wild goose (yeyan野雁), ducks living in a lake, chirping quails, fatty crabs from a pure river, fresh fish from cold water, covered with purple fronds[?] and mixed with wild rice stem (jiaoshou茭首). There were dogwood berries (Cornus officinalis) (yu萸[21])  and chrysanthemums floating in cups of liquor. Turnips (jing菁[22]) and leeks (jiu韭) were displayed on the table. I sat by the pines and bamboos in the mountain with streams, sweeping under the paulownias (tong桐) and willows in the field in front of my door. My boy servants would not be noisy and I had books by my sides. Sometimes I had kept quiet for a whole day, while other times I had pleasant conversations with my friends. I believed in what my parents liked and had been in the community for long. My heart earnestly desires to decline the official seal and ribbon, but I definitely do not want to imitate the self-locked heart of Tao Yuanming, who was ashamed to bow down for five pecks of grain.  [All the treats mentioned are rustic mountain-and-river foods.  Tao Yuanming famously rejected office, thus nobly following his true nature but less nobly denying the world his services; Wang wants to follow him but is too moral.]

 

 

VOLUME ONE

 

TEAS AND SPRINGS

 

An Essay on Teas

 

There are many kinds of tea in the world. There are the Flower-on-Stone Tea石花 from the top of Mountain Meng in Jiannan[23], Purple-Bamboo-Root Tea 紫筍in Guzhu (Hu Prefecture[24]), Bright-Moon Tea in Bijian (Shan Prefecture), Missing-the-Peace Tea of Huojing in Qiongzhou, Thin-Flake Tea in Qujiang, True-Fragrance in Badong, Cedar-and-Rock in Fuzhou, White-Dew in Hongzhou, Yangxian Tea in Chang Prefecture, Juyan Tea in Mao Prefecture, Yangpo Tea in Mountain Yashan, Riding-the-Fire Tea in Long’an, High-Stalk Tea in Duru, Qianyang, and Plum-Slope Tea in Naxi, Luzhou, all of which are well-known.

In rank, the Flower-on-Stone Tea is the best, the Purple-Bamboo-Root second.  The Bright-Moon Tea in Bijian and the others rank after them respectively. It is a pity that not all of them can be obtained. In recent years, the tea grown on Mountain Huqiu is said to be surprising; unfortunately we cannot get more of it. If its slender sprouts are picked before the Festival of Grain Rain and withered [lit. “roasted,” but withering is the correct technical English term here] with the correct method, the Heavenly-Lake Tea is green and fragrant. It would satisfy your thirst just to smell it. The real Jie Tea is extremely expensive, twice as expensive as the Heavenly-Lake. I regret the difficulty of obtaining it. It would be wonderful if one could pick by himself as needed. As for the Lu’an Tea in Zhejiang, its taste is delicate. However, it is not good for withering and turns bitter if withered even if its nature is really good. The real Dragon-Well Tea grown in Hangzhou cannot be matched by the Heavenly-Lake. There are only a few families whose skill in withering it is excellent. Nearby, the tea withered by monks living in the mountain is also good.

The Dragon Well is better. However, Mountain Dragon-Well grows on only about ten mou. The tea grown outside of the mountain is not as good, and is used as substitute Dragon-Well.  Teas such as the tea grown in Northern-Mountain and West-River are used to replace the Dragon-well. Even the Hangzhou natives who know the taste of the Dragon-well are few, since there are too many fakes. I think that the beautiful spring of the Dragon-well is made by heaven.  The wonderful tea is grown for the miraculous qi of the mountain and thus can match the mountain. For those that cannot obtain it, the Heavenly-Lake and [ordinary] Dragon-Well[25] are the best. Tianzhu and Lingying tea are ranked next. The Yuqian tea grown in Mountain Tianmu, Hangzhou, is similar to the tea in Shuzhou, both of which are of the second rank.

Tea has become popular in the north, but one should be careful about drinking water and tea if he is in the south, in Fujian and Guangdong. In the past, Lu Yu [the great tea conoisseur] did not recognize the [problems with] teas grown in Lingnan and said that the tea grown in Lingnan tasted very good. We now know that Lingnan has much poisonous qi.  It affects the grass and trees. If northerners eat it, they can easily get sick. Therefore, one should be careful. Anyone wanting to pick some should wait till the sun is up and the mountains are visible. When the mist is gone from the mountains, one can start to pick the tea.

Tea balls and tea bricks are produced by grinding and lose most of the true taste.

Tea is wonderful when it is dried in the sunshine, green and fragrant, much better than withered tea.

 

[Notes:  The belief that southeast China had poisonous mists is an old and widespread one, not entirely gone today.  The major source for the idea was malaria, which is, of course, associated with mosquito-breeding marshes, and thus with mists. The problem was not the tea, but the malaria-carrying mosquitoes that made dawn and dusk dangerous times to be picking.           Withering tea leaves involves heating them—“roasting”—in shallow pans, over fires or sometimes with charcoal.  It is the normal first step in preparing green tea.]

 

Picking tea

 

Tuanhuang “has one flag and one gun,” which means one leaf and one sprout. When it is picked in the morning, it is called “tea,” but is called “chuan” if picked in the evening. The tea picked around the date of Grain Rain is best. Both the rough and the slender can be used except that it should be picked when it is sunny, withered properly, and preserved in the correct way.

 

[The first sentence here appears fragmentary; what is meant is that people say that the tea should be picked “when it has one flag and one gun,” as explained. The very finest tea still is picked at this stage:  one new leaf and a bud.]

 

Preserving tea

 

Tea is compatible with ruo bamboo leaves, but should be kept away from fragrances and medicines (xiangyao香藥). It likes warm and dry and hates cold and wet. Therefore, tea-gathering household use ruo bamboo leaves to pack it, and warm it every two or three days. The temperature of the fire should be close to body temperature. When it is warm, it can get rid of the humidity. If the fire is too hot, the tea is burned and cannot be consumed.

It is said that one can put the tea in bottles [probably ceramic ones], ten jin per bottle, and then put the bottles in a jar. Every year, put the ashes of burned straw into a huge barrel. Put the tea bottles into the barrel and insert the ashes around the bottles. Put the ashes above the bottles and pack down tightly. Whenever wanting to use the tea, open the bottle and take out a little, then put the ashes on it. The tea will not be rotten. In the second year, change the ashes.

It is also said that one can hang a frame in an empty room and put the tea bottles upside down. Because steam comes from the sky and goes down, they are put upside down.  [Steam and vapor rise, of course; evidently something like “drizzle” is meant here.  The text may be corrupt.]

If two kinds of sprout teas are served, they should be cooked with clean spring water, and flowers, fragrances, and fruit should not be added.. Some like to add flowers to tea. They should use tea that is even and delicate [i.e. small, even-sized leaves]; the taste of tea will not be decreased and the mouth will be filled with the fragrance of the flowers, so the tea will not be insipid (脱俗tuosu).

For orange tea and lotus tea, open the half-blossoming lotus at dawn and add a pinch of delicate tea. When the flower is full of tea, tie it up in a hemp skin [sic; evidently a web or sack made of hemp cloth) and leave it overnight. Next morning pour out the tea. Use paper made in Jian to wrap the tea and bake it with slow fire till it is dry. Repeat the previously-mentioned method with another flower. Repeat it for several times and bake it till it is dry. Its fragrance will be unsurpassed when it is tasted.

Osmanthus (muxi), jasmine, rose, wild rose (qiangwei), orchid (lanhui兰蕙), orange flower, gardenia, muxiang木香 (costus, Vladimiria souliei or Saussurea lappa), and mei (Prunus mume) flowers, all can be used in tea. When the flower is blossoming, pick the half-opened blooms, which have the most fragrance. Measure the amount of the tea and add a proper amount of flowers to it. If the flowers are too many, it would be too fragrant and lose the taste of the tea. If the flowers are too few, it would not be fragrant and not good enough. Use three portions of tea and one portion of flowers and it would be fine. With osmanthus, one should get rid of its branches and pedicels and dust and worms and ants. Take a porcelain jar and put one layer of flower and then one layer of tea till it is full. Tie it tightly with paper and put it into a boiler. Boil it with a large amount of water. Then take it out and wrap it with paper when it is cooled down. Bake it on fire till it is dry and then preserve it. Other flowers are treated similarly.

 

[Most of these flowers, especially osmanthus or sweet-olive, are still commonly used in tea.  Mei or flowering-apricot—often mistranslated “plum”—has a delicate carnation scent.]

 

Four tips for making tea

  1. Choosing water

When a mountain spring is not sweet [i.e., when it is sulphurous or otherwise mineralized], it will devastate the taste of the tea. Therefore, people of old thought that the selection of water is of utmost importance. Mountain water is the best, river water next to it, and well water the worst. As for mountain water, springs dripping from stalactites and flowing slowly [i.e., somewhat alkaline] is the best. If the water flows fast, don’t use it, or it will make people have neck ailments. As for river water, use that which is far from human beings. For well water, take that which is abundant[i.e., with plenty of water to dilute the pollutants]. If the water is as yellow as a crab or turbid or salty and bitter, don’t use it.

The water taken from the middle of the lake in Hangzhou, the number one spring in Mount Wu, Guo Pu’s Well, The Hupao Well, the Dragon Well, and the Immortal Ge Well, are very good.

 

  1. Wash the tea

Whenever cooking tea, wash the tea leaves with hot water, so that the dust and cold qi [“breath” or essence, but actual bitter dust is intended too] will be eliminated.  Thus it will be wonderful when cooked.  [Green tea is believed to have cold qi because it is bitter and a “cold” color.]

 

  1. Then to the brew

The tea should be cooked by slow and “living” fire. Living fire means fire coming from burning charcoal and having flames. One should not let the water boil.  Thus the tea will be properly prepared. At first, the water has dispersed fish-eyes [bubbles] and a low sound can be heard. In the middle of boiling, the water gushes like a spring from the edge and [the bubbles] are like pearls. At the end, the water is surging [boiling high] and the water qi [in this case, the literal air in the water; modern teamakers are still careful not to boil the dissolved air out of the water] disappears.  This is called old water [i.e., overboiled for the purpose]. This method of three-stage boiling cannot be made without living fire. The most serious thing to prevent is smoking the tea by burning firewood—the Five-Bandit-and-Six-Demon Brew mentioned in Qingyilu清异录 (N. Song).

 

  1. The equipment

When the pot is small, it is easy to get the brew ready. Soaking the tea leaves and pouring the brew should match each other. [I.e., don’t steep more than you are going to drink—always good advice.]  If the pot is large and the tea is left over after drinking, the tea stays too long and thus will not remain tasty. The tea boiler and pot made of porcelain and pottery is the best; bronze or tin is worse. Porcelain pots are best for making tea, while pottery [earthenware] boilers are best for cooking the water. It was said in Qingyilu清异录 that the brew made by the wealthy and prominent people should be cooked by silver boilers, and is wonderful. It is worse when using a bronze boiler to cook the soup or a tin pot to pour the tea.  [The metal leaches out and its taste and chemical action ruin the tea.]

For tea utensils, the cups and plates made from Xuan kiln is the best. They are of thick material and white and shiny, while the style is ancient and delicate. There are white pots stamped with flower patterns that are similar to those from the Xuan kiln. Their style is acceptable, and they shine like jade. Second best are those from kilns of the Jiajing period. When there is a small design [character unclear, probably corrupt] in the middle of it, it is especially beautiful. If one wants to test how the tea is yellow or white, how could he make the assessment harder by using qinghua [bluish-white] porcelain? For liquor, the same theory applies; only pure white vessels are of the highest quality, and others should not be used.

 

[All the above is good advice, still to be highly recommended.]

 

Three methods to use for tea

 

  1. Wash the vessels

When tea pots, cups, and spoons become dirty, they will devastate the taste of the tea. They should be washed till they are clean; then it will be fine.

 

  1. Warm up the cups

Whenever the tea is poured out, the cups should be warmed.  Thus the tea will show a cream-like surface.  If the cup is cold, the color of the tea will not appear on the surface.

 

  1. Concerning fruit

Tea has real fragrance, good taste, and right color. When it is cooked or poured, it should not be served with precious fruits or fragrant grasses. Those that can complement its fragrance are pine nuts, orange, lotus seed kernels, Chinese quince, mei flower, jasmine, wild rose, osmanthus, and so on. Those complementing its taste are cow milk, dragon peach, round eye (yuanyan圓眼—longan?), loquat and so on. Those complementing its color are dried persimmon, dried date, fire [-colored] peach, red bayberry, orange and so on.  [These are all ordinary, common items, not “precious” exotica.]  Whenever taking good tea, I feel pure after moving away the fruits. When they are mixed, I cannot distinguish one from another. If one wants to have fruits and nuts with tea, he should try walnut, hazel, melon seeds, apricot kernels, Canarium seed, chestnut, chicken head (jitou雞頭, seeds of the Euryale waterlily), ginkgo seed (yinxing銀杏) and so on. These can be used with tea.

 

[Again, all good advice, and most of it still practiced in China.]

 

The uses of tea

 

When one drinks tea, it can satisfy his thirst, help digestion, get rid of the ailment of having phlegm or insomnia, benefit the “water way” [sic], brighten the eyes, enhance thinking (this comes from Bencao shiyi本草拾遺), get rid of irritation and greasiness. One should not spend a day without having tea. However, there are things to avoid. It will get rid of irritation and greasiness and will not damage one’s spleen and stomach when one washes one’s mouth with strong tea after having a meal. When there is meat between teeth, one should use tea to wash it. Then the meat will be diminished and fall out.  One will not even notice it or feel anxious aboout picking it out. The nature of teeth is bitter [in the Chinese fivefold correspondence theory]. Therefore, his teeth will grow stronger and denser and poison will disappear by itself. However, only Chinese tea (zhongcha中茶) should be used. (The foregoing comes from Mr. Su’s writings.)

 

The tea set

 

A tea set includes sixteen vessels, which are collected in a container and work for the “bitter upright man” [a literary term for a furnace, see below]. I name them here and want to manage them as one set, for those that have pure hearts and fine conduct and can manage by themselves.

Shangxiang: the ancient Zhao tripod, used for cooking the tea.

Guijie: baboo brushes, used for washing the pot.

Fenying: ladle, used for measuring the weight of the water.

Dihuo: bronze fire dipper, used for moving fire.

Jianghong: bronze fire sticks, used for piling up the fire.

Zhiquan: balance for measuring tea, use one liang of tea when using two jin of water.

Tuanfeng: white bamboo fan, used for fanning the fire.

Chuchen: tea washer, used for washing the tea.

Jingfei: bamboo frame, a stomach support mentioned in the Classic of Tea.

Zhuchun: pottery pot, used for pouring tea.

Yunfeng: knife, used for cutting fruits.

Gandun: wood chopping block.

Chuoxiang (tasting the fragrant): porcelain cup, used for drinking the tea.

Liaoyun (teasing the cloud): bamboo tea spoon, used for taking fruits.

Najing (showing respect): bamboo tea container, used for containing cups.

Shouwu (receiving the dirty): dishcloth, used for cleaning the cups.

 

Tea containers (seven in total)

 

Kujiejun (bitter, upright man): bamboo furnace used for cooking the tea. It is also collected by the travelers.

Jiancheng: cage made from Indocalamus leaves, used for containing the tea to store in a high place.

Yuntun: porcelain bottle, used for taking the spring water for the purpose of cooking.

Wufu: bamboo basket, used for containing charcoal, the material for boiling the tea.

Shuicao: porcelain or pottery urn, used for containg the spring water which is used for boiling.

Qiju: a square box braided from bamboo sticks, used for collecting the tea set.

Also, pinsi: a round basket braided from bamboo sticks, used for collecting every kinds of tea leaves available for cooking and tasting.

 

 

Treatise on spring water

 

Tian Ziyi said: the spring that comes from the mountain foot is called mengxi, wuxi is heaven-given, water xi has the full taste.  Lu Yu said: mountain water is the best. Meng refers to a spring coming from bell-like rocks and rocky ponds with a slow flow. When the spring flows fast and violently, it is not a meng. Therefore, one should avoid consuming it.  [Fast currents carry too much turbidity, and generally lack the slight mineralization of slow, clear mountain water in China.]

The obscure cannot be abandoned, since there is a divinity for everything [obscure and probably corrupt; we suspect that “obscure” was originally used in its root meaning, “turbid water,” and that a direction to avoid turbid water has gotten mixed with an originally separate sentence on the mountain god; see following]. The heavenly divinities produce the myriad things. The Book of Han mentioned three gods. The mountain god is one of them.

Spring water should be heavy [i.e., mineralized].  Good spring water is especially so. The Hermit Xu in Yuhang used to tell me that the mountain spring from Phoenix Mountain and the One-Hundred-Flower Spring in Amudun are not as good as the Five Springs; one can see the advantages of the immortals’ springs.

When the mountain is thick, the springs are thick.  [I.e., a large wide mountain produces a large spring.]  When the mountain is outstanding, the springs are outstanding[ly good]. When the mountain is pure, so is the spring. When the mountain is serene, so is the spring. All of them have their own natures. When not thick, they will be thin. When outstanding, they will not be dull. When not pure, they will be turbid. When not serene, they will be noisy. These will not be good springs.

When the mountain does not come to an end, the water will not. If it ends, there will be no source. When there is a drought, it will dry quickly.  [I.e., a long ridge or a range are more reliable water sources than an isolated hill.]

 

 

Stone and Stream

 

Stone is the bone of the mountain. A stream is moving water. The mountain spreads qi and thus the myriad things grow. Qi spreads and thus mai [“pulse”] grows. [The flow of qi in the mountain is a pulse, equivalent to the human pulse; this idea was universal in China until recently, and the folk view was that mountains contained actual dragons that, as living animals, had actual pulses.  Mai has a wider meaning, though, and can accommodate the circulation of qi in a person, water in the earth, and energy in an earthquake-prone mountain range, as well as a pulse from blood flow.] Therefore, the mountain water is the best. It is said in Bowuzhi博物志 that stone is the source of metal. When the essence of jia [lit. “nail” or “shell,” unclear here] and stone flows out, there is water. It is also said that the mountain spring brings out the qi of the earth.

If the spring does not come out from stone, it cannot be good. So it is said in Chuci (Poems of Chu, ca. 3rd century BCE):  “drink the water of the stone spring and stay in the shade of pine and cypress.” Huangfu Ceng wrote a poem for Lu Yu:

Distant temple—in the mountain a calm time,

Cooking in the wild with clean and clear water from the stone spring.

Mei Yaochen’s poem on the tea on Peak Blue Sky:

The stone spring is good where I cook [the tea].

It is also said that:

Small stones and the cold spring hold the early taste.

These can really be appreciated.

Sometimes, there are springs that hide in the sand and earth. If one takes [water from such a spring] and it is not exhausted, it can be used. Otherwise, it is sinking rain water.  Even if it is clean, do not use it.

If the current flows a long way, its taste will be light. If it stays in a deep pond, its taste is doubled and can be used.

If the spring does not move, it is harmful to drink it. It is said in Bowuzhi博物志 that people living in mountainous areas will have goitre if taking water that does not flow. [Water in the west China mountains is often deficient in iodine, with the result that goitre is common. The Chinese early realized that something was wrong with the water or salt there, since they recognized that iodine-rich sea salt prevented the condition while iodine-lacking Sichuan mountain salt was associated with it; but they had no idea what the actual problem was].

When the spring gushes out, it is called pen. When the spring water drops down suddenly, it is called pu. Both the water curtain in Mt. Lu and the waterfall in Tiantai, Hongzhou, are recorded as highly ranked waters, in contrast to the Classic of Tea written by Lu Yu.  [Lu ranked waters differently.]  Therefore, Zhang Jiuling wrote a poem on the waterfall in Mt. Lu, saying that:

I heard of the meng water at the foot of the Mountain,

It is said by those now living in the wild woods

That the nature of things is mysterious and unstable,

The life-giving kun [a power of the earth] is often diverse and transforming.

I put it away and leave quietly,

Who can understand the transformations?

Therefore, the knowledgeable will not have it. However, a waterfall is truly a precious screen and silk curtain when one lives in the mountains. Used for ears and eyes, who would say that it is not suitable?  [I.e., it is fine for scenery, though not for drinking.]

 

Pure and cold

 

“Pure” means clean and quiet, which is the way pure water looks. “Cold” means chill and frozen, which is the way the water looks when poured out. It is not difficult to find pure springs but it is hard to find cold springs. Pure as the water that is shallow and flows over sand, it is not of a good grade. Cold as the water coming from deep rocks and having accumulated enough yin, it is not of a good grade.

When stones are few and earth much, or when the sand is sticky and the mud congealed, it cannot be pure and cold.

The image of the meng water is said to be its fruit. A flowing well’s image is said to be cold. If the spring does not fruit, the qi will be stagnant and its radiance will not be pure. If it is cold, the nature will be dry and the taste will be bitter.

Ice means hard ice. When the qi of yin gathers in a deep canyon and cannot get out, it will be congealed and turn into hidden yin. Water lies bright and light on the ground, while ice is condensed and cold. Therefore, ice is the ultimate status of the pure and cold. The poem composed by Xie Lingyun includes the line:

Chisel the ice and cook the breakfast.

And from Shiyiji拾遺記 (“Record of Collecting What Has Been Forgotten”):

Mt. Penglai’s water is icy,

One who drinks it will live for a thousand years.

[Mt. Penglai is a mythical, divine mountain.]

When there is sulfur under the water, it emerges as a hot spring. There are many of them here and there. There are many cases in which springs come out from the same valley but half are warm and half are cold. Not all of them are of potable grade. An exception is the vermilion spring in Mt. Huang, Xin’an, which can be drunk. It is said in the Illustrated Classic of Herbals that Mt. Huang used to be called Mt. Yi and there is a vermilion spring under the east peak that can be used for cooking tea. In the spring, it is pinkish. It is the liquid cinnabar of nature. [Actually it is ferric iron that stains hot spring water red; red algae may also be involved.]  It is said in Shiyiji拾遺記 that: if one drinks the boiled water of Mt. Penglai, he will live up to one thousand years. This is the drink for immortals. When there is gold, the water must be pure. When there are pearls, the water must be lovely. When there are carp, the water must be foul [as every fisherman knows!]. When there is a dragon, the water must be deep, dark, and somewhat bad. One cannot use waters without distinguishing them.

 

Sweet and fragrant

 

Sweet means beautiful. Fragrant means of good smell. In the Book of History it is said: “Make the crops grow and get sweet grains.”  Sweet means fragrant. The grain is sweet and fragrant and thus can nourish people. The spring is sweet and fragrant. Therefore, the spring can nourish people, too. However, it is easy to find a sweet spring that is also a fragrant spring. There is no fragrant spring that is not sweet.

Those tasting good are called sweet springs. Those having fragrant smells are called fragrant springs. One can find them here and there. When there is a noxious plant growing above a spring, its leaves will be nourished and roots moistened. All of them will damage the sweet and fragrant. The ultimately noxious plants can even make the liquid poisonous. So they should be cleared away.

Sweet water is praised for its sweetness. In Shiyiji拾遺記 it is said that there is a sweet river passing by the north of Mountain Yuanqiao. Its taste is as sweet as honey. In Shizhouji十洲記 (“Record of Ten Continents”) it is said that the water from the Dark Canyon in Yuan Continent is like honey. If one drinks it, he will live as long as heaven and earth. It is also said that the water from Sheng Continent is like maltose and cheese.  [Buddhist and Chinese cosmology postulate several continents beyond the bounds of the known world.  They have truly unearthly properties, such as flavored water.  Probably the visions of shamans or spirit mediums were the sources for the information.]

When there is cinnabar in the water, not only the taste is not normal, but can elongate one’s life and cure his illnesses. It can be found only in the famous mountains and great rivers, where the immortals stayed and practiced. In his youth, Ge Xuan used to be the magistrate of Linyuan. In the county, there was a family named Liao whose members enjoyed longevity for generations. He suspected that it is because of the particularly reddish well water. So he tried to dig around the well and got dozens of hu of vermilion cinnabar covered up by ancient people.

Ge’s Well at Lake West was the place that Ge Gong made cinnabar [pills? Elixirs?]. At the Majia Garden, a stone jar was found when people dredged the well. There were several pieces of cinnabar in it. They were like wild lotus seeds and had no taste when tasted. They had been abandoned. Someone gave a fisherman a pill and he lived as long as one hundred six years. This cinnabar water is extremely difficult to gain. It cannot be contained in unclean vessels.

If one cooks tea properly but does not know how to drink it, it is like taking springs from stalactites to irrigate wormwood [i.e., using the finest grade of water to irrigate a bitter herb]. The sin cannot be more serious. When the drinker has it in one sip and does not take time to distinguish the taste, nothing can be more vulgar.

 

Spiritual water

 

“Spiritual” means pertaining to the gods. The heavenly Unity gave birth to water, which is essential and bright and not turbid. Therefore, water falling down from heaven is really spiritual water. Isn’t it called “the water of the upper lake” in ancient sources? When inspected, such water provides drinks for the immortals. Use a big jar to collect rain water during the Yellow-mildew period [the rainy period in spring when mildew grows], and also use snow water. Insert above ten pebbles under it. It will not spoil for years. Take a piece of charcoal about three-or –four-cun in length and burn it till it is red. Throw it into the water and let it quench. The water will not grow fleas [water insects]. [Both the heat and the adsorptive qualities of charcoal would purify the water.]

The spiritual is that which has yang qi dominant and spreading. The color is as strong as sweet dew, as congealed as grease, as tasteful as maltose. It is also called paste dew, or heavenly liquor.

“Snow” is the coldness accumulated in heaven and earth. In the Book of Fan Shengzhi [a Former Han agricultural manual] it is said that the snow is the essence of the five grains.  [Fan was giving practical advice for cold, dry northwest China:  snow is the best source of soil moisture, as he was well aware.]  In Shiyiji拾遺記 it is said that when the King Mu went east and arrived at the Great Xi Valley, the Queen Mother of the West came to submit sweet snow from Qianzhou. This is spiritual snow. Tao Gu took snow water to cook tea balls. In a poem on cooking the tea, Ding Wei wrote that:

I cherish it and preserve it in the bookcase,

Insisting on keeping it till snow falls.

In a poem on the Jian Tea submitting to the scholar, Li Xuji wrote that:

I try to use the snow of the Liang Garden,

To cook and stir the spring tea from Jian.

Therefore, snow is especially good for tea drinks. Men without official titles ranked it as the last grade; why? I think that it might be about the taste of dryness. If one thinks it is too cold, I do not think so.  [Snow is pure, a commodity rare in old Chinese waters.  Even today, snow and rain make the best tea, far better than our chlorine-laden and sediment-sullied tap water.]

Rain is harmony between yin and yang. Heaven and earth give the water from the clouds above.  It supports the time, gives birth, and nourishes the living. [Ideally] the wind is mild and the rain is proper. The cloud is bright and the rain is sweet. In Shiyiji拾遺記 it is said that when fragrant clouds moisturize everywhere, they become fragrant rain, which is spiritual rain and surely can be drunk. If the rain is made by dragons, or it is heavy and continuous, or dry and frozen, or foul and black, or the dripping from the eaves, it cannot be taken.  [Mostly good advice—rain often picks up dust and soot in the air, as it falls—but the dragon issue is a difficult one.  Many Chinese believed all rain was made by dragons.  We suspect that Gao considered slow or gentle rains to be natural, but violent storms to be dragon-caused.]

The place close to tides must not have good springs because saline-alkali soil is plentiful there. The most famous tides in the world are in Wulin. So there are no good springs. However, there are good springs in the mountains near West Lake.

The Yangzi is a river. The Nanling [flowing into it] has layered rocks and deep canyon and is taken into the best rank, as an exception [to the general rule that river water is contaminated]. I used to taste it and it was really not different from those found east of the mountain [east of the Nanling]. The water from the Wusong River is the lowest grade of water. Inexplicably, it has also entered the ranks [of waters that some people consider acceptable].

 

Well Water

 

When the well is pure, it is because the spring [feeding it underground] is pure. “Tong” [to go through, circulate] means materials circulating [getting through].  “Law” means limits. The law regulates the residents, forbidding them from eating and drinking without limits. The purity [of the well] comes from yin. What has gotten into the well makes it turbid. The law sets up limits [on the well].  Its mai [pulse, in the qi system] is dark and the taste is stagnant. Therefore, Lu Yu said that the well water is ranked lowest. He said that the well has been taken by too many people. When too many people take it, their qi gets in and flows actively there. So it is definitely not a good class. When using the water, put white stones into a jar. This will not only enrich its taste, but can keep the pure water from turning turbid.

Gaozi said:  A beautiful well known to the world is the Zhongling well. However, I have tasted the well on Mt. Jiao four times and it is no worse than that of the Zhongling well. The taste of the water from Mt. Hui is light and pure, and can be safely put into the highest grade. As for the water in our Hangzhou, it is the Running-Tiger well that is best among all the wells. The old Dragon well and that of the Pearl Temple are sweet, too. The taste of the Immortal Ge’s well in Mt. Bei is dense. As for the water inside the city, the number one well in Mt. Wu is the best. When I tasted it, it was not as pure as Mr. Shi’s well or Granny Guo’s well, which are good for tea. As for the water close to the two bridges in the south lake, one should take it in the early morning. It is very good for cooking tea and does not require anything else.

 

 

TYPES OF SOUP

[The recipes in this section are for medicinal preserves, not soups in the usual sense.]

 

Green and crisp mei soup

 

Take three jin twelve liang of green and crisp [underripe] mei [flowering apricot, often miscalled “plum”] fruits, four liang of the raw liquorice powder, one jin of baked salt, one jin four liang of raw ginger, three liang of green Sichuan pepper, half liang of dry pepper. Get rid of the seeds of the mei and cut them in half. Probably every family has a recipe for green mei soup and their ingredients are largely identical, though with minor differences. When starting to make it, the fragrant smells are similar too. When it is salt-preserved for several months, it must become fully ripe like yellow mei soup. [I.e., it will taste like ripe mei, which are yellow.] There is an explanation for how to do this. First, the green mei should be collected before the festival of Xiaoman (Grain Fills). Pestle them till mashed. Discard the seeds, but do not use your hands; use a dry wooden spoon instead. When stirring, use a wooden spoon also. After mashing them, spread them out on the sifter. Let the liquid strain off. Second, use raw liquorice. Third, use baked salt–only when it is cooled down. Fourth, use raw ginger and mash it without being saturated in water. Fifth, use green Sichuan pepper right after it was picked and dried. Fry and stir all the previous ingredients and use a wooden spoon to move them into a new bottle. Only materials slightly more than the quantity for ten cups can be preserved in one bottle. Leave some salt in the power. Cover it with double-layered oilpaper and tie the bottle neck tightly. Only when this has been done, one is able to have crisp mei. If the mei and ginger stick to your hands [i.e. if the mashed paste is too difficult to work with], you can cut them into bits instead.

[This would not produce a “soup,” but a preserved paste very much like—and in fact ancestral to—the “liquorice plums” or “liquorice crack seed” so abundant in Asian and Hawaiian markets today.]

 

Yellow mei soup

 

Take round and large yellow [i.e., ripe] mei and steam them till fully cooked. Discard the seeds. Take one jin of clean meat, three qian of baked salt, one and a half qian dry ginger powder, two liang of dried purple mint [perilla], liquorice and sandalwood, adjusting to individuals’ taste. Stir them till the flavor is even and put them in porcelain. Dry them in the sun and then preserve them. When eating them, one should add some salt. In the summer, it is even better if water is added.

[Again, this is a preserve, not a soup; it is the salted and dried version of a still-common dish of meat, today always pork, with flowering-apricot sauce.]

 

Phoenix-Pond soup

 

Take one jin of pitted black [fermented] mei, four liang of liquorice, one liang of baked salt, and cook them till they become creamlike. One method is to divide them equally into three. Pestle them into powder and stir till they are even. Press them into the bottle tightly. In the twelfth month or in the middle of the hottest days, blend them together. After half a year, bake them till they become powder and take it after cooked with hot water. Otherwise, this also can be taken after it is cooked with water into creamlike stuff.

[Another version of preserved liquorice mei, not a soup.]

 

Mandarin orange soup

 

Take one jin of mandarin oranges and take off the skins, discarding the white membranes inside. Cut the skins into bits and mash them with the pulp. Use one liang of baked salt, one liang of liquorice, and one liang of raw ginger. Mash them till the juice comes out and stir them till it is even. For oranges, the method is the same. Dry it in the sun and seal tightly. When it is cooked in hot water, it tastes very good.

 

Apricot-kernel soup

 

Take any amount of apricot kernels and boil them till the skins peel off. Soak in water overnight, just as in making mung bean jelly. Drain the water. Or add a little of ginger juice as well as butter and honey. Another method is to use three liang of apricot kernels, two liang of raw ginger, one liang of baked salt, one liang of liquorice powder, and mash them together.

[Again, a preserve, not a soup.]

 

Fennel spice soup

 

Take six qian of fennel and the skins of Chinese pepper, two qian of dried salt, half sheng of fully cooked sesame, one jin of roasted flour. Mash them into powder.  Make up as soup with boiled water.

[This would be a thin, highly spiced paste or thick soup.  Salt tends to absorb moisture unless tightly sealed, hence the need to dry it.]

 

Mei-and-Perilla soup

 

Take one and a half jin of black mei fruit, four liang of baked salt, two liang of liquorice, ten liang of purple mint [perilla] leaves, half liang of sandalwood, twelve liang of fried flour. Blend them evenly.  Blend in boiled water.

 

Heavenly-fragrance soup

 

When the white osmanthus blossoms, use a wood stick to strike off the flowers when they still have dew on them in the early morning. Hold them in a piece of cloth and take off the pedicels and calyx. Put them in a clean container. Use a new basin and mash them into mud-like paste. Squeeze water out and collect it. Add one liang of liquorice and ten salted plums to every jin of this material. Mash and make into cakes. Put the cakes into a jar and seal tightly. Use after making up as soup in boiled water.  [This seems to explain why the recipes are called “soups”:  one can beat up the preserved items in water for a hot drink.  However, the modern equivalents are, in our experience, usually eaten as they are prepared, though sometimes made into drinks.  Osmanthus flowers at night, and has an exquisite sweet scent to attract moths; it is routinely used today as of old for flavoring teas and other drinks.]

 

Secret-fragrance soup

 

When the mei blossoms, one should pick half-open flowers with petals in the early morning. Put them into porcelain bottles. Sprinkle every liang with one liang of baked salt. Don’t use hands to take them, or they will be spoiled. [They are extremely fragile.] Use layers of thick paper to seal. Put in the shade. In the next spring and summer, open, and add a little honey first in the cup. Then put two or three flowers in it. Pour boiled water in it. The flower will blossom by itself just as lovely as if fresh. When it is added to the tea, it is extremely fragrant. It is said that pistils also can be dried in the shade and juice added as in the above method.

[Opening mei flowers have a delicate carnation fragrance that is wonderful in tea.]

 

Need-to-ask soup [i.e., soup you should ask for]

 

Su Shi composed a song, saying:

Three qian of raw ginger (dried for use) and one sheng of jujubes (dried and pitted for use),

Two liang of white salt (fried to be yellowish) and one liang of liquorice (burned to get rid of the skin),

Nail spice, wood spice, each half qian,

Mash with the right amount of orange skins (get rid of the white membranes),

When cooked well,

When made up well,

It will redden and whiten your face even when you’re old.

[We have translated.“nail spice” (clove) and “wood spice” (Vladimirea or Saussurea) literally above, to keep the parallel construction.  The parentheses are in Gao’s text, and presumably his rather unpoetic addition to the poem.]

 

Apricot kernel cheese soup

 

Take three and a half liang of apricot kernels and saturate them in two sheng of repeatedly-boiled water. Cover them with a lid. When the water is cooled down, replace it with more repeatedly-boiled water. Repeat this five times. Then pinch off the skins and grind the kernels carefully in a small pottery basin. Then take one jin of good honey and cook them in a boiler till they boil three times. When boiled for the third time, collect them. When they are half cooled, add some more mashed kernels. Grind again.  Add [still more] mashed kernels and grind till even. Eat after mixing thoroughly in boiled water.

[This produces a form of nut butter, probably a Near Eastern contribution to Chinese cooking; it was widely used in Mongol times; see Buell et al. 2010.  Apricot kernel butter is still part of the Chinese nutraceutical shelf.]

 

Phoenix marrow soup (nourishing the lung and curing coughing)

 

Use one liang of pine nuts and walnuts respectively (soaked in hot water and then peeled), and half liang of honey. Grind the above mentioned materials till they are mashed and then add honey to it. Stir till evenly blended. When using it, mix up in boiled water.

[Another nut butter.  Pine nuts are associated with longevity, because pines live long and also because the nuts are genuinely highly nutritious.  Walnuts are, at least in modern China, considered brain food, because the kernel halves look like small brains.]

 

Finest cream soup (satisfying thirst and generating saliva)

 

Use one jin of black mei (mashed. Cook them with two large bowls of water till the soup can be contained in one bowl. Let it settle down. Don’t use iron vessels [Gao’s note]).  Add two liang of susha[石宿]砂[26] (ground fine), one qian of white sandalwood power, one fen of musk, and three jin of honey.

Put the mei water, susha, and honey all three together. Cook it in a sandstone vessel with slow fire till it turns reddish. When it is cooled down, add white sandalwood and musk. When using, take one or two spoons of it and mix in boiled water.

 

Watery-Miraculous-Mushroom soup (opening the qi of heart and benefiting the essence and marrow)

 

Use one jin of dried lotus seeds (wither them with skins on till they are extremely dry. Mash them into fine powder) and one liang of fine liquorice (slightly withered). Grind the above mentioned materials into powder. Add a pinch of salt to it every two qian. Saturate it in boiled water and use. Mash the blackish skins of lotus seeds till they are as hard as iron. If they cannot be mashed any more, get rid of them then. People usually get rid of the blackish skins when using lotus seeds. They do not understand. When one remains sitting at night, too hungry and tired to take any food, have one cup of this soup and it will greatly compensate for weakness and enhance the qi.  Formerly the immortal Wuguangzi took this and then achieved the Way.

 

Jasmine soup

 

Spread honey in the middle of a bowl. Spread it evenly and do not let it flow. Pick twenty or thirty jasmine flowers early every morning. Cover the honey bowl on the flowers and use their fragrance to smoke it. At noon get rid of the flowers. Pour hot water into the bowl.  It is very fragrant.

 

Fragrant orange soup (widens the Middle Jiao, improves the movement of qi, and cures the discomforts of drunkenness)

 

Use two jin of large oranges (got rid of the seeds, cut into slices, and use with skins), one half liang of sandalwood power, one liang of raw ginger (cut into slices and withered), one liang of liquorice powder, and three qian of salt. Grind the oranges and ginger in a clean sandstone basin till they are mashed. Then add white sandalwood powder and liquorice powder. Mix them and make cakes out of them. Bake the cakes till they are dry. Grand them into powder. Whenever using, take one qian of it and make it up in boiled water.

 

Chinese olive [Canarium album] soup

 

Use one liang of baiyaojian (百藥煎)[27], one qian of white angelica 白芷, five qian of sandalwood, and five qian of honey liquorice甘草炙[28]. Grind the above materials into fine powder. Mix in boiled water and then take it.

 

[Presumably the ingredients are used to preserve the “olive,” or are used with a preserved one; the “olive” is the preserved fruit of a south Chinese and southeast Asian tree that also has an edible kernel in the seed.  The preserved fruit resembles a cured olive, but the tree itself has no resemblance or close relationship to that plant.]

 

Cardamom soup

 

This soup cures every kind of cold qi, fullness in heart and stomach, stagnancy in chest midriff, hiccup and vomiting, diarrhea and weakness and slipperiness[29], indigestion of water and grains, tiredness and powerlessness, lose of appetite (this comes from Jufang局方[30]).

Use one jin of cardamom seeds (baked in flour), four liang of roasted liquorice [here and in the following, “roasted” means parched or toasted in a pan], one jin of roasted white flour, five qian of clove branches and sticks (just use the branches), two liang of dried salt. Grind them into powder. Whenever using it, take two qian of it and mix in boiled water. It is wonderful when used before meals.

 

Sobering-up soup (use after centering wine [zhong jiiu, Gao’s euphemism for getting drunk!])

 

Use one and half qian of white tuckahoe [a fungus], five qian of cardamom seeds, three qian of wood spice (muxiang), one and half qian of dried orange skins, one fen of greenish lotus skins 蓮花青皮, one qian of zexie澤瀉[31], one qian of shenqu神曲 (withered till it turns yellowish), three qian of susha, half liang of kudzu flowers葛花, one and half qian of cocklebur猪苓 (get rid of the black skins), one qian of dried ginger, and two qian of large-headed atractylodes (Atractylodes macrocephala) 白术.

Grind them into fine powder and stir them till they are even. Whenever using, take two qian of it and saturate it in hot water. After taking it, the patient will sweat a little bit and then the drunken illness is gone. One should not take too much of it.

 

Quince soup (getting rid of wetness, satisfying thirst, and improving the movement of qi)

 

Use four liang of clean, peeled, dried quince, five qian of white sandalwood, three qian of gharu-wood, five qian of roasted [pan-toasted, parched] fennel, five qian of cardamom, five qian of susha, one and half liang of fine liquorice, and half liang of dried raw ginger.

Grind them into extremely fine powder. Take half qian of it everyday. Add salt and boiled water when using it.

[Quince juice, someteimes with spices, is still used for the above purposes, and a more delightful and refreshing nutraceutical would be hard to find.]

 

No-dust soup

 

Use two liang of crystal sugar水晶糖霜 and two fen of mei-like borneol梅花片脑.

Pestle the sugar into powder and sift it. Add borneol and grind it till it is even. Whenever using, take one qian and mix up in boiled water. One should not use too much. If one uses too much, it makes people feel full.

 

Green-cloud soup (one should not take this soup when eating fish)

 

Use four liang of catnip ear荆芥穗, two liang of large-headed atractylodes, and two liang of liquorice.

Grind them into powder. When using it, add salt and saturate in hot water.

 

Arborvitae leaf柏叶 soup

 

Pick tender leaves of arborvitae [Thuja orientalis—though pai can also mean similar evergreens with flat needle sprays]. Tie them with thread and hang it in a large jar. Seal the jar with paper. Use it after several months. If it is not dry yet, seal it till it is dry. Grind it into power. The color is like that of tender grass. If the jar is not used, it can also be put in a closed room. But it won’t be as green as that made in a jar. It turns yellowish when it meets the wind. This soup can be used to replace tea, especially if people talk at night and are frightened [presumably because of drinking too much tea]. If one drinks too much tea, it will harm his health, consume the qi of essence, and harm the spleen and stomach. Arborvitae leaf soup is very beneficial. It is even better if it is picked freshly, cleaned, and mixed in boiled water.

 

Three-goodness soup

 

Use one sheng of glutinous rehmannia地黄 juice and Chinese wolfthorn枸杞 berry juice respectively, and half sheng of honey. Cook them in silver till it is like thin maltose. When using it, take a large spoon of it and saturate it in hot water or liquor. It enriches the qi and nourishes the blood. It is good for a person when taken over a long time.

[Rehmannia is medicinal; Chinese wolfthorn berries are rich in vitamins and minerals, including iron, hence the benefit to the blood—traditional Chinese did not know that iron and vitamins were responsible, but, as we can attest, they did know from observation that wolfthorn berries significantly benefited the blood, making thin and pale blood stronger and redder.]

 

Dried Lichee荔枝soup

 

Use two jin of white sugar, five liang of large black mei pulp (steam it with boiled water and get rid of the sour liquid), a small amount of cinnamon powder, a small amount of raw ginger thread, and a small amount of liquorice.

Pestle the sugar and black mei pulp till they are mashed. When using, mix it in boiled water.

 

Pure charm清韻 soup

 

Use three liang of susha, one liang of stone calamus powder石菖蒲末, and five qian of liquorice powder. Add a small amount of salt. Mix in clear boiled water and take.

 

Orange soup

 

Use fifty oranges, one liang of dry wild yam powder 干山藥末, one liang of liquorice powder, and four liang of white mei pulp.

Mash them and bake until dry. Make it into cakes. Mix it in clear hot water and use.

 

Osmanthus soup

 

Use four liang of osmanthus (baked and made into powder), a small amount of dry ginger, and a small amount of liquorice. Make them into powder and stir it till it is even. Add proper amount of salt and contain it in porcelain jar. Do not let the qi get out of the jar. Use it frequently after mixing in white hot water.

 

Dongting soup

 

Use four liang of aged orange skins (peeled) and four liang of raw ginger.

Mix the orange skins and ginger for one night. Toast them and add six qian of liquorice powder, thirty white plum pulps, as well as five qian of baked salt. Stir them till they are even.  Mix in boiled water and use.

 

Quince soup (second recipe)

 

Use ten liang of quince, two liang of raw ginger powder, two liang of baked salt, two liang of liquorice powder, and ten liang of purple mint powder.

Merge them and stir till they are even. Mix in boiled water and use. If one’s hands and feet are sour [sour perspiration?], he will feel better after drinking it.

Another recipe: add two liang of susha powder and three liang of yam powder. This enhances digestion, dissolves the qi化氣, and strengthens the spleen.

 

Ginseng and dwarf lilyturf soup

 

Use one qian of ginseng, six fen of dwarf lilyturf门冬 [Ophiopogon], and three fen of five-flavor [spice powder]五味.

Put them in a small jar and cook. As the soup is ready, drink it.

 

Green mung bean soup

 

Sift and clean green [but dried] mung beans and put them in a pot and add water. Boil it once over a high fire. Take the soup and wait till it is cooled down. The color is green. It cures heatstroke/insolation. If it boiled several times, the color will become turbid and one cannot bear to eat it.  [This is still an extremely common folk remedy, not only in China but in Korea and elsewhere.]

 

 

BOILED WATERS (twelve kinds)

 

Paddy-leaf boiled water (daoye shushui稻葉熟水)

 

Pick seedlings of growing rice plants and dry them in the sun. For use, pour boiled water in a pot. Burn the leaves and throw them into the pot while still alight. Cover tightly. After a short while, pour the water out.  It is extremely fragrant.

 

Tangerine-leaf boiled water

 

Pick and dry in the sun. Make as above.

 

Osmanthus-leaf boiled water

 

Pick and dry in the sun. Make as above.

 

Purple-mint-leaf boiled water

 

Pick purple mint [perilla] leaves and toast them over fire with a piece of paper inserted between the leaves and fire. Do not stir them. When the fragrance can be smelled, collect them.  For use, wash quickly in boiled water. Then pour away the water. Add the saturated purple mint into a pot and then pour boiled water in it. After using this water, the breast can broaden out and the stagnant can be guided through (kuanxiong daozhi寬胸導滯).

 

Gharu-wood boiled water

 

Use one or two pieces of gharu-wood of the best grade. Burn in a stove and let it smoke. Cover the stove with the mouth of a pot and do not let the smoke escape. When the smoke does not come out any more, add boiled water into the pot immediately. Cover it tightly and then pour it out and drink it.

 

Clove boiled water

 

Use one or two cloves. Mash and put in a pot. Pour boiled water into the pot. The fragrance is thick; it is a little heating (shaore少熱).

 

Large cardamom (sharen砂仁) boiled water

 

Use three to five sharen and one or two qian of liquorice. Mash them and add them into a pot. Add boiled water. This is fragrant and can be eaten.  It can eliminate blockage (xiao yongge消壅隔) and remove what has congealed and been detained in the stomach region.

 

Flower-fragrance boiled water

 

Pick jasmines and roses with half-opened buds. Use one bowl of boiled water and let it cool down. Saturate the buds in the water and cover it with a bowl tightly. Remove the flowers next morning. Fill a pot with boiled water and then add one or two small cups of flower-saturated water. Then the whole pot is fragrant and the water can be taken.

 

Sandal-wood boiled water

 

Use the same method as for gharu-wood boiled water.

 

Cardamom boiled water

 

Use one qian of cardamom, three qian of liquorice, and five fen of sweet flags growing on rocks (shichangpu石菖蒲). Slice them and add them into a clean pottery vessel. Pour boiled water on them, then drink. If the taste is too strong, add boiled water and then it can be used.

 

Cassia liquid (guijiang桂漿)

 

Use one liang of royal cassia (guan gui官桂, Chinese cinnamon) powder and two bowls of white honey (baimi白蜜). Boil two dou of water till only one dou remains. Pour it into a porcelain jar and wait till it is cooled down. Add cinnamon and honey and stir it for more than two hundred times. First cover it with a layer of oil paper. Then add several layers of cotton paper. Seal the jar tightly. After five to seven days, the water can be used. Otherwise, wedge a piece of wood into the jar and seal it tightly. Put it in a well. After three to five days, it is cool and tasty. Drink one or two cups frequently. Heat will be dispelled (qushu祛暑) and anxiety resolved. The hot will be removed and the cool will be generated (qure shengliang去熱生涼). Hundreds of illnesses will be prevented.

 

Medicinal citron (xiangyuan香櫞) soup

 

Use any amount of of large fragrant (medicinal) citrons and set twenty of them apart. Cut them in half. Use a bamboo knife to scrape out the pulp. Remove the part resembling a bag(nangdai囊袋). And the membrane resembling a tendon (jin筋). Collect it. Peel it till there is no white pith. Mince totally. Take it with a bamboo strainer and put it into boiled water. Scald it briefly once or twice. Squeeze it and let it dry. Collect it into the bag-shaped part. Add four liang of baked salt, one liang of liquorice powder, three qian of sandal-wood powder, one qian of gharu-wood powder (it will also be suitable if gharu wood is not used), and two qian of white cardamom powder. Mix evenly and seal tightly in a bottle. This can be preserved for a long time. Use chopsticks to get out one or two spoons of it and pour fully boiled water (baiguntang白滾湯) into it. It cures swelling and inflation in the diaphragm area (xiongge zhangman pengqi胸膈脹滿膨氣), sobers one up from drunkenness, improves digestion (xingjiu huashi醒酒化食), removes phlegm and dissolves congealed matter (daotan kaiyu導痰開郁). Its wonderfulness cannot be described in words. It cannot be taken in too large quantities, or it will hurt one’s original qi (yuanqi元氣).

 

 

CONGEES AND PORRIDGES (zhoumi粥糜), thirty-eight kinds

 

Gordon euryale (foxnut or chicken-head, the edible fruits of a water plant; qianshi芡实) congee

 

Use three he合 of peeled Gordon euryale. If they are new crop, grind them into paste. If they are old, make them into powder. Mix it with three he of japonica rice. Cook it as it turns into congee and eat it. It will enhance the essence and qi, strengthen the intelligence, and sharpen ears and eyes.

 

[Still commonly used in soups and congee; highly nutritious and digestible, it does provide benefits, though possibly not great intellectual supplementation.]

 

Lotus seed congee

 

Use one liang of lotus seed pulp. Peel and cook it till it is mashed. Pestle it carefully. Add three he of sticky rice. Cook them till it turns into congee. Eat it and the curative effects are the same as above.

 

Bamboo leaf congee

 

Use fifty pieces of bamboo leaves, two liang of gypsum (shigao石膏), and three bowls of water. Cook them till it can be contained in two bowls. Let it settle down and remove the sediment. Add three he of rice and cook them into congee. Add one or two spoons of white sugar and eat it. It cures the wind and heat above the midriff (or diaphragm; geshang fengre膈上风热) and red eyes (toumuchi头目赤).

 

Turnip seed (manjing蔓菁, possibly including a kind of beet) congee

 

Use two he of turnip seeds and mash them. Add two large bowls of water and stir. Take the clean juice and add three he of rice. Cook it into congee. It cures difficulty in urination (xiaobian buli小便不利).

 

Cow milk congee

Use one zhong钟 of raw real cow milk [as opposed to soybean milk, etc.]. First make a congee with japonica rice and cook it till it is half cooked. Remove a little of the soup. Add cow milk. When it is fully cooked, contain it in a bowl and add one spoon of butter (su酥) and eat it.  [An interesting recipe, appearing thoroughly Indian; it probably came from India with Buddhism.]

 

Sugar cane congee

 

Extract three bowls of sugar cane juice and add four he of rice. Cook it into congee. Eat it with empty stomach. It cures cough, heat accompanied with weakness (xure虛熱), dry and hot mouth (kouzao口燥), thick phlegm (tinong涕濃), dry tongue (shegan舌幹).

 

Wild yam (shanyao山藥) congee

 

Use four liang of lamb and mash it. Add one he of yam powder, a small amount of salt, and three he of japonica rice. Cook them into congee. Eating it will cure illness caused by long-term weakness (xulao虛勞) and hot bones (gezheng骨蒸).[32]

 

Wolfthorn (gouqi枸杞) congee

 

Use one he of wolfthorn [presumably berries] from Ganzhou甘州 and add three he of rice. Cook it into congee and eat it.

 

Perilla (zisu紫苏) congee

 

Use Perilla frutescens crispa powder and add water to get the juice. When one is cooking [rice] congee and it is about to be fully cooked, add proper amount of juice and mix them evenly. Eating it will cure old men’s foot qi (laoren jiaoqi老人脚气). (It is wonderful using domestic perilla. [Gao’s note.])

 

Glutinous rehmannia (dihuang地黄) congee

 

Use more than ten jin of glutinous rehmannia newly grown by the tenth month. Mash them till the juice comes out. Add four liang of white honey to every jin of the juice. Slowly cook it till it turns into paste. Collect and seal it. When cooking three he of congee, add three or two qian of glutinous rehmannia paste and a small amount of ghee. Eating it will moisturize yin and moisten the lung (ziyin runfei滋阴润肺).

 

Sesame congee

 

Use peeled sesame and steam them till full cooked. Toast till the fragrance can be smelled. Use three he of rice and wash. Add two he of sesame and grind up into juice. Fully cook it into congee. When eating, add butter to it. [“Grinding into juice” evidently means grinding up the sesame and rice in water, or grinding and then putting into water.]

 

Mountain chestnut (shanli山栗) congee

 

Fully cook chestnuts and powder them. Add rice and cook into congee. Then one can eat it.

 

Chamomile seedling (jumiao菊苗) congee

 

Use new born sprouts of chamomile (ganju甘菊) with clustered leaves. Pick and clean them. Mince finely. Add salt and cook with rice into congee. Eating it will clarify the eyesight and pacify the heart (qingmu ningxin清目宁心).

 

Wolfthorn leaf congee

 

Use new tender leaves of wolfthorn. Cook it as the above method. It is also wonderful.

 

[Chinese wolfthorn leaves and berries are extremely rich in vitamins and minerals, and have many of the benefits claimed for them in Chinese medicine.]

 

Job’s tears (yiyi薏苡) congee

 

Wash job’s tears and add the same amount of white rice. Cook them into congee. When eating, add one or two spoonfuls of white sugar.

 

Sandy-husk rice (shakemi沙殼米) [rice with rough, sandy-feeling husks] congee

 

Collect sandy-husk rice and wash it roughly with water. Add it to boiled water. When it is boiled again, take it out immediately. Therefore it will not turn into paste. It cures diarrhea (xiali下痢) and is extremely effective.

 

(wulou芜蒌) congee

 

Fully cook red beans (chidou赤豆) in a pottery jar. When the rice congee is slightly boiled, add the cooked red beans to it and cook. Eat it.

 

Mei flower congee

 

Collect fallen mei petals and clean them. Use snow water to cook congee. When the congee is fully cooked, add petals to it. When it is boiled again, take it up immediately and eat it.

 

Tumi 荼蘼 congee

 

Pick petals of tumi [a small tree with white flowers, according to note in text; unidentified] and boil briefly with hot liquorice soup. When the congee is fully cooked, add them to it and reboil.

Or pick tender leaves of muxiang木香, and boil them briefly with hot liquorice soup. Add oil, salt, ginger, and vinegar to make a dish. It has two kinds of pure fragrances and is truly a food that should be offered to the immortals.

 

River-god (heqi河祇) congee

 

Fully cook Chinese herring (haixiang海鲞). Remove the bones and cut it finely. When the congee is fully cooked, add the fish to it and cook together. Stir till evenly mixed, and eat.

 

Wild yam (shanyao山药) congee

 

Use yam from Huai and make it into powder. Add rice to it with the ratio four to six. Cook them into congee. Eating it will compensate the lower cinnabar field (xiayuan下元)[33].

 

Goat or sheep kidney (yangshen羊肾) congee

 

Use half jin of wolfthorn leaves, three he of rice, two goat/sheep kidneys, five minced green onion heads (it is also suitable if dried). Cook them with rice into congee. Add some salt. Eating it will effectively cure pains in waist and feet.

 

Elk horn (mijiao麋角) congee

 

Use elk horns that have been cooked to produce glue. Grind them into fine powder. Add one qian of powder to every cup of congee. Add a small amount of salt. It cures the weakness in the lower cinnabar field (xiayuan xuruo下元虚弱).

 

Deer kidney congee

 

Use two deer kidneys. Remove the fat and membranes. Mince them finely and add a small amount of salt. Cook till very soft. Add three he of rice and cook into congee. It cures the weakness of qi and deafness (qixu erlong气虚耳聋). Another recipe: add one liang of desert cistanche (congrong苁蓉), which has been washed by liquor and peeled. Cook it with kidneys and rice. It is also good.

 

Pig kidney congee

 

Use two fen of ginseng, a small amount of green onion white (congbai葱白), and one fen of (fangfeng防風)[34]. Mash all of them into powder. Cook them with three he of japonica rice (jingmi粳米) till they are half cooked. Remove the membranes from a pair of pig kidneys. Cut them into thin slices and salt them. Let stand for a while. Add them into the congee pot. Do not stir after the kidneys have been thrown into the pot. Cook it with slow fire for a long time. Eating it will cure deafness.

 

Lamb congee

 

Use four liang of cooked [?] lamb (lanyangrou烂羊肉). Mince it finely. Add one qian of ginseng powder, one qian of tuckahoe powder, two jujubes, and finely minced membranous milk vetch (huangqi黃耆)[35]. Add three he of japonica rice and three or two fen of good salt. Cook them into congee. Eating it will cure weakness (leiruo羸弱) and enhance the yang (zhuangyang壮阳).

 

Dolichos bean (biandou扁豆) congee

 

Use half jin of white dolichos beans and two qian of ginseng. Mince them into thin slices. Cook them with water till the juice comes out. Add rice to it and make it into congee. Eating it will improve one’s essence and strength (yi jingli益精力). Also, it cures children’s cholera (xiao’r huoluan小儿霍乱).

 

Tuckahoe (fuling茯苓) congee

 

Make tuckahoe into powder. Use one liang of it and two he of sweet rice. Fully cook the rice into congee. Then add the tuckahoe and cook them together. Eat it after taking it up. It treats insomnia (“the symptom that one wants to sleep but cannot,” yushui budeshui欲睡不得睡).

 

Perilla and cannabis congee

 

Use five qian of real Perilla frutescens crispa seeds (zhen zisuzi真紫苏子) and cannabis seeds (damazi大麻子) respectively. Wash them with water. Bake them till the fragrance comes out. Add water and grind them into mud-like stuff. Take the juice. Use the juice taken from the two kinds of seeds to cook congee. It cures every kind of weakness that has congealed in an old man’s body for a long time (laoren zhuxu jiejiu老人諸虛結久), wind that cannot been terminated (fengmi bujie風秘不解), the stagnancy gathered in the diaphragm area (yongju gezhong壅聚膈中), inflation in the stomach and sickness in heart (fuzhang exin腹脹噁心).

 

Bamboo trickle (zhuli竹瀝)[36] congee

 

Cook congee as normal. Add a half bottle of bamboo trickle. Eating it will cure the fire accompanying the phlegm (tanhuo痰火).

 

Dwarf lilyturf (mendong門冬) [37]congee

 

Wash raw dwarf lilyturf till it is clean. Extract one cup of juice out of it. Take two he of white rice, one he of Job’s tears (yiyiren薏苡仁), two he of extracted raw glutinous rehmannia (dihuang地黄) juice, and half cup of raw ginger juice. First, fully cook Job’s tears and white rice. Then add the other three sorts of juices. Cook them into thin congee. It cures nausea and vomiting (fanwei ouni翻胃呕逆).

 

Daikon (luobo萝卜) congee

 

Use daikon that is not spicy. Add salt and boil it till it is fully cooked. Mince it into bean-shape bits. Add it to congee that is almost cooked and it can be eaten when it is boiled.

 

Lily bulb (baihe百合) congee

 

Use one sheng of lily bulbs. Mince them and add one liang of honey. When the congee is almost ready to eat, add three he of lily bulbs and cook them together. Eating it is wonderful.

 

Heshouwu (何首乌) congee

 

(The red heshouwu is the female and the white is male. The bigger, the better.)

When picking the bigger, iron tools cannot be used. Use a bamboo knife to peel and slice it. Collect the slices. Use five qian of it and cook it in a pottery jar till it is mashed. Add three he of white rice and make them into congee.

 

Cornel (shanzhuyu山茱萸) congee (it can also be made into powder)

 

Peel and mash it. Grind it into mud-like stuff. Whenever using one cup of it, add two spoons of honey. Bake them together and let them congeal. When eating, mix it with congee and stir evenly.

 

Breast milk (renru人乳) congee

 

Use breast milk from a fat person (feiren肥人). When the congee is half cooked, remove the soup and add breast milk to it. Replace the soup with breast milk and cook it till it is fully cooked. Contain it in a bowl. Add one or two qian of butter (suyou酥油). Stir immediately. It is sweet and tasty. It greatly supplements the original qi (dabu yuanqi大补元气). It is also suitable if butter is not added.

 

Wolfthorn berry (gouqizi枸杞子) congee

 

Use raw wolfthorn berries and grind them into mud-like stuff. If they are dry, grind them into powder. Add half cup of the powder to every basin of congee. Add one or two spoons of white honey and stir it till it is even. Eating it is greatly beneficial (dayi大益).

 

Meat and rice (roumi肉米) congee

 

Use white rice and cook it into soft rice. Use chicken soup (jizhi鸡汁), meat soup, or shrimp soup. Mix them and let it become limpid. Mince fully cooked meat into bean-like bits. Add wild rice stem [i.e. sliced swollen stems of “wild rice,” Zizania; jiaosun茭笋], hispid arthraxon (xiangjin香荩)[38], or (songrang松穰). Mince them finely. Add them and the rice to the soup. When it is boiled, take it immediately and serve it. Use pickles to add flavors to it (guowei过味). It is very good.

 

Green bean congee

 

Wash green beans till they are clean. Put them into a boiler. Add a lot of water and cook them till it is mashed. Then add rice. Use high fire (jinhuo紧火) to cook them into congee. When it is cooled down, it is good for eating. In the summer months, one should stop when having enough of it. It should not be eaten too much.

 

Counted-member (koushu口數) congee[39] [i.e. congee for everyone in the household]

 

At the night of the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month, use red beans to cook congee with the same method of cooking green bean congee. Share it with the whole family. For those that have been out and returned, one should have them eat too. It is called koushu congee. It can repulse epidemics and vicious demons (ligui疠鬼). This comes from Tianjia wuxing田家五行.

 

 

 

STARCHES AND POWDERS (fenmianlei粉面类), eighteen kinds

 

Lotus root starch (oufen藕粉)

 

Take any amount of thick lotus roots. Clean and cut them off. Soak [in water] for three days. Change the water every day. When the water is clean and clear, take the lotus roots out. Mash them into mud-like stuff (dao ru nijiang捣如泥浆). Use a piece of cloth to get the juice. Then mash the dregs. Then extract the juice, sift the remaining, and remove any contaminants. Add clean water, slightly mix and stir them. Then let it settle and remove the water. What has settled is good starch.

 

Jitou Starch (jitoufen鸡头粉)

 

Use fresh jitou and dry them in the sun. Remove the husks and mash them into powder.

 

Chestnut starch (lizifen栗子粉)

 

Use mountain chestnuts. Slice them and dry them in the sun. Grind them into fine powder.

 

Water caltrop starch (lingjiaofen菱角粉)

 

Peel the water caltrops and make them into powder as in making the lotus root starch.

 

Ginger starch

 

Mash the raw ginger and extract the juice. Let the starch settle. It can be added to soup (hegeng和羹).

 

Arrowroot starch (gefen葛粉)

 

Peel the arrowroots. Obtain starch by using the above method. It stimulates the appetite and terminates anxiety and thirst (kaiwei zhi fanke开胃止烦渴).

 

Tuckahoe starch (fulingfen茯苓粉)

 

Slice tuckahoe. Soak, and remove the red juice. Change the water and soak for one day. Get the starch by using the above method. When it is stirred with uncooked congee (weizhuzhou未煮粥), its benefits are best (buyi zuijia补益最佳).

 

Pine and cypress starch (songbofen松柏粉)

 

Take leaves when they still have dew on them. If picked overnight, it will not produce starch. Use the tender leaves and mash them. Let the starch settle down. It is like the tender leaves, green and lovely.

 

Yam starch (shanyaofen山药粉)

 

Use fresh yams. Follow the above method. The dry can be grinded into starch.

 

Brake [presumably bracken fern root] starch (juefen蕨粉)

 

Use it to make cakes, which are wonderful. There are such made-cakes (zhichenghuo治成货).

 

Lotus seed starch

 

The dry lotus seeds can be ground into powder.

 

Taro starch (yufen芋粉)

 

Use white taro (baiyu白芋). Make them into powder by using the above method. The purple ones should not be used.

 

Caltrop starch (jilifen蒺藜粉)

 

Mash it in a wood mortar till its sticks and skins are off. Take the starch out of it as the above method. It can lighten the body and remove the wind (qingshen qufeng轻身去风).

 

 

 

DRIED MEAT AND FISH (puzhalei脯鲊类), fifty kinds

 

One thousand li dry meat (qianlipu千里脯)

 

Beef, lamb, or pork can be used. Use one jin of thin meat, two cups of strong liquor (nongjiu秾酒), one qian of thin vinegar (dancu淡醋), four qian of white salt, three qian of dong 冬, one qian of fennel and Chinese pepper powder. Stir them overnight. Cook them with slow and high fire (wenwuhuo文武火)  till the juice is dry. Dry it in the sun. It is extremely wonderful. It can be preserved for one month.  [Presumably good for a journey of a thousand li, about 300 miles.]

 

Meaty dried flesh (rouzha肉鲊) it is also called willow-leaf dried meat (liuyezha柳叶鲊)

 

Use one jin of thin meat (remove the tendons) and one liang of salt. Add a small amount of rice starch (mifen米粉)—it will turn sour if too much rice starch is added. Use three jin of pig skins (roupi肉皮). Boil them briefly with water. Slice them into thin pieces. Mince them with the thin meat. Stir them. Use a piece of bamboo shoot (ruo箬) skin to wrap a meat cake of the weight of four liang. Bake it above the ashes in the winter (dongtian huihuo冬天灰火) for three days. Use a cover and keep a small hole on it. In the summer, it can be eaten after one week.

[Zha often means dried fish specifically—see below—but, obviously, not here.]

 

Pestled dry meat (chuipu槌脯)

 

Use one jin of thin meat from a pen-raised pig that has been just slaughtered, while still warm. Chop it into four or five pieces. Add half liang of baked salt. Press them into the meat till the tendon and pulse cannot take them any more. Half dry them in the sun. Measure and use good liquor and water, Chinese pepper, dill (shiluo莳萝), orange skins (jupi橘皮). Cook them with slow fire till it is dry. Then mash it into bits.

 

[This spiced, pemmican-like dried shredded meat is still a common snack food.]

 

Fire meat (huorou火肉)

 

Use the four thin legs from a pig that has just been slaughtered and was raised in a pen. Add salt when they are still warm. Add one liang of salt to every jin of meat. Rub the salt from the skin into the meat. Let it turn soft. Press down with bamboo fencing [woven slats] and stones. Put it in a jar. After about twenty days, add ashes burned from paddy stalks (daochaihui稻柴灰) to each layer of meat. Repeat this for three or five times. Burn paddy stalks to smoke the meat for one day and one night. Hang the meat in the place for smoking. In early summer, soak it in water for one day and one night, clean it, and hang it up as before.

 

[Modern Chinese huotui “fire leg” is ham, but here we have a more complex recipe.]

 

Twelfth-month meat (larou腊肉) [La is a general term for preserved meats]

 

Use ten jin of fat, tender pork from a castrated pig (fenzhu?猪). Cut it into twenty pieces. Use eight liang of salt and two jin of liquor. Mix them evenly and rub them with high pressure into the meat till it turns soft. Use a big stone to force out the liquid. Air it till dry. Spread the remaining liquor and dregs on the meat. Use a piece of bamboo strip to piece the meat and hang it in a well-ventilated place.

Another method: use ten jin of meat. Cook twenty liang salt with water till the water is clean. Take the liquid and add it to the meat. Take it out after twenty days and hang it up in a well-ventilated place. Another method: summer-month salty meat. Rub baked salt into the meat. Let it evenly salted for one night. Then hang it up. If any trace of liquid is visible, use a big stone to extrude the liquid. Then hang it in the wind.

 

Roasted fish (zhiyu炙鱼)

 

Use long-tailed anchovy (jiyu鲚鱼)[40] just caught from the river. Clean it. Roast it on burned charcoal till it is fully dried, and gather it up.

Another method: remove the head and tail of the long-tailed anchovy. Cut it into pieces. Fry it with oil till it is fully cooked. Use the skin of bamboo shoots to separate the fish, and arrange them in a pottery jar. Use mud to seal the jar.

 

Fish in salted water (shuiyanyu水腌鱼)

 

In the twelfth month, cut a carp (liyu鲤鱼) into large pieces. Wipe off the water. Use four liang of baked salt for every jin of fish. Rub the salt on the fish and let it stay for one night. Then wash it and air it till it is dry. Then use two liang of salt and one jin of dregs. Mix them evenly and put them in a jar. Use paper and mud to seal the jar.

 

Raw crab (xiesheng蟹生)

 

Mince fresh crab into bits. Cook the sesame oil till it is cooked. Let it cool down. Use (caoguo草果), fennel, large cardamoms (sharen砂仁), Chinese pepper powder, water ginger (shuijiang水姜), pepper powder. Then add green onion, salt, and vinegar. There are ten kinds of flavors. Add them into the crab and stir it evenly. It can be eaten immediately.

 

Dry fish (yuzha鱼鲊)

 

Carp (liyu鲤鱼), herring (qingyu青鱼), weever (luyu鲈鱼), or sturgeon (xunyu鲟鱼) all can be used to make dry fish. Remove the scales and intestines. Use old bamboo brush to brush away the fat and blood till it is very clean. Hang it in the wind for one or two days. Cut it into small squares. Add one jin of raw salt for every ten jin of fish. In summer months, use one jin four liang of salt. Stir it evenly and let it be salted in a container. In the winter, it should be salted for twenty days. In the spring and autumn, it should be salted for less time. Wrap it with a piece of cloth and press it with a rock. Let the liquid go out till it is fully dry, not slippery (hua滑) or pliable (ren韧). Use two liang of Sichuan pepper skins, half liang of dill (shiluo莳萝), fennel, large cardamoms, and red beans (hongdou红豆) respectively, a small amount of liquorice. Make them into rough powder. Wash seven or eight he of white japonica rice and cook it. Use one and half jin of raw sesame oil, one jin of purely white green onion slices, one and half he of red distiller’s yeast (hongqu红曲). Mash them and stir evenly. Press them into a porcelain or wood jar tightly. Cover it with lotus leaves. Insert bamboo strips to fix it. And then press small stones on it. Wait till it is gradually ready. It is suitable to be made in the spring or autumn. In the winter, one can prepare salted fish as a base. When it is used, add other materials to it immediately. This is the method used in the capital. Long-tailed anchovy (jiyu鲚鱼) can be made in the same way. But it should be dry; then it will be good.

 

Meat that is like dry fish (rouzha肉鲊)[compare above recipe, from a different part of Gao’s oeuvre]

 

Cook fresh pig or goat lean legs. Slice them and pestle the slices with the back of a knife blade for twice or three times. Cut them into squares. Boil them and then take them out immediately. Wrap them in a piece of cloth and twist it till dry. For every jin of meat, add one cup of good vinegar, four qian of salt, a small amount of Chinese pepper oil, caoguo草果, and sharen砂仁. It is also tasty when it is served [at a meal].

 

Large stewed meat (dalurou大卤肉)

 

Choose a pig that has been raised in the pen and is about forty jin in weight. Use only the fore legs. Remove the fat, bones and the (tuodu拖肚). Pick a piece of pure meat (jingrou净肉) and cut it into pieces about four or five jin in weight. Then cut two times in a cross shape and then make them into squares (qie shizi wei sifang kuai切十字为四方块). Boil them with pure water till they are about seventy or eighty percent cooked. Take them out and let them cool down. Slice them and let each slice have both fat and lean meat and one finger in thickness. Remove the grease on the surface and add a small amount of water. Use the original soup (yuanzhi原汁) [that was used to boil the meat]. Put the soup in a pot. First add spices (luliao卤料), then add the meat, and then add soy sauce, and then add the original soup. Boil them. Then add fine spice powder (mozi xi luliao末子细卤料) to the meat, and then add red dreg powder (hongqumo红曲末).  [A red fungal ferment.] Let it soak in the meat juice and get thinner. Pour the juice onto the meat. Use slow and high fire to boil them till the meat is red all over. Then add previously cooked sauce (suzhi宿汁). Add some salt, remove (jiangban酱板), and then add shrimp sauce (xiazhi虾汁). Remove the grease floating on the surface. Measure how clean (qing清) the sauce is and cook it till it is proper. Use when it is warm. The meat and sauce should not be warmed in a pot again.

Fermented-soybean-sauced goose (chizhi e豉汁鹅) is made as the above method. But the red dregs should not be used. Instead, add some fermented soybeans to the sauce.

The method of extracting a thin sauce (qingzhi清汁): how to remove the grease previously. Mash raw shrimps and soy sauce and add them to the soup. Boil the soup and let it boiled in the pot. At the same time, skim what is floating on the surface. (If there is no shrimp sauce, mash pig liver and add water. Replace the shrimp sauce with the liver sauce.) After three or four times, it is all right, when there is no floating grease, if the shrimp sauce is added.

The method of preserving previously cooked sauce (suzhi宿汁): boil the previously cooked sauce everyday. Let it settle down for awhile and it is usable when clean. If it is not used, contain it in a tin container or pottery jar and seal it. Then hang it in a well.

The method of using the red dregs (yong hongqu fa用红曲法): use about a cup of liquor for every yeast ball (qu曲). Let it soak in the liquor overnight and turn soft. Grind it into mud like stuff. Use the meat soup to dilute it.

The method of making rough spices (cu luliao粗卤料): use equal amount of royal cinnamon, white angelica (baizhi白芷)[41], and fine ginger (liangjiang良姜). Do not cut them and use up all of them.

The method of making fine spices (xi luliao细卤料): use as much as liquorice, and equal amount of royal cinnamon, white angelica, fine ginger, osmanthus flowers, sandal wood, ageratum (huoxiang藿香), asarum (xixin细辛), nard (gansong甘松), Chinese pepper, susha[石宿]砂, red beans, and apricot seeds. Make them into fine powder for usage.

The meat soup should be very clean. It is wonderful when there is no floating grease. But the meat should not be dry or shriveled.

 

 

Salted vinegar fish in jelled stock (daidong yancu yu帶凍鹽醋魚)

 

Cut fresh carp into small pieces. Salt them. Cook in soy sauce. Add the fish scales and catnip (Schizonepeta tenuifolia, jingjie荊芥)[42] to the sauce and boil them. Remove the dregs. When the soup is thick, flavor it according to one’s taste. Keep the soup in a tin container. Put it in a well or in [cold] water [to jell it]. Pour thick gingered vinegar on it.

 

Cucumber sauce (guaji瓜齏)

 

Use equal amount of cucumber [or gourd] pickles (jianggua醬瓜), raw ginger, green onion (congmian蔥面), unsalted dried bamboo shoots (dansungan淡筍乾) or wild rice stem (jiaobai茭白), baby shrimps (xiami蝦米), and chicken breasts. Cut them into long slices. Fry them with sesame oil and then it can be served.

 

Dried moorhen (a duck-like wild bird; shuiji ganzi水雞幹子)

 

Clean a large moorhen. Boil it in the water and take it out immediately when it is boiled. Press it with a stone. Let it dry totally and then store it.

[Not generally considered very edible.]

 

Abacus-strip cake (suantiao bazi算條巴子)

 

Use fat and lean pork and cut them into pieces three cun in length, in shape of abacus strip. Use proper amount of granulated sugar (shatang砂糖), Chinese pepper powder, and susha宿砂 powder. Blend them evenly. Dry them in the sun and steam them till fully cooked.

 

Minced pork and clam (saozi hali臊子蛤蜊[43])

 

Use half fat and half lean pork. Cut into small squares like dices. Add some liquor and half-cook these. Add soybean sauce and then Chinese pepper, large cardamoms, green onion white, salt, and vinegar. Blend them evenly. Then mix green bean powder and water evenly. Add them into the pot and contain it when it is boiled. Use this as the sauce (ni膩). Boil the clams in the water and remove the shells. Place them one by one in a boiler (tangguzi湯鼓子). Place the sauce above the clams and serve them. The same method can be applied to fresh leek (xinjiu新韭), onion (hucong胡葱), bok choy hearts (caixin菜心), pig kidney (zhuyaozi猪腰子), bamboo shoots, and wild rice stem.

 

Oven roasted chicken (lubeiji炉焙鸡)

 

Use one hen. Boil it till it is eighty percent cooked. Cut it into small squares. Add a small amount of oil in a pot and fully heat it. Place the chicken in the pot and fry it briefly. Use a metal plate (xuanzi鏇子) or a bowl to cover it. Cook it till it is extremely hot. Add equal amount of liquor and vinegar, a small amount of salt. Cook. When it is dry, [add water and] cook it. Repeat this for several times till the chicken is very soft and full cooked. It can be used.  [The “oven” thus appears to be a large pot. The idea here is to cook the chicken pieces down to preserve them.]

 

Steamed hilsa herring (or Reeves shad; shiyu鲥鱼)[44]

 

Remove the intestines of the hilsa herring but not the scales. Use a piece of cloth to wipe off the blood. Place it in a boiler. Mash Chinese pepper, large cardamoms, and soy sauce. Add liquor (shuijiu水酒) and green onion and blend them till the flavor is even. Steam the fish with the sauce. Remove the scales and serve it.

 

Soft-bone fish (suguyu酥骨鱼)

 

Clean a large crucian carp (jiyu鲫鱼). Add a small amount of soy sauce, a large pinch of perilla leaves (zisuye紫苏叶), and a little liquorice. Cook for half a day [evidently braising over very low heat; this would soften the otherwise extremely annoying small bones of this fish]. When it is fully cooked, it can be served.

 

Sichuan pig head (chuanzhutou川猪头)

 

Boil the pig head with water till it is fully cooked. Cut it into strips. Blend granulated sugar, Chinese pepper, large cardamom, and soy sauce with it evenly. Boil it in the original soup [boiling stock]. When it is as soft as if mashed, remove the bones and tie it with threads. Press a large stone on it tightly and make it into cream-dreg like stuff (gaozao膏糟). Then it can be eaten.

[Much like European head cheese.]

 

Stuffed stomach (niangduzi釀肚子)

 

Clean a pig stomach. Stuff dried lotus seeds (shilianrou石蓮肉)[45] into it. Wash the bitter skin (kupi苦皮) [of the lotus seeds] till it is very clean. Wash white sweet rice as much as the lotus seeds. Stuff them into the stomach. Tie the stomach with threads. Full cook it and press it tightly. When it is cooled down, slice it. Place the cooked stomach above a piece of paper on the floor. Spray fine vinegar on the stomach and cover it with an earthen bowl. After a while, it can be eaten. Both the stomach and the pulp are thick and edible.

 

The method of making salted meat (yanrou腌肉) in summer months

 

Use baked warm salt to scrub the meat till the meat turns soft. Place it in a jar and press stones on it evenly. Press it overnight and then hang it up. If there is any trace of liquid, use a big stone to press it till it is dry. Hang it in a windy place and it will not spoil.

 

The method of making salted pig tongue and ox tongue

 

Use eight qian of salt for every jin of tongues. One recipe: use five qian [of salt][46], a bowl of fine liquor, a small amount of Sichuan pepper, dill (shiluo莳萝), fennel (huixiang茴香), and sesame oil, and minced green onion white. Blend them and let them be for five days. Stir them for three or four times. Pierce the tongues, then use a piece of thread to hang them up in a windy place. Let them dry in the shade and wrap them in paper. Boil them and they can be used.

 

Recipe for air-dry fish (fengyufa风鱼法)

 

Cut open the stomach of herring (qingyu青鱼) or carp (liyu鲤鱼) and remove the intestines. Use four or five qian of salt for every jin of fish. Salt it for seven days and then take it up. Clean it and wipe off the liquid. Cut below the gills. Scrub the gills and inside and outside of the abdomen with Sichuan pepper, fennel, and baked salt. Wrap it with paper. Then use a piece of hemp skin (mapi麻皮) to wrap all the fish into one bundle. Hang it in a windy place. It would be wonderful if there are more spices stuffed in the fish abdomen.

 

Recipe for raw meat (roushengfa肉生法)

 

Cut lean pork into narrow, thin slices. Wash them with soybean sauce. Fry them quickly in a red-heated pot. When the blood disappears and the meat turns white, it is prepared. Take it out and cut it into threads. Then add pickles, radish pickled in lees (zaoluobo糟萝卜), garlic, Amomum villosum cardamom (sharen砂仁), Amomum tsaoko cardamom (caoguo草果)), Chinese pepper, orange slices, and sesame oil. Mix them and fry. When eating it, one should add vinegar to the meat threads and blend them evenly. It is very tasty.

 

Recipe for making fish paste (yujiang鱼酱)

 

Use one jin of fish. Mince it and wash it till it is clean. Use three liang of baked salt, one qian of Chinese pepper, one qian of fennel, one qian of dried ginger, two qian of (shenqu神曲), five qian of red dregs (hongqu 红曲). Add liquor to them and blend them evenly. Blend them with fish and contain it in a porcelain jar and seal it tightly. After ten days, it can be used. When eating, one should add some minced green onion.

 

Recipe for making mashed and/or lees-cured pig head and feet (zaozhutou tizhua糟豬頭、蹄爪)

 

Boil pig head and feet till they can be easily mashed. Wrap them in a piece of cloth and spread them. Add a big stone on it and press the stone, flattening them for one night. It is very good when brewing lees are used (zaoyong糟用).

 

Recipe for making liquor fish (jiufayu酒發魚)

 

Cut a large crucian carp (jiyu鯽魚) open. Remove the scales, eyes, and intestines. Do not let unboiled water touch it. Use a piece of cloth to wipe off the water. For one jin of fish, use one liang of shenqu神曲, one liang of red dreg (hongqu红曲) powder, two liang of baked salt, one liang of pepper, fennel, Sichuan pepper, and dried ginger. Blend them and insert them into the abdomen of the fish. Add one more layer of spices and place it in a jar. Wrap it and seal it with mud. If it is made in the twelfth month, it should be opened after the fifteenth day of the first month. Turn the fish over and add fine liquor to it and let it saturate in the liquor. Seal it with mud till the fourth month. By then it is ready and can be eaten. It can be preserved for one or two years.

 

Recipe for making liquor-soaked shrimps (jiuyanxia酒腌虾)

 

Use large shrimps and do not wash them with water. Clip the antennae and tails. Use five qian of salt for every jin of shrimps. Salt them for half day. Let them dry and put them in a bottle. When placing one layer of shrimps, add thirty Chinese peppercorns. It would be wonderful if more peppercorns are added. Or it would be wonderful if one blends peppercorns with shrimps and place them in a bottle. After placing them in the bottle, one should use three liang of salt for every jin of shrimps and dilute the salt with fine liquor and pour the salted liquor into the bottle. Seal it with mud. It will be tasty after five to seven days in the spring or autumn. It takes ten days in the winter.

 

Huguang recipe for making dried fish (huguang yuzha湖广鱼鲊)

 

Use ten jin of large carp (liyu鲤鱼). Cut them into small squares like cloves (dingxiang丁香). Remove the bones and other wastes. Stir and toast old yellow rice till dry. Grind into powder. Use a half sheng of it.  Add one and a half sheng of baked red dregs (chaohongqu炒红曲). Make into powder for use. Measure ten jin of the fish pieces and use two bowls of fine liquor, one jin of salt (use one jin and four liang of salt in summer months). Blend them with the fish and put them in a porcelain container. Let it be salted for half of a month in the winter, ten days in the spring or summer. Then take it up and wash it till it is clean. Wrap it in a piece of cloth and extract water out of it till it is very dry. Use two liang of Sichuan pepper, one liang of Amomum villosum cardamoms (sharen砂仁), five qian of fennel, five qian of red beans, a small amount of liquorice that is made into powder, one jin and eight liang of sesame oil, and one jin of white stalks of green onions. First, add one sheng of rice-koji powder (miqumo米曲末) to them and blend them evenly. Contain them in a jar and press a stone on it. It can be eaten after fifteen days in the winter and seven or eight days in the summer months. When eating it, it would be wonderful if spices and rice vinegar (jiaoliao micu椒料米醋) are added.

 

Deep-fried meat in water (shuizharou水煠肉); also called “split-and-burned” (boshao擘燒)

 

Cut raw pork into large strips of two fingers in width. Carve patterns like brick stairs [i.e., cut little notches] on both sides of the strips. Then use sesame oil, sweet sauce (tianjiang甜酱), Chinese pepper, fennels, and blend them evenly. Rub them on the carved meat till they are evenly spread. After a while, add a bowl of oil obtained by cooking the pig fat, a bowl of sesame oil, a large bowl of water, a small bowl of liquor to a pot. Add the spiced meat till it is saturated in the juice. Then add one liang of garlic (suanlang蒜榔) and stew it with a cover on the pot. When the meat turns soft, take it up and eat it. The meat seems to have no grease at all because the grease turns into gas.

 

Water steamed meat (qingzhengrou清蒸肉)

 

Boil a piece of fine pork once. Take clean squares. Wash it by water and scrape it till it is clean. Carve the skin with a knife. Wrap anise seeds, fennel seeds (daxiaohuixiang大小茴香),  Chinese pepper, Amomum tsaoko cardamoms (caoguo草果), and royal cinnamon in a piece of sparsely-woven cloth. Put it in a boiler and press the meat on it. First, boil chicken or goose meat to get the pure broth and flavor it properly. Pour the broth onto the meat. Then cover it with scallion (dacong大葱), pickles (yancai腌菜), and garlic (suanlang蒜榔) in the boiler. Steam it with the boiler covered. When eating it, remove the scallion, garlic, wrapped spices, and so on.

 

Fried goat stomach (chaoyangdu炒羊肚)

 

Wash a goat stomach till it is clean. Cut it into narrow strips. Boil a large pot of water. At the same time, cook oil in a pot. First, put the stomach in the boiler and boil it quickly by holding it in a bamboo strainer (zhaoli笊篱). Then use a piece of coarse cloth (cubu粗布) to extract the water in the stomach. Put it immediately into the wok with oil in it and fry it with high fire. When it is about to be fully cooked, blend green onion, sliced garlic, Chinese pepper, fennels, soybean sauce, liquor, and vinegar evenly and add them to stomach. Take it up immediately after it is cooked. It is delicious and crisp. If one is slow in doing this, the stomach will be slick like a strip of skin.  It is then disgusting.

 

Fried kidney (chaoyaozi炒腰子)

 

Cut a pig kidney open and remove the white membrane and tendons. Carve patterns on the outside of the kidney. Place it in boiled water and boil it briefly. Take it up and let the water go. Fry it quickly in a wok. Add spices (xiaoliao小料) such as minced green onion, coriander (yuansui芫荽), sliced garlic, Chinese pepper, ginger, soybean sauce, liquor, and vinegar. Take it up immediately when it is cooked.

 

Razor clam and dried fish (chengzha蛏鲊)

 

Use one jin of razor clams and one liang of salt. Let the clams be salted for one day and one night. Then wash the clams and let them dry. Wrap them in a piece of cloth and press a stone on it. Add five qian of cooked oil, five qian of ginger and orange slices, one qian of salt, five fen of sliced green onion, a large cup of liquor, and one he of rice (fanshen飯糝) that is made into powder. Blend them evenly. Put in a bottle and seal it with mud. It can be served after ten days. Dried fish can be made in the same way.

 

Wind-dried fish (youfengyu又风鱼)

 

Use four qian of salt for every jin of fish. Add Chinese pepper, Amomum villosum (sharen砂仁), minced green onion, sesame oil, sliced ginger, and finely sliced orange. Let them be salted for ten days and then hang the fish up in the smoke.

 

Sugar-roasted meat (tangzhirou糖炙肉) and roasted meat strips (hongrouba烘肉巴)

 

Remove the skin and bones in a piece of pork and cut it into large slices of two cun in thickness. Use a small amount of granulated sugar to remove the smell [of the pork]. Blend soybean sauce, aniseeds, fennel seeds (daxiaohuixiang大小茴香), and Chinese pepper with the meat. Dry it for one day and collect it. Cook sesame oil and add the meat to it. Cover the wok and do not burn firewood. It is ready when it turns soft.

Cut lean and tender pork into slices or strips. Salt them for awahile and blend them with Chinese pepper. Dry them for one day. When eating, roast them on iron grill above burning charcoals.

 

Three recipes for soybean sauce crab (jiangxie醬蟹), dreg crab (zaoxie糟蟹), and drunk crab (zuixie醉蟹)

 

Add sesame oil in soybean sauce, which can make the crab be preserved longer without turning granulate (jiuliu busha久留不砂). Use one bowl of dregs, vinegar, liquor, and soybean sauce, respectively. When the crabs are many, add a plate of salt. Another recipe: use seven bowls of liquor, three bowls of vinegar, and two bowls of salt. Drunk crabs are delicious too. Place a piece of charcoal at the bottom of the jar and the crab fat (xiegao蟹膏) will not granulate. Add one qian of angelica root (baizhi白芷) to the crabs in liquor dregs and then the crab fat will keep firm. But the crabs will probably be tainted with a smell of medicine, which is not good.

 

How to dry shrimps in the sun without letting their redness fade away

 

Stir and bake shrimps with salt till they are fully cooked. Put them in a bamboo basket. Wash away the salt with well water. Dry them in the sun and their redness will not fade away.

 

Recipe for boiling a fish (zhuyufa煮鱼法)

 

For river fish (heyu河鱼), place in water and boil till bones turn soft. For fish of big rivers and seas (jianghaiyu江海鱼), first flavor the stock for boiling and then place the fish in it, so the fish bones will be hard.

 

How to boil crabs and let them remain green in color; how to remove the meat from clam (geli蛤蜊)

 

Use three to five persimmon pedicels (shidi柿蒂) to boil with crabs and the crabs will remain green in color. Boil loquat kernels (pipaheneiren枇杷核内仁) with clams and the clam meat will fall from the shell.

 

Recipe for making meat paste (roujiang肉酱)

 

Use four jin of lean pork and remove the tendons and bones. Use one jin and eight liang of soybean sauce, four liang of finely ground salt, one bowl of finely minced green onion white, five or six qian of Sichuan pepper, fennel, and preserved orange peels (chenpi陈皮) respectively. Blend these spices with liquor and add the meat into it till it is like a thick congee. Place it in a jar and seal it tightly. Dry it in a scorching sun. After more than ten days, open it and see whether it is dry or not. If it is dry, add liquor. If it is light, add salt. Seal it with mud again and dry it in the sun.

 

Dried yellowbird (huangque黄雀) [Yellow buntings or siskins]

 

Clean every bird. Wipe it with liquor and do not let it be touched by water. Use yellow wheat yeast (maihuang麥黃)[47], red rice starter (honhqu红曲), salt, Chinese pepper, and sliced green onion. Taste it till the flavor is right. Place the birds in a flat jar. Spread one layer of spices on every layer of birds. Stuff the jar and fasten it with bamboo leaves and stalks. When the brine (lu卤) comes out, pour it away and add liquor to it. Seal it tightly and it can be used for a long time.

 

List of cooking tips (zhishi youfa tiaoli治食有法条例)

 

Use flour to wash pig liver and use granulated sugar to wash pig intestines and there will not be any smell.

When boiling bamboo shoots, add mint to them and add less salt or ashes. Then the bamboo shoots will not taste sour.

Place a half piece of the fruit of Chinese honeylocust (zaojiao皂角) on the jar containing dregs and soybean sauces (zaojiang糟醬), and it can be preserved longer. [Possibly the saponins in the pod have some preservative effect.]

Add one or two drops of raw oil to the water and use it to wash the fish. The there will not be any sticky liquid (xian涎).

When boiling fish, add ground incense (moxiang末香)[48] to it and it will not be smelly.

When boiling goose, add several slices of cherry and then it will turn soft easily.

When boiling old dried meat (chenlarou陈腊肉) that is about to be fully cooked, throw several pieces of burning charcoal into the boiler and then the meat will not have a sour, greasy smell.

When boiling any kind of meat, cover the boiler and cook them with one or two pieces of paper mulberry fruit (Broussonetia papyrifera, chushizi楮实子). Then the meat will easily turn soft and become delicious.

In summer months, boil meat with vinegar alone and it can be preserved for ten days.

Flours (mian面) should not be eaten along with unboiled water (shengshui生水). Use boiled water and let it cool down and eat it.

When cooking meat, do not use mulberry branches as firewood. [Most of the tips in this section are practical, but this one seems magical.]

Do not place crabs in soybean sauce or crabs in dregs in the light of a lamp. Otherwise, the meat will turn coarse (or sandy, sha沙).  [Possibly another magic trick, but more likely the idea is that one cannot see by lamplight well enough to get the sand out.]

If the liquor turns sour, bake one sheng of red beans (xiaodou小豆) till they are burned. Put them in a bag and place the bag in the liquor jar. Then the liquor will be good.

Dry the light ashes (danhui淡灰) extracted from a dye house in the sun. Use to cover raw cucumbers or eggplants completely, and they will be edible till the winter.

Wrap oranges with pine needles (songmao松毛) and the oranges will not dry up for three to four months. It is also possible to use green beans to cover oranges.

On the fifth day of the fifth month, boil wheat flour into congee. Add a small amount of salt and let it cool down. Pour it into a jar. Collect recently picked unripe red peaches and place them in the jar. Seal the jar. The peaches will be fresh in the winter months.

For yellow apricots in honey (mijian huangmei蜜煎黄梅), one should change the honey frequently. Place asarum (xixin细辛) on top of them and worms will not grow in them.

Use the water taken in the twelfth month (lashui臘水), a handful of mints, and a small amount of potassium alum (mingfan明矾). Place them into a jar. Soak loquats枇杷, apples, or waxberries (yangmei杨梅) in it and their color will not change. They taste cool and are edible.

[Most of these tips are quite practical, and similar to old-time preserving methods in Europe and frontier America.]

 

 

 

VOLUME TWO

 

DOMESTIC VEGETABLES (jiashulei家蔬类)

 

These are what I have made by myself and thus I know how they taste. These recipes are collected in my notes, not recorded randomly (fei manlu ye非漫录也). If they are different from what is circulated, it is because of difference of opinion (xiting zhidu悉听制度).

 

Salted gourds and vegetables (peiyan guashu配盐瓜蔬)

 

Use fifty jin of old gourds and tender eggplants. Use two and a half liang of pure salt. First use a half liang of salt to salt the gourds and eggplants for one night in order to let the water go. Then use five jin of orange peels, two jin of fresh perilla (zisu紫苏) with roots, three jin of raw ginger, two jin of peeled apricot kernels, four liang of osmanthus flowers (guihua桂花), two liang of liquorice, and one dou of soybean. Boil them. Blend them with five jin of liquor and place them in a jar. Stuff the jar and press five layers of bamboo leaves on them. Use bamboo strips to fasten them. Use bamboo leaves with mud to seal the jar. Dry it in the sun. Take them out after two months. Add half jin of Chinese pepper (dajiao大椒), half jin of fennel and Amomum villosum (sharen砂仁) respectively. Spread them and dry them in the sun light. When they glow [probably:  turn a glowing color], they turn soft and delicious. For soybeans, one should use large ones and fully cook them till they can be easily mashed. Use bran (fupi麸皮) to cover the cooked soybeans till they glow. Then remove the bran and use the pure soybeans.

 

Sugar steamed eggplants (tangzhengqie糖蒸茄)

 

Use tender and large cow-breast eggplants (niunaiqie牛奶茄). Do not remove the pedicels. Cut them into six-side shape (liuleng六棱). Use one liang of salt for every fifty jin of eggplants. Blend them evenly. Then boil them briefly in boiled water and let their color change. Strain them. Use mint and fennel powder, two jin of granulated sugar, and half cup of vinegar. Soak them in it for three nights. Dry them in the sunlight and then use above spices to salt them again (lu卤). When the spices have been used up and the eggplants are dry, flatten the eggplants and collect them.

 

Garlic mei (suanmei蒜梅)

 

Use two jin of green and hard mei (qingying meizi青硬梅子, i.e. very unripe) and one jin of peeled garlic. Add three liang of stirred-and-baked salt to proper amount of water and boil it. When it is cooled down, soak the mei and garlic in it. After five to ten days, the brine (lushui卤水) is about to change color. Pour it out and boil it again. When it is cooled down, saturate the mei and garlic in it again. Contain them in a bottle. Eat them till the seventh month. The mei will not taste sour and the garlic will not have a rank smell (hunqi荤气).

 

[Suanmei are still a common delicacy, but are now made from more ripe mei.]

 

Stuffed gourds (nianggua酿瓜)

 

Choose hard, old, and large green gourds (qinggua青瓜) and cut them into halves. Remove the pulp and salt them briefly to get rid of excess liquid. Slice raw ginger, orange peels, mints, and perilla (zisu紫苏). Stir and bake fennel and Amomum villosum cardamoms (sharen砂仁). Add granulated sugar to them and blend evenly. Stuff these into the gourds. Use threads to tie them into whole pieces. Then place them into a jar. After five or six days, take them out and dry the stuffed gourds in the sunlight. Collect the withered gourds. Mince them and dry them in the sunlight.[49]

 

Garlic cucumbers (or gourds; suangua蒜瓜) [the recipe seems to be for cucumbers]

 

Use one jin of small cucumbers picked in the autumn. Boil them briefly in calx and white alum water (shihui baifan tang石灰白矾汤). Strain them and use half liang of salt to salt them for one night. Use another half liang of salt, three liang of peeled, mashed garlic. Blend them with the cucumbers evenly. Place them in the water that is obtained from the previously salted cucumbers. Slowly cook liquor and vinegar. Saturate them in it and place them in a cool place. The same method can be applied to wax gourd (donggua冬瓜) and eggplants.

 

Boiled-for-three-times gourds (sanzhugua三煮瓜)

 

Cut hard, old green gourds into halves. Use half liang of salt, one liang of soybean sauce, a small amount of perilla (zisu紫苏) and liquorice for every jin of gourds. During the hottest days (fushi伏时), boil them with the brine water at night and dry them in the day. After three times of boiling and then drying in the sunlight for two days, steam them in a pot. Preserve them after they are withered in the sunlight.

 

Dried garlic sprouts (suanmiaogan蒜苗干)

 

Cut one jin of garlic sprouts into pieces of one cun in length. Use one liang of salt to salt them and remove the smelly water. Strain them briefly. Add some soybean sauce and sugar. Steam them and dry them in the sunlight and collect them.

 

Preserved mustard plants (cangjie藏芥)

 

Use thick mustard plants (jiecai芥菜) that do not touch water. Dry them in the sunlight till they are sixty to seventy percent dry. Remove the leaves. Use four liang of salt for every jin of mustard. Salt them for one night and take them out. Wrap plants in small handfuls and place them in a small bottle. Pour out all the water and boil it with the mustard. Take the clean liquid and let it cool down. Put it in a bottle and seal the bottle tightly. Eat in summer months.

 

Green bean sprouts (lüdouya绿豆芽)

 

Soak green beans in cold water for two nights. When they are swelling, change the water and wash them twice. Bake them till they are dry. Sweep the floor and make it clean. Spread water on the floor and place a piece of paper on the wet floor. Then place the beans on the paper. Cover them with a basin. Spread water on them twice every day. When the sprouts grow, wash them and remove the peels. Boil them briefly in water. Add ginger and vinegar to them. It is especially good when ground meat is added.

 

Spicy mustard (jiela芥辣)

 

Finely grind two-years-old mustard seeds (jiezi芥子). Add water to them and pack tightly in a bowl. Seal tightly with a piece of firm paper (renzhi韧纸). Saturate it in boiled water twice till the water turns yellowish. Place the bowl upside down on the cold floor. After a while, there will be gas. Add light vinegar (dancu淡醋) to it. Unwrap it and use a piece of cloth to remove the dregs. Another recipe is to add two or three fen of asarum (xixin细辛) to it and then it will be more spicy.

 

Buddha’s-hand citron (foshou佛手), citron (xiangyuan香橼), or pear (lizi梨子) preserved in soybean sauce

 

Place pears without peels in a jar of soybean sauce and they will not spoil for a long time. Place citron peels after removing the pulp in soybean sauce. Place the whole Buddha’s-hand citron in soybean sauce. Fresh orange peels, edible lichens (shihua石花), and wheat gluten (mianjin面筋) can also be soaked in soybean sauce and their taste will be better.

 

Recipe for making brewed eggplants (zaoqiezi糟茄子)

 

With five jin of eggplants, six jin of dregs, and seventeen liang of salt, plus river water, [the brewed eggplants] are as sweet as honey.[50]

Use five jin of eggplants, six jin of dregs, seventeen liang of salt, and two small bowls of river water that is used to blend with the dregs. This eggplant is tasted sweet by itself. This is a method of preserving eggplants and not for heavy eating.

Another recipe: soak middle-sized eggplants that are picked late in season (wanqiezi晚茄子) in water for one night. Use four liang of salt and one jin of dregs for every jin of eggplants. It also tastes good.

 

Recipe for making brewed ginger (zaojiang糟姜)

 

Use one jin of ginger, one jin of dregs, and five liang of salt. Pick a day before Earth Day (sheri社日)[51] to saturate them in the dregs. Do not let water get into it. Do not damage the ginger peels. Use a piece of cloth to wipe off the mud on the ginger. After half-drying them in the sunlight, blend dregs and salts with them and contain them in a jar.

 

Sugar-and-vinegar gourds (tangcugua糖醋瓜)

 

Use white long-crooked gourds (baishenggua白生瓜) that are just picked in the sixth month. For every fifty jin of gourds, cut them in halves and remove their (lian练). Cut them into squares about one cun in length and three fen three li in thickness. Then use water and a bamboo strainer to wash them till they are clean. Use five liang of salt for every ten jin of gourds. Salt them in a jar for about two hours. Then stir them and salt them for another hour. Strain them and spread them on a piece of reed mat. Dry them in scorching sunlight and let them half dry. First, slice orange peels and gingers, sift Chinese pepper peels and baked salt till they are pure. Boil fine vinegar in a pot and use twenty two liang five qian of vinegar for every ten jin of gourds. Add ten liang of fine granulated sugar to the salt and vinegar. Pour them into a container. When they cool down, add gourds, ginger, Chinese pepper and so on to the vinegar and blend them evenly. After one night, stir them. After another night, stir and collect them. As long as the containers are clean and have not water in it and they are kept in the shade, they will be fine.

 

Vegetarian bamboo-shoot that is like dried fish (susunzha素笋鲊)

 

Use six or seven fine haofu (好麸) [unclear; fron the context, presumably a kind of bamboo shoot] and pull them into strips like little fingers. Measure five jin of them and add them into boiled water. Boil them till boiled for four times and place them in a bamboo strainer. Dry them when they are still warm. First, bake half a he of dill (shiluo莳萝) and fennel in total. Grind them till they cannot be ground further. Pick slightly less than a half he of Chinese pepper peels. Use more than a half he of red yeast rice (chiqumi赤曲米) and soak them in boiled water till they turn soft. Cut a half bowl of green onion heads. Use about one he of apricot kernels and remove the tips and mash them. Use liquor to flavor the soup. Cook two liang of oil. Put out the fire when the oil is fully cooked. Pour the apricot kernels into the oil, and then the yeast rice and spices. Use an iron turner to stir them three or four times. Taste it and decide whether it is salty or light. Then pick it up with a bamboo strainer and keep it in a container. Add the warm red yeast rice to it and press it. Cover it with lotus leaves and fasten it with bamboo strips. Press a stone on it. It can be eaten after three or four hours.

 

Another recipe for bamboo-shoot like dried fish (sunzha笋鲊)

 

Use tender bamboo shoots in the spring and remove the old heads. Cut them into strips about four fen in thickness and one cun in length. Steam them in a bamboo steamer till they are fully cooked. Wrap them with cloth and extract water out of them till they are extremely dry. Place them in a container. When using them, add them to oil. The recipe is the same as the preceding.

 

Recipe for making lees-cured turnip (zaoluobo糟萝卜)

 

Use one jin of turnip and three liang of salt. No water should get onto the turnips. Wipe them clean. Keep the roots and fibrils. Dry them in the sunlight. Blend lees and salt. Then add the turnips. Stir them and place them in a jar. This recipe cannot be used for heavy eating.

 

per, one liang of nter, ten days in the spring or summer.

Recipe for making garlic sprouts (suanmiao蒜苗)

 

Use a small amount of salt to salt garlic sprouts for one night. Strain them and then boil them briefly in water and then strain them again. Blend them with soup having liquorice in it. Steam them and then keep them in a jar, after drying them in the sunlight.

 

Three harmony vegetables (sanhecai三和菜)[52]

 

Use one portion of thin vinegar (dancu淡醋), one portion of liquor, one portion of water, and proper amount of salt and liquorice. Blend them to get the right flavor. Boil them. Then add a small amount of vegetables (cai菜, almost certainly meaning Chinese cabbage greens here), sliced ginger and orange peels, one or two small pieces of Dahurian angelica (baizhi白芷) to the vegetables. steam them with water (chongtang重湯) and do not let it boiled. When they are fully cooked, eat them.

 

Quick-fried bits (baoji暴齏)

 

Boil briefly the tender stalks of young pakchoi (songcai菘菜) until half cooked. Strain till dry. Mince them into small bits. Add a small amount of oil and fry quickly. Then put them in a container and add a small amount of vinegar. After a while, eat them.

 

Carrot dish (huluobocai胡蘿蔔菜)

 

Slice red, slim carrots and mustard greens (jiecai芥菜). Saturate them in vinegar for a while. They are crisp when eaten. Add a small amount of salt, aniseed and fennel (daxiao huixiang大小茴香), ginger, and sliced dried orange peel. Blend them with vinegar and let them be for a while. Then they can be eaten.

 

Carrots (huluobozha胡蘿蔔鮓), commonly called red carrots, with fish flavorings

 

Slice [carrots] and boil them briefly in boiled water. Strain them and add a small amount of minced green onion, aniseed and fennel (daxiao huixiang大小茴香), ginger, dried orange peels, Chinese pepper powder, and mashed red yeast (hongqu紅麴). Stir them with salt evenly. Let them stand for two hours and eat them.

 

Another recipe

 

Cut white turnips and wild rice shoots (jiaobai茭白). Boil bamboo shoots till they are fully cooked. Apply this recipe[53] to all the three materials. It can be offered when they are salted.

 

Sun-dried light bamboo shoots (shaidansungan曬淡筍乾)

 

Use any amount of the tips of fresh bamboo shoots. Peel them and cut into slices or strips. Boil briefly in boiled water. Dry in sunlight and collect them. When using them, saturate them in water that have been used to wash rice (miganshui米泔水) till they are soft. Their color is as white as silver. If they are boiled in [heavily] salted water, they will be salted bamboo shoots.

 

Garlic dish/pickles (suancai蒜菜)[54]

 

Cut tender, white winter vegetables (dongcai冬菜) into strips about one cun in length. Use four liang of stir-baked salt [rock salt crystals stirred in a pan over a fire till heated to high temperature], one bowl of vinegar, and two bowls of water, for every ten jin of vegetables. Marinate the vegetables in a jar.

 

Recipe for cooking gourds [gua, general term for gourds, melons, cucumbers; China’s firm, nonsweet cooking melons possibly meant here, or perhaps this is just a general recipe for gourds.]

 

Cut hard, raw gourds open and remove the pulps. Wipe them till they are dry and do not let water get onto them. Carve them into triangular pieces. For every ten jin of gourds, use a half jin of salt and place them in a large tub for one night. In the next morning, place them in a bag made from hemp cloth and press stones on it till the slices are dry. Use five qian of dill seed (shiluo蒔蘿), fennel, Chinese pepper, dried orange peel, perilla (zisu紫蘇), and raw ginger respectively. Slice all of them and blend them evenly with the gourds. Use ten liang of fine granulatedd sugar and two bowls of vinegar. Grind the sugar as fine as possible. Place [evidently all the above] in a porcelain container. Dry them in the sunlight and stir them frequently. When the juice is dried up, collect them in a bottle.

 

Recipe for making light eggplants (danqiegan淡茄幹)

 

Wash large eggplants. Boil them in a pot and then do not let water[55] get into them. Cut them in halves and then press stones on them to let them dry. When it is sunny, put tiles in the sun till they are warmed up and then place eggplants on the tiles. When they are dry, collect them. Preserve them till the first or second month and blend them with other food. Their taste is as good as fresh eggplants.

 

Recipe for making the ten-flavor salted fermented soybeans (shixiangxianchi十香鹹豉)

 

Use equal amount of raw gourds (shenggua生瓜) and eggplants. For every ten jin of them, use twelve liang of salt. First, use four liang of the salt to salt the gourds and eggplants for one night. Then strain them. Use half jin of sliced raw ginger, half jin of fresh perilla (zisu紫蘇) that has stalks and has been cut up, half liang of liquorice powder, two liang of ground Chinese pepper with sticks and seeds removed, one liang of fennel, one liang of dill seeds (shiluo蒔蘿), two liang of large cardamoms (sharen砂仁), and a half liang of agastache leaves (huoye藿葉) (it is also acceptable if there are no agastache leaves).  Five days earlier [or:  in the first five days ?] boil large soybeans and mash. Use one sheng of cooked bran (chaofupi炒麩皮) and blend with the soybeans, and make them into yellow bits (huangzi黃子). [Presumably means roll the slices of gourds and eggplants in the soybean mash, but this recipe seems corrupt, and in fact may be two recipes run into each other.]  After heating, sift them and remove the bran. Use only fermented soybeans. Use a bottle of liquor and more than half a bowl of vinegar dregs (cuzao醋糟). Blend them with the fermented soybeans. Clean a jar and stuff the mixture into it. Use four or five layers of bamboo leaves to cover it and fasten it with bamboo strips. Then use paper and bamboo leaves to wrap the mouth of the bottle. Seal it with mud and dry it in the sunlight. After forty days, take them out and slightly dry them in the shade. Then collect them in a jar. For drying them in the sunlight, one can turn around the jar after twenty days and this will let the sun reach every part.

 

Another recipe for making spicy mustard (jiela芥辣)

 

Use one he of mustard seeds and finely grind them in a grinder. Use a small cup of vinegar and blend them with water. Use a piece of fine silk cloth to extract water out of it. Place it in a cool place such as a water cylinder. When using it, add soybean sauce and vinegar and stir till evenly mixed. This is as spicy as it can get, and the taste is very good.

 

Recipe for making sesame paste (zhimajiang芝麻醬)

 

Mash one dou of fully cooked sesame. Boil it with water taken on the sixth day of the sixth month. When it cools down, blend evenly in a jar till the water is as deep as one finger. Seal the jar and dry it in the sunlight. After five to seven days, open the jar and remove the blackish peels. Add three bowls of fine liquor dregs (haojiuniangzao好就釀糟), three bowls of fine soybean sauce, two bowls of fine liquor, one sheng of red yeast powder (hongqumo紅麴末), one sheng of stir-baked green beans, one sheng of stir-baked rice, and one liang of fennel seed powder (xiaohuixiangmo小茴香末). Blend all of them and use after fourteen days.

 

Recipe for making piled gourds and eggplants in soybean sauce (pan jianggua qie fa盤醬瓜茄法)

 

Use one jin of yellow bits (huangzi黃子 [from the recipe above?]), one jin of gourds, and four liang of salt. Rub the gourds with the salt. Use the water that is obtained by salting the gourds to blend the yellow soybean sauce (jianghuang醬黃). Pile them up twice every day. After forty-nine days, place them in a jar.

 

Dry sealed-in-a-jar vegetables (ganbiwengcai幹閉甕菜)

 

Use ten jin of vegetables and forty liang of stir-baked salt. Salt the vegetables in a jar. Whenever placing in a piece of vegetable, place equal amount of salt. When they are salted for three days, take up the vegetables and rub them in a basin. Place them in another jar. Collect the brine for future use. After another three days, take up the vegetables and rub again. Place them in another jar and keep the brine for future use. After repeating this for nine times, place them in a jar, applying one layer of Chinese pepper and fennel (xiaohuixiang小茴香) to every layer of vegetables while placing the vegetables [and spices] in the jar. Repeat this step and pack in tightly. Pour three bowls of the previously prepared brine into each jar. Seal the jar with clay. It can be eaten after the New Year.

 

Pouring, stirring and blending vegetables (sabanhecai撒拌和菜)

 

Add sesame oil to Chinese pepper. Use after bringing to boil one or two times. When using it, measure out one bowl of the oil and add a small amount of soybean sauce, vinegar, and white sugar to it. Blend properly and save. For any food that is to be stir-fried with oil, pour some of this oil to it and stir. It is delicious. If stirring with bok choy (baicai白菜), bean sprouts (douya豆芽), water dropwort (Oenanthe javanica) (or achillea; shuiqin水芹; normally the dropwort), one should boil the vegetables briefly [i.e. blanch them] in boiling water and soak them in pure water. When using them, strain them and stir(-fry) them with the oil. The vegetables will remain green and will not turn blackish. They are crisp and delicious.

 

Recipe for making fermented soybean in water (shuidouchifa水豆豉法)

 

Use ten jin of yellow bits (huangzi黃子)[56], forty liang of fine salt, and ten bowls of sweet liquor made in Jinhua. One day in advance, add the salt to twenty bowls of boiled water to make brine. Let it cool and settle down, for future use. Place the yellow bits into a jar and add liquor to it. Then add the salted water. Set in sunlight for forty-nine days. Then add three liang of aniseeds and fennel (daxiao huixiang大小茴香) respectively, five qian of large cardamom (caoguo草果), five qian of royal cinnamon, three qian of muxiang (木香), one liang of preserved orange peels, one liang of Chinese pepper, half jin of withered sliced ginger, and one jin of apricot kernels. Place all the spices into a jar. Dry it in the sunlight while beating it. After three days, store it in a jar. It tastes good after one year. It is even better if it is used as a dipping for meat.

 

Upside-down hairy vegetables (daodaocai倒纛菜)

 

Use one hundred jin of vegetables. Blend burned-hair ashes (maohui毛灰) like flour with salt brine (yanlu鹽鹵) for sealing [the jar]. Arrange the vegetables and then seal the jar. There is no need to put grass in the jar.  [The idea seems to be to produce a bacteriostatic seal.  The “grass” can then be assumed to be some sort of preservative herb.]

 

Pure-boiled spicy mustard (lajiecai qingshao辣芥菜清燒)

 

Use mustard stalks that water is not got onto. Dry them in the shade till they turn soft. Boil them briefly with boiled water and take them up immediately. Use a bamboo strainer to scoop them up and place them in a sifter. Let them cool down. Add some puffy salt (songyan松鹽) to them and stir. Contain them in a bottle. Then add dried, cold vegetables. Pour the brine on them and wrap them tightly. Place the bottle on the cold floor.

 

Steamed wilted vegetables (zhenggancai蒸乾菜)

 

Use large, fine vegetables. Pick, wash, clean, and dry them. Boil them briefly in boiled water till they are fifty to sixty percent cooked. Dry them in the sunlight. Boil them with salt, soybean sauce, dills (shiluo蒔蘿), Chinese pepper, granulatedd sugar, and orange peels till they are fully cooked. Then dry them in the sunlight again. Steam them for a while and preserve them in a porcelain container. When using them, rub them with sesame oil and add some vinegar. Steam them over rice [when cooking rice].

 

Quail-like eggplants (anchunqie鵪鶉茄)

 

Pick tender eggplants and cut them into slim threads. Boil them with boiled water and strain them. Blend them with salt, soybean sauce, Chinese pepper, dills (shiluo蒔蘿), fennels, liquorice, preserved orange peels, apricot kernels, and ground red beans. When they are evenly flavored, dry them in the sunlight. Then steam and gather them. When using them, soak them in boiled water till they turn soft. Dip them in sesame oil and quickly fry them in oil.  [The resemblance to quail is hard to find; possibly the spicing was that used for quail in those days.]

 

Good-tasting gourds and eggplants (shixiang guaqie食香瓜茄)

 

Use any amount of [gourds or eggplants] and cross-cut them into pieces. For every jin of them, use eight liang of salt. Blend “taste-good” (or “eating fragrance”; shixiang食香)[57] and the gourds evenly. Salt them in a jar for one or two days. Then take them out and dry them in the sunlight. At night, place them in the brine again. On the next day, take them out and dry them in the sunlight again. Repeat this three times; do not let them get too dry. Keep them in the jar for future use.

 

Gourds and eggplants in dregs (zaoguaqie糟瓜茄)

 

For every five jin of gourds or eggplants, use ten liang of salt. Blend them with brewing dregs (zao糟) evenly. Spread fifty bronze coins on every layer of gourds or eggplants. After ten days, take away the coins. Do not replace the dregs.  Keep all in a bottle. They will keep as green as if fresh for a long time. [Not to be recommended; the green would come from copper salts, which are poisonous.]

 

Salted wild rice stems (jiaobaizha茭白鮓)

 

Cut fresh wild rice stems (jiaobai茭白) into slices. Boil them briefly and strain them. Blend them with finely sliced green onion, dill seeds, fennel, Chinese pepper, ground red yeast (hongqu紅麴), and salt. Eat them after two hours. Use the same method to make salted lotus root tips (ousaozha藕梢鮓).

 

Sugar-and-vinegar eggplants (tangcuqie糖醋茄)

 

Cut fresh eggplants into triangular pieces. Boil these in water and strain them. Wrap them in cloth and extract the water. Salt them for one night. Then dry them in the sunlight. Blend them with sliced ginger and perilla (zisu紫蘇). Fry them and pour the mixture of sugar and vinegar on them. Then place them in a porcelain container. The same method can be applied to gourds.

 

Ginger in dregs (zaojiang糟薑)

 

Use any amount of tender ginger before the Spring or Autumn Festival for the Earth God[58]. Remove the leaves and clean them. Blend them with liquor, dregs, and salt. Place them in a porcelain jar and add one block of granulated sugar (shatang沙糖) on top. Wrap the jar with bamboo leaves and seal it with mud. After seven days, they can be eaten.

 

Pickled and salted vegetables (yanyancai醃鹽菜)

 

Remove the roots and yellow, old leaves of bok choy (baicai白菜). Wash and strain them. For every ten jin of vegetables, use ten liang of salt and several pieces of liquorice. Place them in a clean jar. Spread the salt into the leaf junctions of the vegetables and place them in the jar. Add a small amount of dill seeds (shiluo蒔蘿). Press tightly with hands. When half of the jar is filled, add more several pieces of liquorice. When the jar is full, press the vegetables with bricks and stones. Salt them for three days and then pour the vegetables out. Squeeze the brine out and place the vegetables in another clean container. They should be kept from contact with unboiled water. Pour the brine over the vegetables instead. After seven days, follow the previous step and pour out the vegetables and soak them in the brine that is newly squeezed out. Keep pressing bricks and stones on top of them. The leaves will be delicious and crisp. For those that have not been used up, blanch them in boiled water and dry them in the sunlight and preserve them. In the summer, soak the vegetables in warm water and squeeze them till they are dry. Add sesame oil to them and blend. Put in a porcelain bowl and place the bowl over rice. Eat them after steaming.

 

Wax gourd with garlic (suan donggua蒜冬瓜)

 

Choose large ones and remove the peels and pulp. Cut it into pieces as wide as one finger. Add alum and calx (baifan shihui白礬石灰) to boiled water. Blanch the vegetables in the water. Then take them out and strain them. For every jin of vegetables, use two liang of salt and three liang of garlic. Mash the garlic and put together with the wax gourd in a porcelain container. Soak in boiled fine vinegar.

 

Recipe for making salted, pickled leek (yanyanjiufa鹽醃韭法)

 

Before frost comes, choose large leeks without yellowish tips and wash them. Then strain them. Place one layer of leeks in a porcelain basin and then spread one layer of salt till the leeks and salt stuff the basin. Salt them for one or two nights. Stir them for several times and then place them in a porcelain container. Use the original brine. It will be even better if a small amount of sesame oil is added. One can also salt small cucumbers and small eggplants with the leeks. Salt them to extract the water and then blend them with the leeks. Put in a jar and preserve them.

 

Recipe for making vegetables with grains (zao gucai fa造穀菜法)

 

Use spring stalks of caitai [a mustard-green-like vegetable] that are not yet old (chunbulao caitai春不老菜苔) . Remove the leaves and wash them. Mince them into bits as big as the hole in a coin. Dry them in the sunlight and let the vapor go off. Do not let them get too dry. Add fried soybean halves (huangdouban黃豆瓣) with sliced ginger. For every jin of vegetables, use one liang of salt. Add the same amount of “taste-good” (see above; shixiang食香)[59]. Knead the vegetables with the salt (rouhui luxing揉回鹵性). Keep in a jar. Use them when they are ready (houshu suiyong候熟隨用).

 

Yellow sprouts of vegetables (huangyacai黃芽菜)

 

Cut the stalks and leaves of bok choy and keep only the hearts. From two cun away, pile earth (fentu糞土, wet soil) around the hearts, as high as they are piled. Cover with a large jar and pile soil outside of the jar tightly. Do not let gas in. After half a month, pick it and it tastes the best. The same method can be used to produce yellow sprouts of leeks, ginger, turnips, and Sichuan rhizome (Cnidum, chuanxiongya川芎芽)[60].

 

Recipe for making fermented soybeans in liquor (jiu douche fang酒豆豉方)

 

Use one dou five sheng of yellow bits (huangzi黃子)[61] and sift them to remove the flour. Use five jin of eggplants, twelve jin of gourds, one jin fourteen liang of ginger, sliced oranges as much as one wants, one sheng of fennel (xiaohuixiang小茴香), four jin six liang of stirred-and-baked salt, and one jin of green pepper. Blend them and place them in a jar. Press them tightly. Pour the Jinhua liquor (jinhuajiu金花酒) or fermented rice (jiuniang酒娘) into it till the liquor is about two cun higher than the vegetables. Wrap the jar with paper and bamboo leaves and seal it with mud. Place it outside for forty-nine days. Write down something[62] on the jar to mark it (tanshang xiedongxi zi jihao壇上寫東西字記號). When they have been dried for enough days, pour the vegetables into a large tub. Dry them in the sunlight and cover them with a mat made from yellow grasses.

 

Red salted beans (hongyandou紅鹽豆)

 

First, place a flowering-apricot fruit frosted with salt (yanshuangmei鹽霜梅) at the bottom of a wok. Use large green beans (qingdou青豆), that have been washed, to cover the apricot. Make a pit in the middle of the peas and add salt to it. Add a small amount of alum (baifan shihui白礬) to boiled water that is cooked with sapanwood (sumu蘇木). Pour the water around the rim of the wok till it is as high as the beans. Heat it till the water is gone. When the beans are fully cooked, the salt will not be visible, and they turn red.

 

Five-beauties ginger (wumeijiang五美薑)

 

Slice one jin of tender ginger. Mash half jin of white mei (baimei白梅, a type of preserved mei) and remove the kernels. Add two liang of stirred-and-baked [rock] salt to it and blend them. Dry them in the sunlight. Then add to it one qian of nard/spikenard (gansong甘松), five qian of liquorice, and two qian of sandal powder (tanxiangmo檀香末). Again blend them and dry them in the sunlight for three days. Then take and contain them.

 

Salted mustard greens (yanjiecai醃芥菜) (the principle is to use eight liang of salt for every ten jin of vegetables)

 

Use fresh, tender mustards that are picked in the tenth month. Mince and blanch them in boiled water. Scoop them up with the boiled water in a basin. Blend them with raw lettuce (celtuce, i.e. thick-stemmed lettuce; woju萵苣), cooked sesame oil, mustard flowers (jiehua芥花), sesames, and salt. Pack them in a jar. After three to five days, eat them. They will not spoil till spring.

 

“Taste-good” (“eating-fragrance,” shixiang食香)[63] turnips (shixiang luobo食香蘿蔔) (use eight liang of salt to salt every ten jin of turnips)

 

Cut the turnips into dice-like squares. Salt them with sea salt (dayan大鹽) for one night. Then dry them in the sunlight. Slice ginger and oranges. Blend them with aniseeds and fennel (daxiao huixiang大小茴香). Boil vinegar and pour it onto the vegetables. Contain them in a porcelain bottle and place the bottle in the sun. Preserve them after they are dried.

 

Turnips, wild rice stems, bamboo shoots, gourds, eggplants, and so on in dregs (zao luobo jiaobai suncai gua qie糟蘿蔔,茭白,筍菜,瓜,茄等物)

 

Add alum and calx (baifan shihui白礬石灰) to boiled water and let it cool down. Soak above vegetables in it for one day and one night. Warm up liquor and add salt to dregs. Also add one or two bronze coins to them. Measure out the dregs and add them to the vegetables. After ten days, take up the vegetables and replace the previous dregs with fine dregs. Add salt and liquor to them. Blend them and place them in a jar. Wrap it with bamboo leaves and seal with mud.

 

Recipe for making five-spice vinegar (wula cu fang五辣醋方)

 

Use one spoon of soybean sauce, one qian of vinegar, one qian of white sugar, five to seven Chinese peppers, one or two peppers, and one fen of raw ginger. It would be even better if one or two cloves of garlic.

 

 

 

WILD VEGETABLES (yesulei野蔌類) (new section)

 

What I have selected is totally different from what Wang Pan[64] has done.  I dare record only those that people recognize and are edible, not what Mr. Wang has selected. This is because I want to accomplish something.  [The hapless Wang must have recommended some pretty inedible items.]

 

Yellow fragrant daylily (Hemerocallis flava, huangxiangxuan黃香萱)

 

Pick the flowers in the summer and wash them. Blanch them in the boiled water and then they can be eaten when blended with spices. If they are added to vegetarian food that have been boiled in flavored sauce (aosupin熝素品), such as Toufu, the taste is very good. If one wants to eat this wild vegetable, he should wash it and make it clean. He should still look for small worms hiding on the back of the petals and not eat them by mistake. First, prepare a flavored sauce (liaotou料頭). For every large cup of vinegar, add three fen of liquorice powder, one qian of white sugar frost (baitangshuang白糖霜), and half cup of sesame oil. Blend them and use this as a flavored sauce to stir with the vegetables. Adding some mashed ginger to it gives another recipe. For flowers that have picked and cleaned, blanch them in boiled water and rinse them in water for two hours. Then take them up and squeeze them till they are dry. Blend them with spices and then they can be served. Their color will not change and be as if fresh. At the same time, they are crisp, tender, not mashed, and have more flavor. The same method can be applied to domestic vegetables. As for the roasted, the quickly-fried, and the minced (zhibozuoji炙煿作齏), they are included in this recipe.  [Daylily flowers are still a common food in China, and are excellent eating.  The buds or just-opening flowers are used.  These have to be gathered early, since, as the name implies, the flower opens, blooms, and fades in a day.]

 

Chamomile shoots (“sweet chrysanthemum,” ganjumiao甘菊苗)

 

Pick tender tips of well-grown chamomile shoots in the spring and summer. Blanch them in the boiled water as previous recipe. Then eat them. If they are coated with the mixture of liquorice liquid (gancaoshui甘草水) and yam powder (shanyaofen山藥粉) and then deep-fried, they will be extremely delicious.

 

Wolfthorn heads (gouqitou枸杞頭)

 

Use tender wolfthorn leaves and sprouts. Follow the above cooking method. They will taste even better if they are used in cooking congee. Of the four seasons, eat only in winter.

[This refers to Lycium chinense.  Wolfthorn berries now very often come from Lycium barbarum, which has inedible shoots.]

 

Water caltrops (lingke菱科)

 

Pick them in the summer and autumn. Remove the leaves and roots and only keep the round clusters on the stalks (gengshang yuanke梗上圆科). Use the above method. It tastes delicious when fully cooked. It tastes even better when blended with dregs (zaoshi糟食). It is of the first rank in the wild vegetables.

 

Water shield (Brasenia, chuncai蓴菜)[65]

 

Pick [shoots] in the fourth month and blanch them in the boiled water. Then rinse them in water for future use. These can be eaten with ginger and vinegar. They can also be used in cooking meat congee (rougeng肉羹[66]).

 

Wild amaranth (yexiancai野苋菜)

 

Pick it in the summer [when young] and eat it when fully cooked. It can also be blended with pices or fried. It is more delicious than domestic amaranth.

 

Wild white mustard (Sinapis alba or Brassica hirta, yebaijie野白芥)

 

Pick [sprouts] in the fourth month. The tender ones can be eaten when they are raw or fully cooked.

 

Wild radishes (yeluobo野萝卜)

 

The vegetable is like the radish [or turnip]. One can pick the root and shoots. Fully cook it and then it can be eaten.

 

India wormwood herb (Artemisia selengensis /Artemisia absinthium /Artemisia vulgaris, louhao蒌蒿)

 

Pick the hearts in the early spring. These are most fragrant if added to tea. The leaves are edible when fully cooked. In the summer and autumn, the stalks can be used to make a minced mixture (ji齑)[67].

 

Chinese goldthread heads (Coptis, huangliantou黄连头)

 

It is the same as the huanglian used for medical purposes. Pick the heads and salt them. Dry them in the sunlight. It tastes best when added to tea. It is also delicious when fully cooked.

 

Bengal water-dropwort herb or water-cress (shuiqincai水芹菜)

 

Pick them in the spring months and boil them in boiled water. Blend them with ginger, vinegar, and sesame oil. it is very delicious. Or one can also add salt to the boiled water and blanch the vegetables in it. Dry them in the sunlight. It is also good if it is added to tea.

 

Jasmine leaves (moliye茉莉葉)

 

Pick tender jasmine leaves and wash them clean. Boil them with toufu in the flavored sauce (lushi熝食) and it is of the best grade of food (juepin絕品).

 

Goosefoot flower (ejiaohua鵝腳花) [an unidentified plant called “goosefoot” in Chinese, not the familiar plant called “goosefoot” in English]

 

Pick the univalve [?  Obscure character, hard to understand] flowers, which are edible. The multivalve flowers are harmful. Blanch them in the boiled water. Add salt and blend them with spices. It can also be boiled in flavored sauce (lushi熝食). [Lushi, today, means a rich stock.]  It can also be fried with minced gourds. In the spring, the sprouts are edible.

 

Gardenia (zhizihua栀子花), also called yanpu檐葡

 

Pick the flowers and wash them clean. Rinse them in water to remove the smell (xing腥). Add sugar and salt to flour and make it into a paste. Coat the flowers in the paste and deep-fry them and then they can be eaten.

 

Cassia seeds (jindour金豆儿); the same as juemingzi决明子

 

Pick the beans (dou豆) and blanch them in boiled water. They can be added to tea and taste delicious and sweet.

 

Broom flowers (jinqiao’r金雀兒)

 

Pick the flowers in the early spring. Blanch them in salted boiled water. They can be added to tea. They can also be blended with spices and become a dish.

 

Purple flowers (zihuar紫花兒) [unidentified]Both the flowers and leaves are edible.

 

Cedrela sinensis A. (a.k.a. Toona sinensis; xiangchunya香春芽)

 

Pick the heads and sprouts and blanch them in the boiled water. Add a small amount of salt and dry them in the sunlight. They can be preserved for more than one year. Blend them with sesame and serve. The fresh ones can be added to tea. They are most suitable for adding to fried gluten (chaomianjin炒麵觔). Toufu and vegetables can also be added.

[These intensely-flavored shoots are still a fairly well-known food.]

 

Penghao (a mugwort, a type of sagebrush; 蓬蒿)

 

In the second or third month, pick the tender heads and wash them clean. Salt them in a small amount of salt. Blend them in flour and make them into cakes. Deep-fry them and they are delicious.

[Various mugwort or sagebrush cakes are still very common in Korea, but have become rather rare in China.]

 

Grey amaranth (huixiancai灰莧菜)

 

Pick the whole plant and boil it. It can be boiled or fried (jianchao煎炒). It is more delicious that the domestic amaranth.

 

Ear fungus on mulberry and agaric growing on willow (sangjun liujun桑菌柳菌)[68]

 

Both of them are edible. Pick them and boil them with vegetarian food in flavored stock (lushi熝食).

 

Aquatic malachium herb /Malachium aquaticum Moench /(echangcao鹅肠草)

 

Use the thick ones.  Pick them and blanch them in boiling water. Blend them with spices and then they can be eaten.

 

Eritrichium pedunculare (jichangcao鸡肠草) can also be cooked in the same way as the above.

 

Cotton fiber tips (mianxutou綿絮頭) [unidentified]

 

These are white and grows on the field levee (tiangeng田埂). Pick them and wash them clean. Mash them till they are like cotton. Add them into flour or powder and make cakes with them.

 

Buckwheat leaves (qiaomaiye荞麦叶)

 

In the eighth or ninth month, pick the newly growing tender leaves . They can be eaten after being fully cooked.

 

Western ocean great purple (seaweed? xiyangtaizi西洋太紫)

 

In the seventh and eighth month, pick the leaves. Use them to boil toufu in the flavored soup. It is wonderful.

 

Mushroom (mogu蘑菇)

 

Pick and dry them in the sunlight. When raw or made into a thick soup, these are so delicious that they cannot be described in words. This is the best among vegetarian foods.

 

Dictyophora (zhugu竹菇)

 

This is even more delicious.  [Than the best?]  It can be eaten when fully cooked.

 

Trollius chinensis Bunge? (jinlianhua金莲花; the name now refers to nasturtium, but that flower was unknown to China in Ming)

 

In the summer, pick the leaves and stalks that are floating above the water. Blanch them and blend them with ginger, vinegar, and oil. Then they can be eaten.

 

Solanum indicum L. (tianqier天茄兒)

 

Blanch them in salted, boiled water. Add them to the tea. It can also be made into a dish after being blended with ginger and vinegar.

 

Alopecurus aequalis Sobol (Amur foxtail, kanmainiang看麥娘)

 

It grows along with wheat in the field. Pick it in the spring. Eat it after fully cooked.

 

Cochinchina leaf-flower herb (goujiaoji狗腳跡)

 

At frost time, its leaves are like the footprints of a dog. Pick them and eat when fully cooked.

 

Xie artemisia (xiehao斜蒿)

 

It grows in the third and fourth month. For the small ones, the whole plant can be used. For the large ones, pick the tender tips. Blanch them in boiling water and dry them in the sunlight. When eating them, soak them in boiled water and blend them with spices.

[Another mugwort or sagebrush, edible only when very young.]

 

Potamogeton distinctus (pondweed, ganzicai眼子菜)

 

Pick them in the sixth and seventh month. It grows in the water and marsh. The leaf is green and the back is purple. The stalk is soft, smooth, slim, and as long as several chi. Pick it and blanch it in the boiled water. Eat it when fully cooked.

 

Nostoc commune /T.japonicum (Bluml) Makino (ditaye地踏葉) [an alga]

 

It is also called di’er地耳. It grows when it rains in the spring and summer. Pick it after the rain. Fully cook it and blend it with ginger and vinegar. When the sun is out, it disappears and withers.

[This is an algae growing on wet soil or mineral springs.]

 

Snail mustard (woluojie窩螺芥)

 

In the first and second month, pick it and fully cook it.

 

Purslane  (Portulaca oleracea, machixian馬齒莧)

 

Pick it in the early summer. Blanch it in the boiled water. Dry it in the sunlight. Eat it when the winter comes.

 

Kalimeris indica heads/sprouts (malantou馬蘭頭)[69]

 

It grows in clusters in the second and third month. Fully cook it. It can also be made into a minced dish (ji齏).

 

Artemisia apiacea (yinchenhao茵陳蒿) it is the same as qinghaor青蒿兒

 

Pick it in the spring. Add it to flour and make it into cakes.

 

Wild goose intestines (yanrchang雁兒腸) [unidentifiable]

 

It grows in the second month. It is like green bean sprouts. Fully cook it. It can be eaten when it is raw.

 

Wild rice stem (yejiaobaicai野茭白菜)

 

In the early summer, it grows in the marsh. It is the same as jiaoyar茭芽兒. Fully cook it.

[Probably a Zizania, not true rice, but term rather ambiguous.]

 

Shepherds’ purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris, daoguanji倒灌薺)

 

Pick it and fully cook it. It can also be minced for eating.

[Still a common food all over Eurasia.]

 

(kumatai苦麻台) [unidentified]

 

Pick it in the third month. Mash the leaves and add it to flour. Make cakes with it and eat.

 

Cole flowers (huanghuar黃花兒)[70]

 

Pick it in the first and second month. Fully cook it.

 

Wild water chestnuts (yebiqi野荸荠)

 

Pick them in four seasons. They can be eaten when they are raw or fully cooked.

 

Wild green beans (yelüdou野绿豆)

 

Its leaves and stalk are like those of green bean but smaller. It grows in the wild field and has many vines. It can be eaten when it is raw and fully cooked.

 

Lustrous herb (youzhuozhuo油灼灼) [unidentified]

 

It grows by the water. The leaves are glossy (guangze光澤). It can be eaten when it is raw or fully cooked. It can also be salted and then dried. Steam it when eating.

 

Bannqiaoqiao(板蕎蕎) [unidentified]

 

Pick it in the first or second month. When eating, cook it. It cannot be eaten in the third or fourth month.

 

Cardamine hirsuta L. /(suimiji碎米薺) [a small mustard of good flavor]

 

Pick it in the third month. It can be eaten only when it is minced and mingled with spices.

 

Heavenly lotus roots (tian’ou’r天藕兒)

 

Its root is like that of the lotus but smaller. It can be eaten after it is fully cooked and blended with spices. The leaf cannot be eaten.

 

Broad bean (Vicia faba) sprouts (candoumiao蠶豆苗)

 

Pick it in the second month. Fry in sesame oil and then boil it with soybean sauce and salt. Add a small amount of ginger and green onion.

 

Broad cocklebur leaves (Xanthium sibiricum, cang’er cai蒼耳菜)

 

Pick tender leaves and wash them clean. Blanch them in the boiled water. Blend them with ginger, salt, and bitter liquor (kujiu苦酒). It cures the rheumatism/wind-damp illness (fengshi风湿). The seed can be blended with rice powder and made into dry provision (qiu糗)[71].

[Not gourmet fare, but widely eaten to this day.  Only very young leaves are edible.]

 

Lotus flower (furonghua芙蓉花)

 

Pick the flowers and remove the pistil and petal. Blanch it once or twice in boiled water. Blend it with toufu and add a small amount of pepper. It is red and white and lovely.

 

Mallow (?Althaea rosea or, more likely, Malva spp.; kuicai葵菜) this is the Sichuan mallow (shukui蜀葵). The cluster is short and leaves are larger. Its nature is mild (xingwen性温).

Pick the leaves. it can be eaten when cooked in the same way as cooking thick vegetarian soup (caigeng菜羹).

 

Osmanthus (danguihua丹桂花)

 

Pick the flowers and spread liquorice liquid on it. Blend it with mashed rice and make it into cakes (gao糕). Its pure fragrance will fill the mouth.

 

Lettuce stem (wojucai莴苣菜)

 

Pick the stem and remove the leaves and skin. Cut it into pieces one cun in length. Soak them in boiled water. Add ginger oil, sugar, and vinegar to them and blend them.

[Now called “celtuce” when it appears in English-speaking markets.]

 

Great burdock (Arctium lappa Linne, niupangzi牛蒡子)

 

In the tenth month, pick the root and wash it clean. Avoid to boiling it too much. Take it up and mash and flatten it. Press it till it is dry. Blend it with salt, soybean sauce, dill (luo萝), ginger, Chinese pepper, cooked oil. Soak it in the spices for one or two days. Then take it and bake it till it is dry. It tastes like dried meat.

 

Pagoda-tree Pod (Sophora japonica L)  leaves (huaijiaoye槐角叶)

 

Pick narrow, clean, tender leaves and mash them till the juice comes out. Blend it with flour [and make it into flour food]. Rinse it in the mixture of vinegar and soybean sauce (xijiang醯酱) . Add fully cooked, minced food to it and it can be eaten.

 

Cedrela chinensis root (chunshugen椿樹根)

 

Pick the root before the autumn. Mash and sift it. Blend it with flour and make it into small dough/patches. Boil it in pure water and eat it.

 

Lily bulbs (baihegen百合根)

 

Pick the bulb and dry it in the sunlight. Blend it with flour and make it into noodle. Steam the noodle and eat it. It enhances the qi and blood.

 

 

 

 

 

Snake gourd (Trichosanthes kirilowii Maximovich) root (kuolougen括蔞根)

 

Dig deeply to get the large root. Peel it till it is white. Cut it into pieces one cun in length and soak them in water. Change the water every day. After five to seven days, take them and mash them into pulp. Use a piece of thin silk to sift through thin pulp and powder [sic; “powder” here seems likely a scribal error of anticipating the next sentence]. When it is dried, it turns into powder. Mix it with non-glutinous rice powder (jingfen粳粉) and make it into congee. If it is added with cheese, it will be very tonic (bu補).

 

Few-flowered wildrice fruit (diaogumi調菰米)[72]

 

Few-flowered wildrice is now called Barbarian Rice (huji胡穄). Dry it in the sunlight. Hull and wash it. Steam it and its fragrance cannot be expressed in words.

 

Weigela florida (jindaihua錦帶花)

 

Pick the flowers and use them to make a thick soup. They are soft, crisp, and edible.

 

Sweetgrass Acorus calamus and/or Acorus tatarinowii  Schott, changpu菖蒲)

 

Boil sweetgrass (shichangpu石菖蒲) with atractylodes (Atractylodes macrocephala or A. ovata, baishu白術) together till they turn into paste. Use three jin of Chinese yam rhizome (shanyao山藥) for every jin of this powder. Add honey water (mishui蜜水) to the flour and make cakes with it. Steam the cakes and eat.  [This would be a medicinal recipe. Presumably the rhizome of the sweetgrass is used; the leaves do not cook down to pulp.]

 

Plum (lizi李子)

 

Take large plums and remove the pits. Take white mei (baimei白梅) and liquorice and soak them in boiled water. Blanch the plums in the boiled water. Add white sugar to ground pine nuts (songzi松子) and terminalia (Terminalia superba or T. catappa L., lanren欖仁). Stuff them in a steamer and eat it when it is fully cooked.

 

Yam tubers (shanyutou山芋頭)

 

Pick yams and slice them. Boil them with torreya nuts (feizi榧子). Make bitter apricot seeds (kuxingren苦杏仁) into powder. Add a small amount of soybean, water, and salt to the bitter apricot seed powder and make into a paste. Dip the sliced yams in the paste. Then deep fry them and eat.

 

“East-wind vegetable” (dongfengji東風薺) [the author’s note:] it is the same as shepherd’s purse (jicai薺菜)

 

Pick one or two sheng of shepherd’s purse and wash them clean. Add three he of taomi(淘米), three sheng of water, and one ginger sprout to them. Mash them and blend them in a pot till it are even. Pour one clam shell (xianke蜆殼) of sesame oil to it. Then do not move it any more. Boil over fire. If it is moved, there will be a greasy flavor. Do not add any salt or vinegar. If one tastes this, he will feel that the eight precious foods of seas and lands (hailubazhen海陸八珍) are as nothing.  [Hyperbolic praise for a boiled-down weed.]

 

Plantain lily (Hosta fortunei, yuzanhua玉簪花)

 

Pick the half-blossoming flowers and split them into two pieces or four pieces. Dip them in paste and deep fry them. If add a small amount of salt and white sugar to the paste and blend them evenly. It is very delicious after being dipped in the paste [and deep fried].

 

Gardenia (zhizihua梔子花), another recipe, recorded for a second time.

 

Pick the half-blossoming flowers and blanch them in alum water (fanshui礬水). Add thinly sliced green onions, aniseeds and fennel (daxiaohuixiang大小茴香), Chinese pepper, red yeasts (hongqu紅麴), and yellow steamed rice (huangmifan黃米飯) to them. Grind them till they are mashed. Blend evenly with salt. Salt it for half a day and eat. When it is blanched with alum water and soaked in honey, it is very delicious.

 

Wood fungus /timber fungus (mujun木菌)

 

Use decayed mulberry wood (sangmu桑木), camphor wood (zhangmu樟木), and Persea nanmu Oliver/Phoebe zhennan wood (nanmu楠木). Cut them into pieces one chi in length. In the twelfth month, sweep decayed leaves and choose a rich and shady place (feiyindi肥陰地). Bury the wood and leaves deeply at the place, using the same method of planting vegetables. In the spring months, irrigate it with water that has been used to wash rice. Soon, fungus grows. Irrigate it three times every day. Then it will grow as large as a fist. Pick it and fry it with vegetarian food. It is also delicious when withered. It grows on the wood and is not harmful.

[Not the usual substrates for shiitake; possibly for oyster mushrooms, at a guess.]

 

Sollya (Wistaria?)  (tenghua藤花)

 

Pick the flowers and wash them clean. Pour salted water on them and blend them evenly. Steam them in a steamer till they are fully cooked. Then dry them in the sun. They can be used to make a stuffing. It is delicious. When it is mixed with meat, they are also delicious.

 

River Shepherd’s-purse (jiangji江薺) [Presumably a riparian form of, or close relative of, shepherd’s-purse]

 

It grows in the twelfth month. It can be eaten raw or fully cooked. Do not eat the flower. However, the flower can be made into minced dish (ji齏).

 

Poke Phytolacca arinosa Roxb. Or Phytolacca esculenta van Houtte (shanglu商陸)

 

Pick the seedling and stalk. Wash them clean and steam them till fully cooked. Add salt and spices to them. The purple ones are tasty.

 

Achyranthes spp. (?) (niuxi牛膝)

 

Pick the seedlings using the same method of cutting leeks. It is edible.  [Achyranthes is a genus of rather small, tender herbs.]

 

Lotus rhizomes growing in a lake (hu’ou湖藕)

 

Pick raw lotus rhizomes and cut them into pieces about one cun in length. Blanch them in boiled water. Then salt them to remove some water. Add a small amount of green onion, oil, sliced ginger roots, sliced orange peel, aniseeds, fennel, and yellow steamed rice (huangmifan黃米飯). Mash them and blend them carefully. Wrap them with lotus leaves tightly. Leave overnight, then eat.

 

Ledebouriella seseloides (=Saposhnikovia divaricata) (fangfeng防風)

 

Pick the seedlings. These can be made into vegetarian food. Blanch them in boiled water and blend them with spices. It is very good at removing the wind (qufeng去風).

 

Plantain/Chinese banana (bajiao芭蕉)

 

There are two kinds of plantains (jiao蕉). Those having sticky fruits (gen根) are glutinous plantains (nuojiao糯蕉). They are edible. Pick the fruits and cut them into pieces about the size of a hand. Boil them in the ash-liquid (huizhi灰汁)[73] till they are fully cooked. Remove the ash-liquid and boil them in clean water. Replace the water twice till the smell of ashes disappears. Take the leaves and press them till they are dry. Grind salt, soybean sauce, aniseeds, fennel, Chinese pepper, dried ginger roots, and cooked oil, carefully. Blend them with the plantains. Salt them in a jar for one or two days and then take them out. Bake them for a while till they are almost cooked and turn soft. When one eats it, it tastes exactly like fatty meat (feirou肥肉).

 

Water cress (shuicai水菜)

 

Its shape is similar to bok choi (baicai白菜). It grows in the seventh and eighth month, in the field or on the water bank. It grows in clusters and its color is dark green. Blanch it in boiled water. Boil it with soybean sauce and then it can be eaten.

 

Lotus seed pod (lianfang蓮房)

 

Pick the tender ones. Remove the peel, seeds, and stalks. Boil it with ashes and boil it in clean water in order to remove the taste of ashes. Bake them with the plantains till they are dry. Flatten them with stones. Then slice them and eat.

 

Sesame leaves (kupencai苦盆菜) [the author’s note:] it is also called huma胡麻

 

Pick the tender leaves and make them into thick soup. It is large, sweet, crisp, and smooth.

 

Pine-needle-shape vegetable (songhuarui松花蕊)

 

Pick it and remove the red skins. Use the tender and white ones and soak them in honey. Bake them for awhile till the honey is fully cooked. But do not let it be overcooked. It smells good and it is crisp and tasty.

 

Angelica dahurica Benth. et Hook (baizhi白芷)

 

Pick the tender roots. Soak them in honey or preserve them in dregs. Then they can be eaten.

 

Ledebouriella sprouts (fangfengya防風芽)

 

Pick the scarlet-colored sprouts (yanzhi胭脂). Blend them with spices like normal vegetables and eat.

 

Lilyturf  (Ophiopogon spp.) sprouts (tianmendongya天門冬芽)

 

Use [lilyturf or] ligusticum sprouts (chuanqiongya川芎芽), sokji (Cassia?) sprouts (shuizaoya水藻芽), Achyranthes sprouts (niuxiya牛膝芽), chrysanthemum sprouts (juhuaya菊花芽), and Villarsia nymphaeoides (? Or Nymphoides spp.) sprouts (xingcaiya荇菜芽). Blend them with spices. Eat it when fully cooked.  [The identification of these wild sprouts is dubious.]

 

Water [Sphagnum?] moss (shuitai水苔)

 

In the early spring, pick the tender tips. Wash and trim them till they are very clean. Wash away any sand, gravel, and worms. Press them with stones till they are dry. Add salt, oil, Chinese pepper, and minced leeks. Blend them and place them in a bottle. Add vinegar and ginger. It is very delicious. It can also be fried with oil. It is also good when it is added with salt and soybean sauce.

 

Pulu sprouts (puluya蒲蘆芽)[74]

 

Pick the tender sprouts and cut them. Blanch them in boiled water and wrap them in cloth. Press them till they are dry. Then add spices. It tastes like dried fish and it is very delicious.

 

Garden Balsam (Impatiens balsamina) stalks(fengxianhuageng鳳仙花梗)

 

Pick the thick stalks and peel them. Peel them till they are clean. Add them into dregs in the morning and eat at noon.

 

Safflower seeds (honghuazi紅花子)

 

Pick the seeds. Soak them in water and remove those floating on the surface of the water. Mash them in a pestle and soak the mashed material in boiled water to get the liquid. Mash it again. Boil the mash and liquid. When the water is boiled in the pot, add vinegar into it in order to let it coagulate. Use a piece of thin silk cloth to strain it. What has been obtained [i.e., the residue after straining] is like fatty meat. If it is added to vegetarian food, it will be extremely delicious.

 

Golden-bird flower (jinquehua金雀花) [broom]

 

It blossoms in the spring. The appearance of the flower is like a golden-bird (siskin, canary or goldfinch; jinque金雀). Each flower is worthy of being picked. Blanch them in boiled water and they can be served as tea food (chagong茶供). If it is blended with frost sugar [fine crystallized sugar], oil, and vinegar, it can be served as a dish. It is very pure (qing清).

 

Cold bean sprouts (handouya寒豆芽) [presumably a kind of pea, not literally cold sprouts]

 

Wash peas till they are clean. Wrap them in the container made from cattail (pu蒲) leaves when they are still wet. In the spring and winter, place them near the kang (raised household heating platform, 炕), where is close to fire. In the summer and autumn, this is not necessary. Spray water on it every day. When the sprouts grow, remove the shells and wash them till they are clean. Blanch them in boiled water and serve them as tea food. If the sprouts are long enough, they can be made into a regular dish.

 

Soybean sprouts (huangdouya黃豆芽)

 

Use large soybeans and follow the above method. When the sprouts grow a little bit, take them and remove the shells. Wash them till they are clean and fully cook them. Add Arthraxon hispidus (?) (xiangjin香藎), sliced oranges, wood-ear fungus (muer木耳), and sliced Buddha’s-hand citron (foshougan佛手柑) to them. Blend them till they are even. Add as much as possible of sesame oil and frost sugar. Then add vinegar. Serve it after blending them.

 

 

 

BREWS (niangzaolei釀造類)

 

These are liquors made in the families of Mountain Persons [i.e. immortals, hermits, or the like; shanren山人] for the purpose of nourishing life. Either they are sweet, or they are medicines. They are very different from those tasty foods. Those who booze [lit. “drink immoderately”] should not join our conversation here.

[These are basically medicinal or herbal ales.  Most old brewing recipes are hard to follow, and translations below are highly tentative. One often suspects that our author had not tried these himself. A brewing expert would have to look at them and try them before serious translation.  On all these, see Huang 2000.]

 

Liquors (jiulei酒類)

 

“Peach flower stream” liquor (taoyuanjiu桃源酒) [The name refers to Tao Yuanming’s famous story of a fisherman who followed a trail of peach flowers up a stream and found a land of Mountain Folk]

 

Use twenty liang of white yeasts (baiqu白曲) and cut them into almond shape[75]. Soak them in one dou of water and let them ferment (fa發). Wash one dou of sweet rice till it is very clean. Steam it till it is mashed. Spread the rice and let it cool down. Add it to the yeast liquid according to the changing weather of the four seasons (yi sishi xiaoxi qihou toufang quzhi zhong以四時消息氣候投放曲汁中). Stir it and make it into a thick congee. When it ferments, add two dou of steamed rice. if it does not [yet] taste like liquor, one should not feel surprised. Let it ferment and two more dou of steamed rice. Then the liquor is ready. If the weather is warm, there will be clean liquid emerging in the jar three to five days after it is ready. Take the liquid and drink it. Even if one guzzles this liquid, it will not be harmful. This recipe was originally [hyperbolically said to be] obtained at Peach Flower Stream, Wuling. Then it was recorded in Qimin yaoshu齊民要術. Neither entry catches the full wonder of this liquor. This recipe is the only true version. Now I think that it will be even better if one uses only water to soak the rice. When making the liquor, boil one dou [presumably of sweet rice][76] and then take one sheng of clean liquid. Then soak the yeast in it. One day after it ferments, steam rice and let it cool down. Take [the rice] out of the jar and mix it with yeasts. Then place it back into the jar. Repeat this step for every time of brew (dou酘). For the third and fifth brew, place the rice in the jar one day after liquor emerges. When it has been moved for five times, press it one or two days after liquor emerges. Then more than half of the rice has transformed into liquor. If the taste is hard (ying硬), steam three sheng of sweet rice for every dou [of rice]. And use a large spoon of yeasts made from shoots growing from old barley (damai niequ大麥櫱曲) and a large fen of white yeast powder. Blend them evenly and place them in a cambric bag. Contain it in a liquor jar. When it becomes sweet and tasty, remove the bag. However, since it is cold in the north, it is proper to brew at one’s will. Since it is warm in the south, it is proper to make liquor when the weather is extremely cold [otherwise it goes off to vinegar easily].

 

Fragrant-snow liquor (xiangxuejiu香雪酒)

 

The requires one shi of sweet rice. First, use nine dou of sweet rice and wash it till it is very clean and there is no sediment in the water that was used to wash the rice. Contain the carefully measured sweet rice in a barrel. Add the same amount of water to the sweet rice. It is proper to add one more dou of water in order to compensate the washed-away sediments of sweet rice. Soak the sweet rice in a jar. Then use one dou of sweet rice. Wash it as previously it has been done. Steam rice and place it on the sweet rice. Cover the jar with grasses. After more than twenty days, [the steamed rice] floats [indicating top-fermentation here, as in ale]. Take the steamed rice dregs (fanke飯殼) first and then the sweet rice. Let them dry. Then steam the rice and use it when it is just fully cooked. Use the water that was used to soak the rice and remove the sediments in it. Use twenty jin of white yeasts that have been cut into small pieces. Blend them. Place the steamed rice dregs (mi ke米殼) at the bottom of the jar. If it is warm, let the warmth [of the steamed rice] come out for awhile and then stir and blend them till they are even. Then cover the jar. After one day and one night, rake over the rice for the first time and do not cover the jar. After one day or one night, rake it over for the second time. If it is warm, one should rake it to let the warm gas get out. Rake it thoroughly for the third time. Then cover the jar and wait till it is ready. If one uses a normal recipe, the rice must normally be fine and white. The rice should be washed and clean. When raking over, the warm gas should be let out completely and then the rice will not spoil.

 

Greenish-and-Fragrant liquor (bixiangjiu碧香酒)

 

Use one sheng of sweet rice and wash it till it is clean. Use nine sheng of the sweet rice and soak them in a jar. Use one sheng of steamed rice and blend four liang of white yeast power with it. Bury a bamboo sifter (chou篘) in the soaked rice. When the steamed rice floats, dredge it out [with the sifter]. Steam nine sheng of rice and blend sixteen liang of white yeast powder with it. First, place the clean steamed rice at the bottom of the jar. Then place the soaked sweet rice and steamed rice in the jar. Use ten jin or twenty jin of the liquid that was used to wash the rice. Use four or five layers of paper to seal the jar tightly. In the spring, it takes several days. If the weather is cold, it will be ready in one month.

 

The twelfth-month liquor (lajiu臘酒)

 

Use two shi of sweet rice, two hundred jin of yeast-in-water (shuiyujiao水與酵) [presumably concentrated starter liquid] in full measure (zucheng足秤), forty jin of white yeast in full measure, two dou of sour steamed rice (suanfan酸飯) or two dou of fermented rice. The liquor tastes thick (nong濃) and spicy. It is made in the twelfth month. When boiling it, use two baskets with large meshes to hold liquor bottles and place them in the boiled water. When the liquor is boiled, take them out.

 

Red liquor from Jianchang (jianchang hongjiu建昌紅酒)

 

Use one shi of fine sweet rice and wash it clean. Place the sweet rice in a jar and make a small pit in the middle of the sweet rice. Pour one shi and two dou of water in the jar. Use another two dou of sweet rice and boil it till it is fully cooked. Spread it and let it cool down. Make it into a ball and place it in the pit. Then cover the jar. After more than twenty days, the cooked rice starts to float and the liquid in the jar becomes sour. Remove the floating cooked sweet rice and dredge out the soaked sweet rice. First, wash five dou of rice till it is clean and spread it at the bottom of a steamer. Place wet rice on it. Spread a little bit the cooked rice and let the gas out. Then cover the jar. Use eight dou of the liquid that was used to soak the rice and one liang of Chinese pepper that is fried and just comes out of pan. When [the Chinese pepper] is cooled down, use three jin of white yeast, three bowls of finely mashed yeast (jiaomu酵母), and proper amount of rice just as in brewing normal liquor. Do not make it too thick. If it is very cold, place it in a warm place. Wrap it with grass for one night. Divide the cooked rice into five portions in the next morning. Place each portion in one small jar and use one sheng of red yeast, half sheng of white yeast. Divide the yeast (jiao酵) into five portions too. Blend each portion with each portion of the cooked rice till they are even. Force them down in the jar and place the remaining cooked rice on top of it. Then cover the jar. After two days, beat and rake over it. If the surface is thick and it cannot be thoroughly beaten in three or five days. After being beaten, the surface will float and puff up. Then beat it one more time and still cover the jar. It will be ready in twenty days if it is in the eleventh month, in one month if it is in the twelfth month, and in twenty days in the first month. In the other months, it is not appropriate to make this liquor. Squeeze it and let it settle down. Then add a small amount of white sandalwood (baitan白檀). Wrap [the jar and seal it] with mud. Use boiled water for the original dregs (touzao頭糟) and add any amount of dregs to it at will. After two nights, the mixture can be squeezed.

 

Five-flavor distilled liquor (wuxiang shaojiu五香燒酒)

 

For each brew, use five dou of sweet rice, fifteen jin of thin yeast, three large jars of white distilled liquor, sandalwood (one liang) and five qian of muxiang (木香), frankincense (ruxiang乳香), ligusticum (chuanxiong川芎), and myrrh (moyao沒藥) respectively, five qian of cloves (dingxiang丁香), four liang of ginseng, fifteen jin of white frost sugar, two hundred walnut kernels, and three sheng of red jujube with the seeds removed. First, steam the rice till it is fully cooked. Let it cool down. Follow the normal way to make liquor and stuff the jar with the rice till it is almost to the brim. Seal the jar tightly. When it starts to spread heat slightly, add sugar, distilled liquor, spices, walnuts, jujubes, and so on, to it. Seal the jar with thick wrappers. Do not let the gas out. Open it for every seven days. Seal it for forty-nine days. Squeeze it as in the above method. When one drinks one or two cups and eats the foods soaked in it, it feels like the genial wind in the spring.

 

Yam liquor (shanyujiu山芋酒)

 

Use one jin of yams (shanyao山藥), three liang of ghee (suyou酥油), three liang of lotus seed pulp (lianrou蓮肉), and half fen of borneol (bingpian冰片). Grind them together and make them into pills. For every bottle of liquor, throw one or two pills in it. It is good for health if one drinks it when it is warmed up.

 

Grape wine (putaojiu葡萄酒)

 

Use one dou of grape juice and four liang of yeast (qu曲). Blend them evenly and place them in a jar. Seal the jar and it will become wine naturally. It has a special fragrance.

Another recipe: use three jin of honey and one dou of water. Boil them together and then pour them in a bottle. When it is mildly warm, add two liang of yeast powder (qumo曲末) and two liang of white yeast (baijiao白酵) to it. Seal the bottle with wet paper and place the bottle in a clean place. In the spring and autumn, it takes five days. In the summer, it takes three days. In the winter, it takes seven days and it is also good. When one is practicing kongfu and doing exercises of guiding qi and stretching the body (xinggong daoyin行功導引)[77], he should drink one or two cups. Then he will feel dozens of pulses grow fluid and open, and will feel the qi move without obstruction. The wine is what one should not abandon if he wants to take care of his own health.  [Excellent advice.  This is, of course, a bit of western influence in Gao’s work, but grape wine was long nativized in northwest China by this time.]

 

Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum spp.) root liquor (huangjingjiu黃精酒)

 

Use four jin of polygonatum root, three jin of Chinese asparagus (tianmendong天門冬) with the hearts removed, six jin of pine needles (songzhen松針), four jin of Atractylodes macrocephala (baishu白術), and five jin of wolfthorn [presumably berries]. All of them should be raw. Contain them in a pot and add three shi of water to it. Boil it for one day and remove the dregs. Use the liquid to soak yeast (qu曲) as homemade brews. When the liquor is ready, use the clean liquid. One can eat at will. It cures the hundred illnesses, prolongs life, changes one’s beard and hair [i.e. from gray back to black, a common belief about this substance in old times], and makes teeth grow. It has wonderful functions that cannot be exhausted.  [The ingredients are particularly famous “Mountain Folk” medicinal foods.]

 

Atractylodes macrocephala liquor (baishujiu白術酒)

 

Use twenty five jin of Atractylodes macrocephala. Slice them and soak them in two shi and five dou of flowing water (shuliushui束流水) in a jar for twenty days. Then remove the dregs and pour the juice into a large basin and place it in the inner yard (tianjing天井) at night. After five nights, the juice turns blood-colored and then it can be used to soak yeast. Make it into liquor and drink it by itself. It cures illnesses and prolongs life, changes hair and strengthens teeth, and makes face radiant. One will live longer if he drinks frequently.

 

Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch liquor (dihuangjiu地黃酒)

 

Use a large dou of thick, large rehmannia roots. Mash them. Cook five sheng of sweet rice, use a large sheng of yeast (qu曲). Knead these three materials in a basin till they are evenly mixed. Pour it into a jar and seal it with mud. In the spring, it takes twenty-one days. In the autumn and winter, it takes twenty-five days. When the date comes, open the jar and take a look. There will be a cup of green liquid on the surface, which is the essence. Drink it first. Squeeze the remaining material with a piece of new cloth (shengbu生布) in order to get the liquid. Preserve the liquid. It tastes sweet and delicious. It has functions as the above.

 

Sweetgrass liquor (changpujiu菖蒲酒)

 

Use sweetgrass (Acorus calamus) with nine nodes (jiujiechangpu九節菖蒲) and squeeze out five dou of raw juice by mashing it. Cook five dou of sweet rice and blend five jin of thin yeast (xiqu細曲) with it evenly. Place them in a porcelain jar and seal it for twenty one days. Then open the jar and drink it after warming it up. Drink it three times a day. It will open veins and pulses, nourish stomach, cures the illness of migratory arthralgia/”wind and numbness” (fengbi風痹), the illness of being as thin as “standing bones” (guli骨立) and the illness of losing functions for some part of body and being yellowish (weihuang痿黃). It cures those that cannot [otherwise] be cured. If one takes one prescription [every day], after one hundred days his skin will have brighter color and be radiant, his feet will have strength several times than they had previously, his ears will be able to catch subtle sounds and his eyes become brighter, his white hair will turn black, his falling teeth will grow again, he will have brightness at night (yeyouguangming夜有光明; see clearly at night?) , his lifespan will be extended and he will achieve longevity. Its functions cannot be totally described here.

 

Lamb liquor (yanggaojiu羊羔酒)

 

Use one shi of sweet rice and soak it [in water] to get the liquid following the normal method. Use seven jin of fat lamb, fourteen liang of yeast (qu曲), one jin of apricot-red (xinghong杏紅; apricot flowers?), which has been boiled in order to remove the bitter liquid. Then boil it with the lamb in plenty of water till the meat can be easily mashed. Keep seven sheng of the soup and blend it with the sweet rice mentioned previously. Add one liang of muxiang(木香) to it and brew them together. Do not let water get into it. After ten days, it can be eaten. It tastes sweet and smooth.

[Various forms of lamb or mutton wine or tincture remained common in China through the 20th century.  ENA knew a man in Hong Kong in the 1960s who had drunk a lot of it to treat his malaria; he was healthy at the time of interviewing.]

 

Lilyturf liquor (tianmendongjiu天门冬酒)

 

Use one dou of ripe liquor (chunjiu醇酒), one sheng of yeast powder (qumo曲末) [made on] the sixth day of the sixth month, and five sheng of sweet rice.  Make them into a drink. Boil five sheng of lilyturf root. The rice should be washed and dried in the sunlight. Use the boiled soup of lilyturf root to soak the rice. First, soak the rice in the liquid with yeast as the normal recipe. When it is ripe, cook rice and blend the cooked rice with the boiled liquid according to proper heat so that [their flavors will] penetrate each other. In the spring and summer, it takes seven days. One should frequently check it because it can easily get too warm. In the autumn and winter, it takes ten days to be ripe. Su Shi’s poem reads: “when the lilyturf [liquor] is ripe, a happy new year comes. The yeast and rice are so fragrant that they can be smelled all over the house.” This is true.

 

Pine blossom liquor (songhuajiu松花酒)

 

Use pine blossoms [pollen cones] like mouse tails in the third month. Scrape and use one sheng.  Place in a bag made from thin silk cloth. When one makes distilled liquor (baijiu白酒) and it is ready, place the bag in the middle of the liquor and then place [the liquor jar] in a well. Soak it for three days and then take it out. Pour out the liquor and drink it. It tastes pure, fragrant, sweet, and delicious.

 

Camomile liquor (juhuajiu菊花酒)

 

Pick camomile (ganjuhua甘菊花) in the tenth month and remove the petals. Use only two jin of the flowers and trim them. Then them in liquor in which dregs have not been removed (pei醅) and blend them evenly. In the next morning, it is fragrant and limpid after being squeezed. For flowers having fragrance, such as osmanthus, orchids, and wild roses (qiangwei蔷薇), liquor can be made with them in the same way.

 

Brewed-three-times liquor with wujia bark (Acanthopanax spinosus) (wujiapi santou jiu五加皮三骰酒)

 

Use a large sheng of wujia roots and stalks, Achyranthes (niuxi牛膝), red sage root (danshen丹参), wolfthorn roots, honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica Thunb.) (jinyinhua金银花), turpentine (songjie松节), orange (zhike枳壳, referring to various citrus spp.) branches and leaves, respectively. Boil three large shi of water in a pot and use six large dou of it. Remove the sediments and let it settle down in order to get the pure water. Then soak yeast (qu曲) in the water for several times. Cook five large dou of rice. Then use one dou of raw rehmannia roots (dihuangjiu地黃) and mash all till it is like mud. Blend it with the rice and place it in a jar. For the second time, cook five dou of rice. Then use two dou of finely minced great burdock (niupangzi牛蒡子) roots and mash it into mud-like stuff. Blend it with the rice and place it in the jar. For the third time, cook two dou of rice and boil one dou of bimazi蓖麻子; lit. “castor bean fruits” but these are poisonous, so something else must be implied). Then finely mash the castor beans and blend with the rice and place in the jar. Follow the normal recipe when it becomes too cold or too warm. The taste of the liquor is good. One should drink it after removing the dregs. If the liquor is too cold to be fermented, add yeast powder (qumo曲末) into it. If the taste is bitter and thin, cook another two dou of rice and brew it. If the rice is too dry to be fermented, boil those herbs (yaowu药物) and receive the liquid and add them to the rice when they are still warm. When the liquor is ripe, the dregs should be removed. If one drinks it for a long time, the flavor of the liquor will not disappear (時常飲之多少,常令有酒氣). Both men and women can drink it. There is no food that he cannot eat because of drinking it. If one drinks, it can remove the wind, the tiredness, and the cold qi (qufenglao lengqi去風勞冷氣). It cures illnesses that have accumulated and persisted in the body for a long time. It makes people gain weight and health, and walk as does a running horse. Its functions and benefits are numerous.

[Wujiapi medicinal wine remains one of the few really common medicinal liquors in China.  It certainly has a warming, tonic effect, whatever other virtues it may have.]

 

 

YEASTS AND STARTERS (qulei曲類)

 

Whether the liquor tastes good or bad is determined by the fineness of the yeast and the purity of water. Therefore, yeast is an important material (yaoyao要藥). If the yeast is not good, how can the liquor [that is produced with it] be good? So I record wonderful recipes of making the yeast, below.

 

White yeast (baiqu白曲)

 

Use one dan擔 of white yeast and one dou of sweet rice powder (nuomifen糯米粉). Add water to it and stir it till it is evenly wet. Sift it and tread (ta踏) it into cakes. Wrap it with paper and hang it in the wind. After fifty days, take it down. In the day, dry it in the sunlight; at night, place it outside and let the dew fall on it. For every dou of rice, use ten liang of yeast.

 

Secret recipe of making yeast, from the royal inner palace (neifu michuan qufang內府秘傳曲方)

 

Use one hundred jin of white flour (baimian白麵), four dou of yellow rice (huangmi黃米), and three dou of green beans (lüdou綠豆). First, grind the green beans till their shells are peeled. Toss them and remove the shells. Soak [the shells] in water for future usage. Second, grind the yellow rice and add it into the flour and the green bean powder. Place the soaked green bean shells into the mixture of rice, flour, and green bean powder. Blend them. If the mixture is dry, add more soaked green bean shells till it can be twisted together into dough. Tread it into square yeast (fangqu方曲). [I.e. press into square yeast cakes?] The more solid (shi實), the better. Dry it in the sunlight on a rough board? (cuzhuo粗卓). It would be wonderful if it is made in the third hottest period (sanfu三伏). When one makes liquor, add seven jin of yeast to every shi [of rice]. Do not add too much yeast into it. Then the liquor will be pure (qinglie清冽).

 

Lotus yeast (lianhuaqu蓮花曲)

 

Use three jin of lotus blossoms, one hundred fifty liang of white flour, three dou of green beans, three dou of sweet rice (author’s note: all should be ground into powder), and eight liang of Sichuan pepper. Make and tread it (zaota造踏) as normal.

 

Dew-on-the-golden-stalk yeast (jinjingluqu金莖露曲)

 

Use fifteen jin of flour, three dou of green beans, and three dou of sweet rice. Make them into powder and tread [the powder].

 

Xiangyang yeast (xiangyangqu襄陽曲)

 

Use one hundred fifty jin of flour, three dou of sweet rice (author’s note: make it into powder), five jin of honey, eight liang of Sichuan pepper.

 

Red-and-white liquor-making material (hongbai jiuyao紅白酒藥)

 

Use five tsaokou cardamoms (caoguo草果), two jin of green tangerine peel(qingpi青皮), royal cinnamon (guangui官桂), large cardamoms (sharen砂仁), galangal (liangjiang良薑), cornel (or evodia; zhuyu茱萸), and (guangwu光烏) respectively, one jin of dried orange peels (chenpi陳皮), Amur cork tree bark (Phellodendron amurense; huangbo黃柏), Cyperus rotundus Linn. rhizome (xiangfuzi香附子), atractylodes (cangshu蒼術), dried ginger (ganjiang乾薑), camomile (ganjuhua甘菊花), and apricot kernels respectively, half jin of turmeric (jianghuang薑黃) and mints (bohe薄荷) respectively. For one jin of such a mixture, add one dou of sweet rice, three to five jin of smartwee (laliao辣蓼), two jin of mashed water ginger (shuijiang水薑), and one jin four liang of French chalk/talcum powder (huashifen滑石粉). Put in jar as usual. Add spices such as long pepper (bibo蓽撥), clove (dingxiang丁香), asarum (wild ginger, xixin細辛), four liang of Alpinia oxyphylla (yizhi益智), (dingpi丁皮), and large cardamom (sharen砂仁).

 

Dongyang liquor yeast (dongyang jiuqu東陽酒麴)

 

Use one hundred jin of white flour, three jin of walnut kernels (taoren桃仁), three jin of apricot kernels, one jin of aconite (caowu草烏), three jin of aconite [presumably a second species, but we have no way to tell what two species are meant here] (wutou烏頭)—if it is peeled, the amount can be reduced to half, and five sheng of green beans. Cook them till they are fully cooked. Use four liang of muxiang (木香), eight liang of royal cinnamon, and ten jin of piquant smartweed (laliao辣蓼 [presumably Polygonum hydropiper, one of the “hot” spicy species that give the plant its English name]). Soak them in water for seven days and then let them dry. Use ten jin of mother’s vine (muteng母藤), cocklebur (cangercao蒼耳草) (author’s note: wrapped with two pieces of mulberry leaves, alongside with the previous prepared three kinds of spices): smartweed (蓼草 [presumably a less piquant species), royal cinnamon, and muxiang (木香). Boil them together with the green beans. Add one jin of yeast to every shi of rice. It will not be good if one adds too much of yeast.

 

Smartweed (Polygonum sp.) yeast (liaoqu蓼曲)

 

Use any amount of sweet rice and soak it in the juice of smartweed for one night. Take the rice out of the juice and blend it with flour. After a while, sift it and remove the extra flour. Kep it in a thick paper bag. Hang it in a windy place. In the summer months, it can be used after two months. If one uses it to make liquor, the liquor will taste very delicious.

 

 

 

VOLUME  THREE 下卷

 

SWEETS (tianshilei甜食類)—author’s note: fifty-eight sorts

 

Recipe for making sugar syrup (qi tanglu fa起糖鹵法)

 

Whenever one makes sweets, he should prepare sugar syrup first. This is a secret recipe coming from the Imperial inner palace (neifu內府).

 

Use ten jin of white sugar (or one can use any amount of sugar. I now use ten jin as a standard). Use a movable stove or hearth (xingzao行竈) to set up a large boiler. First, use two and a half scoops of cold water. If the scoop is small and the sugar is too much, add the proper amount of water. Stir it and break the sugar into pieces. Boil it with mild fire. Pour (dian點)[78] two scoops of water that has been mixed with milk into it. If there is no milk, water mixed with egg white is also fine. When it is boiled, add the milk liquid (or egg white liquid) to it. Remove the firewood and quench the fire. Cover the boiler with a lid for enough time to eat a meal. Remove the lid and then set up the fire in the stove. When it is boiled, pour [the liquid] into it. After it is boiled for several times, one should have poured [the liquid] like this. If the foam in the sugar floats, use a skimmer to take it off. Be careful and do not let it burn. Use a brush to dip in the previously prepared liquid and brush [the boiler]. For the second time that the foam gathers, use the skimmer to get it out. For the third time, use high fire and pour pure water to the foam. The milk will be boiled and separated [from the foam]. When [the foam] gathers for the time that one meal takes, all the foam should be picked out. When the black foam is removed and white flower-like stuff can be seen, it is good. Use clean cotton cloth to sift it and contain it in a bottle. The utensils should be clean and avoid grease and pollution. Whenever one makes sweets and uses black granulated sugar (heishatang黑砂糖), he should boil it—no matter how much of it—thoroughly. Then use fine ramee cloth (xixiabu細夏布) to sift it. Otherwise, it is not good for making sweets. If one uses white granulated sugar, he should first dry it in the sunlight.

[The milk and/or egg are used to clarify the sugar—to get out any protein and other materials other than pure sucrose.  They clump with it and can be skimmed off.]

 

Recipe for roasted flour (chaomian fang炒麵方)

 

Sift white flour for three times. Place it in a large wok. Use a wood rake (mupa木耙) to stir it till it is fully browned. Place it on the table and grind it into fine powder. Then sift it again. Thus it can be used to make sweets.

 

Whenever one uses ghee, the ghee should be fresh. If it is old, it cannot be used.

 

Recipe for pine-nut cookies (songzibing松子餅)

 

For one serving of pine-nut cookies, use six liang of ghee, six liang of white sugar syrup, and one jin of white flour. First, melt the ghee and put it in a porcelain container when it is still warm. Pour the white sugar into it and rub it evenly. Then add white flour into it and blend them. Knead and rub it till it is even. Place it on the table and mould the dough (ganmian擀面) into a flat shape. Use bronze circle molds to print on it and make it into round pastes. Spread pine nuts on them and then place them in a tray, which is used to bake them.  [This is strikingly similar to New Mexico’s “pine-nut shortbread,” and must be a western recipe, almost certainly from the Near East—a rare bit of western borrowing in this book.]

 

Recipe for oil-harmonized-with-flour [candies] (mianheyoufang面和油方)

 

Use any amount of [flour]. Use a small pan, two scoops of sugar sauce, and any amount of ghee. Fry the sugar sauce in shallow ghee in the small pan. Sift it with thin cloth. Add uncooked flour (shengmian生面) to it with one’s hand till it is neither thin nor thick. Use a small rake to stir it till the flour is fully cooked. First, cook the sugar syrup over slow fire till one can draw threads of sugar from it. Use a stick to dip in it and test it. Add proper amount of the flour that has been fried in ghee. Stir it and then remove it from the pan. Spread it on the board when it is still hot. Mould it [with a rolling pin] and cut it into eye-shaped [or eye-sized] pieces (xiangyankuai象眼塊).  [This and several following recipes are Near Eastern halwah recipes.]

 

Recipe for pine nut hailuo (松子海羅[口幹]方) [hai luo, literally “sea radish,” clearly a transliteration of halwah]

One can also use both walnut kernels and gourd seeds (guaren瓜仁)

 

Put sugar syrup in a small wok. Cook over slow fire for one meal’s time. Stir it till it is cooled down. Add fried flour to it with one’s hand. Then add chopped pine nut kernels and stir them till it is even. Spread ghee on the board and place [the dough] on the board. Mould it with a rolling pin and cut it into eye-shaped pieces. When one cuts the dough into pieces, he should do it when the dough is still warm. If the dough is cold, it is hard. It would be difficult to cut and one would be afraid of breaking it into crumbs.  [Again a Near Eastern recipe—the transliteration clinches it.]

 

Recipe for white and moist [candy] (bairunfang白閏方)

 

Add a small amount of ghee to the sugar syrup and cook over slow fire. Add fried flour to it conveniently (suishou隨手) and stir it evenly. Place it on the board and flatten it with a rolling pin. Cut it into eye-shaped pieces. If one uses bronze circles as molds, it will be called Sweet-Dew Gluten (ganlujin甘露筋).  [Again, apparently a halwah recipe.  It is sweet and looks like gluten cakes.]

 

Recipe for snow-flake shortbread (xuehuasu雪花酥)

 

Melt ghee in a small pan and sift it. Add heated flour to it with the hand. Stir it till it is even, neither thin nor thick. Then remove the pan from the fire. Spread white sugar powder on the mix and stir it. When they are mixed together, place it on the board and mould it with a rolling pin. Cut it into eye-shaped pieces.

 

Recipe for Manchu candied fritter (shanshima fang芟什麻方)[79], called “poured-and-cut” in the south

 

Cook sugar syrup in a small pan over slow fire till one can draw threads of sugar from it. First, peel sesame seeds and dry them in the sun light. Or bake them briefly and grind them into powder. Add them into the sugar conveniently. Stir and make it mix together, while it should be neither thin nor thick. Spread sesame powder on the board in advance and let it not be sticky. Place [the dough] on the board when it is still warm. Spread sesame powder on the dough, which will keep it from being sticky. Mould it with a rolling pin and cut it into eye-like pieces.  [This is straightforward sesame halwah!  Similar Manchu recipes survive today, and have been noted by Charles Perry; see footnote.]

 

Recipe for yellow and moisturized halwah (huangrun fang黃閏方)

 

[It is] the same as the homemade (jiachang家常) ones. Sift black [dark brown] granulated sugar. Cook it along with sugar syrup over slow fire. Add a small amount of honey. Then let it cool down. Add toasted flour conveniently. Still spread ghee on the board. Mould it with a rolling pin and cut it into eyelike pieces.

 

Recipe for slices with mint (boheqiefang薄荷切方)

 

Dry mints in the sunlight and grind them into fine powder. Put sugar syrup in a small pan and cook over slow fire till one can draw threads of sugar from it. Add a small amount of toasted flour in advance. Then add mint powder and mix them together. Spread mint powder on the board in advance and place [the dough] on the board when it is still warm. Spread more mint powder on the dough. Mould it with a rolling pin and cut it into eyelike pieces.  [These mint candies look, once again, Near Eastern.]

 

Recipe for a nest of threads [taffy] (yiwosi fang一窩絲方)

 

[Author’s note:] prepare a piece of fine stone as a board and spread cooked sesame oil on it. Sift toasted flour till it is pure. Prepare them in advance.  [All candy makers will recognize this!]

Fully cook sugar syrup over slow fire till one can draw threads of sugar from it and it is slightly burned (aocheng laosi熬成老絲). Pour it on the stone board. Use two chopping knives to scrape it up alternatively (zhuanzao lueqi轉遭掠起). When it is cooled down and gets thicker, pull (ba拔) it with hands till it is elongated. Fold it in half [and pull it again]. When it is pulled for more times, it becomes whiter. If it is cold and hard, bake it on fire. Stretch it for dozens of times and make it into a double-circle shape (shuangquan雙圈) and place it on the board. Spread toasted flour on it. Then it requires two persons, face to face, to pull it in opposite directions and turn it around clockwise (erren duiche shunzhuan二人對扯順轉). Pour toasted flour on it at his convenience. Pull it for dozens of times till it turns into thin threads. Sever them with knife, separate and make them into small nests. When one pulls the sugar and place it on the board, he should fold it in half and make it into a circle. Then pull it, fold it and make it into a circle. Repeat this for dozens of times and it will become thin threads.

 

Recipe for comb-print crisps (su’eryin fang酥兒印方)

 

Use uncooked flour and add soybean powder (doufen豆粉) to it. [add water to them and blend them](tonghe同和). Knead it into bars (tiao條) as large as the tip of a chopstick (jintouda筋頭大). Cut it into pieces as long as two fen分. Use a small comb to print patterns on them separately. Contain them and deep fry them with ghee till they are fully cooked. Pick them up with a sifter. Then spread white granulated sugar over, and mix.

 

Recipe for puffed buckwheat (qiaomaihua fang蕎麥花方)

 

First, bake buckwheat till it is puffed into flower-like [popped] kernels. Measure it. Add a small amount of honey to sugar syrup and put in a wok. Do not move them. Cook them till one can draw threads from it. Then [let the fire] higher (luedaxie略大些). Add the puffed buckwheat into it at one’s convenience and stir it evenly. Do not let it become thin. Spread puffed buckwheat on a board, which will prevent stickiness. Move the puffed buckwheat with sugar from the wok to the board and spread it. Mould it with a rolling pin and cut it into eye-like pieces.  [This is similar to Mexican alegría—a rather striking parallel.  Alegría is pre-Columbian, except for the sugar, but again there must be some Near Eastern influence here.]

 

Recipe for goat marrows (yangsui fang羊髓方)

 

Use half a bottle of goat/sheep milk (yangruzi羊乳子) or cow milk (niuruzi牛乳子) and add half a cup of water to it. Add three pinches of white flour to it. Sift it and place it in a wok. Cook over slow fire. When it is boiled, add white granulated sugar or sugar syrup at one’s convenience. Then use high fire [to cook it]. Beat it with a wood rake. When it is fully cooked, sift it and place it in a bottle. Pour it out in a bowl and serve it.  [This is evidently a form of the various milk sweets of India.]

 

Recipe for black and moist [candy] (heirun fang黑閏方)

 

Cook black [very dark brown] granulated sugar with slow fire and sift it till it is pure. Add the same amount of sugar syrup and mix them. place them in a wok. Cook them for one-meal’s time, add half a bottle of ghee to it. Cook and add fried flour and Chinese pepper powder to them at one’s convenience. Blend them into one piece. Then place it on the board and knead it till it is flattened. Cut it into eye-like pieces.

 

Recipe for saboni (灑孛你方)

 

Cook material that has been used to cook mushrooms (aomoguliao熬磨古料) with slow fire. Do not use walnuts. Scoop it out and spread it on a board. Circle and fix it with sweet rice (jiangmi江米). Print it with bronze circles. This is saboni灑餑你. When one cuts it into eye-like pieces, it is called white sugar squares (baitangkuai白糖塊). [This recipe is incomprehensible, and evidently involves transcriptions.  The mushroom reference makes no sense, and aomoguliao is very probably a transcription of a foreign word, as saboni certainly is.  Charles Perry informs ENA, per email of Aug. 25, 2015: “There was a medieval Arab sweetmeat called sabuniyyah which had something of the crumbly texture and faintly sinister luster of soap and was probably cut into pieces resembling bars of soap (sabun): Dissolve sugar and set aside. Put half the syrup in the pan, dissolve starch, add, and stir continuously on the fire; for every raṭl of sugar, use two ūqiyahs of starch. Stir with sesame oil, slowly moisten with the rest of the syrup, and stir. When it comes off the fire, add honey, the same amount by weight as the starch. When done, set aside and work in, for every raṭl,two ūqiyahs of blanched almonds or pistachios and an ūqiyah of rosewater. Then spread it out and sprinkle with sugar.” Further email, Aug. 26: ”It’s a recipe that all the 13th-century cookbooks of the eastern Arab World swiped from some earlier source. You can credit ‘The Description of Familiar Foods,’ which I translated in Medieval Arab Cookery, Prospect Books: Totnes, Devon, 2001. I can hazard a guess for aomoguliaoal-maghli, something that has been boiled. It’s not a literary word (in form it’s a passive participle and the verb ghala is intransitive) but it exists in two senses: 1) herb tea or decoction and 2) in Lebanon and Syria as the name of a sort of rice pudding made with water instead of milk (the rice is ground to a powder and it is boiled with sugar and spices for an hour to thicken) which is served on the birth of a son. In the second sense the first vowel is generally u: mughli, which could be a colloquial pronunciation of mughla, the proper word for ‘something that has been boiled.’”

 

Clearly this is our saboni, and the aomoguliao must be the ingredients called for in Perry’s recipe (translated from a medieval Arab source).]

 

Recipe for pepper-and-salt cookies (jiaoyanbing fang椒鹽餅方)

 

Use two jin of white flour, a half jin of sesame oil, a half liang of salt, and one liang of good pepper peels [sic, probably a miswriting], a half liang of aniseeds (huixiang茴香). Divide [the flour] into three equal portions. For each one of them, use only oil, pepper, salt, and aniseeds to mix with the flour. Then make them into the stuffing (rang穰). If one adds some coarse sesame crumbs to it, it would be even better. For each cookie, insert one piece of the stuffing. Knead the cookie till it become thinner. Then place them in the oven. Another recipe: mix the same amount of boiled water and oil. For the stuffing, use sugar and sesame crumbs and the oil [mixed with boiled water].  [This is a thoroughly Near Eastern recipe; cf. kourabiyeh.  The lack of sugar in the dough is evidently a mistake; probably the “good pepper peels” were sugar until a bad copyist got at this recipe.]

 

Recipe for crisp cookies (subing fang酥餅方)

 

Use four liang of ghee, one liang of honey, and one jin of white flour. Blend them into pastes. Place it into molds and make it into cookies. Then bake them in a oven. Otherwise, one can also use lard. If he uses two liang of honey, it will be even better.

 

Recipe for wind-dissolved cakes (fengxiaobing fang風消餅方)

 

Use two sheng of sweet rice and mash it into very fine powder. Divide them into four portions. One portion is used to make a dough (米孛). Another portion is mixed with water, made into cakes and fully cooked. Blend the remaining two portions [of sweet rice powder]. Use a small half cup of honey, two pieces of fermenting liquor in which the dregs have not been removed (zhengfa jiupei正發酒醅), and white maltose (baixing白餳)[80]. Melt them and then mould it with the sweet rice cakes till it is as thin as a spring [roll] wrapper (chunbing春餅). If the wrapper is broken, there will be no problem. Bake it on a tray and do not let it burn. Then hang it in a windy place. Measure how much [sweet rice] has been used, deep fry it in lard. When one deep fries it, use chopsticks to stir it. At the same time, mix white sugar and fried flour. Then use raw hemp cloth (shengmabu生麻布) to rub the mixed crumb onto the wrappers.  [I.e., thin tortilla-like cakes have crumbs shaken over them as topping.]

Another recipe: use only a small amount of fine and cooked powder and boil it. Then spread it on a sifter and dry it one hundred percent in sunlight. For every dou of sweet rice powder, use twelve liang of yam powder (yumo芋末). This recipe is simple and wonderful.

[With this we leave the Near Eastern-style recipes and move to more purely Chinese ones, though a few exotic recipes appear below.]

Recipe for meat-and-oil cake (rouyoubing fang肉油餅方)

 

Use one jin of white flour, one liang of cooked oil, one liang of sheep and pig fat respectively ([the author’s note:] cut them into small-pea-like pieces). Use two cups of liquor that comes out in the summer (dajiu大酒)[81] and blend it with the flour. Divide it into ten pastes. Mould it into wrappers and wrap lean meat in the wrapper. Bake the pie in an oven till it is fully cooked.  [This rather resembles a moon cake.  Possibly an ancestral form.]

 

Recipe for vegetarian oil cake (suyoubing fang素油餅方)

 

Use one jin of white flour and one liang of real sesame oil (zhenmayou真麻油). Blend them and make them into pastes. Insert granulated sugar stuffing at one’s convenience. Then print patterns on the cake and bake them in an oven.  [Same comment.]

 

Recipe for snow-flake cakes (xuehuabing fang雪花餅方)

 

Use one hundred percent snow-white flour that has been sifted thoroughly when first sifted (shifen touluo xuebaimian十分頭羅雪白面). Steam it till it is fully cooked and it is one hundred percent white. For every jin of flour that has been used, use six liang of lard and half jin of sesame oil. Cut the pig grease into dice-like squares and mix it with a small amount of water and cook them with slow fire. When the grease is about to disappear and there is yellowish and burnt stuff, use a skimmer [scoop, sifter] to pick [the yellowish and burnt stuff] out. If [the grease] does not disappear, one should continue to cook it and then pick [the yellowish and burnt stuff] out with the skimmer. When one has done this, the lard will be white. Mix the lard with the flour and make it as the foundation of the wrappers (bingdi餅底). Place some grass and wood ashes (caochaihui草柴灰) on the baking tray and then place a piece of paper on it. Place the wrapper on [the paper] and bake it.

 

Recipe for taro cake (yubing fang芋餅方)

 

Mash raw taro (yunai芋奶)[82] and blend it with sweet rice powder and make into cakes. Deep fry them. Or one can stuff them with sugar and bean paste (dousha豆沙). Or one can stuff them with walnut and sliced orange peels that has been mixed with pepper, salt, and sugar.

 

Recipe for leek cake (jiubing fang韭餅方)

 

Use pork with fat and make it into ground meat (saozi臊子). Fry oil till it is half cooked. Use raw leek and mince it. Mince goat fat. Blend Chinese pepper, Amomum villosum cardamoms (sharen砂仁), and soybean sauce evenly. Mould [the dough into] two thin cakes. Stuff them with the stuffing and bake them. When one uses shepherd’s purse (jicai薺菜), the recipe is the same.

 

Recipe for white crisp cakes (baisu shaobing fa白酥燒餅法)

 

Use one batch of dough (mianyige面一個), two liang of oil, and good liquor in which dregs have not been removed. Use the liquor as yeast. When the dough is one hundred percent leavened, knead it. Make exactly as with sesame and sugar (zhimatang芝麻糖) above. When one uses one batch of dough and two liang of sugar, he can make sixteen baked cakes.

 

Recipe for Solomon’s-seal cakes (huangjingbing fang黃精餅方)

 

Steam Solomon’s seal root till fully cooked. Remove its peels and fibrous roots. Mix it with baked and fully cooked peeled soybeans. Mash them in powder. Then add white sugar sauce to it and make them in dough. When one uses it to make cakes, it tastes pure.

 

Recipe for fried rolls (juanjianbing fang卷煎餅方)

 

This wrapper is the same as a thin pie (baobing薄餅). For the stuffing, one should use two jin of pork, one jin of pig fat or chicken. It is similar to the stuffing in a bun (mantou饅頭) and uses a lot of green onion whites or withered bamboo shoots and so on. Wrap it in the wrapper and make it into a roll. On both ends, [seal the holes] with paste. Deep fry it and let it float on the surface of the oil (fuyou浮油) till it turns reddish and slightly burnt. Or one can just bake it till it is fully cooked. Serve it with five spices and vinegar (wulacu五辣醋). The vegetarian stuffing is made with the same recipe.  [Note that mantou still meant a filled dumpling at this time, as in earlier centuries.  Today it means an unfilled steamed bread roll, and filled dumplings are jiaozi.]

 

Recipe for sugar Torreya nuts (tangfei fang糖榧方)

 

Add yeast to white flour and leave it for leavening. Add boiled water to [the flour] and make it into paste. Cut it into pieces that look like Torreya nuts (feizi榧子). Place them in completely boiled oil and deep fry them. Then pick them out and wrap them in the mixture of sugar and flour (chan纏). The mixture is made by mixing the same amount of sugar and flour.

[These classic fried dumplings are probably another Near Eastern recipe; they resemble western doughnuts.]

 

Recipe for meat cake (roubing fang肉餅方)

 

Use one jin of flour and six liang of oil. The stuffing is the same as that for the fried rolls (juanjianbing卷煎餅). Bake them in a tray. Cook maltose (xingtang餳糖) [till its color changes] and brush it on the paste to color it.

 

Recipe for oily shilaier (youshilaierfang油[食夾]兒方) [meaning unclear; lit. “oil eat-come-lets” but surely another transliteration]

 

Use flour to make paste. Stuff it and make it into shilaier [食夾]兒. Deep fry in oil. The stuffing is the same as that for the meat pie.

[Diligent search throughout Asian cookbooks fails to retrieve anything that could serve as an original for the name, but it is obviously a western dish with a transliterated western name.  The nearest ENA can find is an Azerbaijan delicacy called shor, which is more similar in recipe than in name.]

 

Recipe for sesame-butter cakes (mani bingzi fang麻膩餅子方)

 

Use a fat goose. Fully cook it and remove its bones. Cut the fat and lean into strips. Place blanched leek, sliced raw ginger, blanched and sliced wild rice stems, sliced fungus (mu’ersi木耳), and sliced dried bamboo shoots in bowls respectively. Steam sesame butter (mani麻膩) till it is fully cooked. Pour the hot soup that has been used to boil the goose onto the sesame butter (mani麻膩). The cake is like the spring cake (chunbing春餅) but a little thicker and smaller. Wrap the prepared materials and eat it.

[Somewhat unclear, but sounds good.]

 

Recipe for five-spice cake (wuxiang gao fang五香糕方)

 

Use two portions of the best white sweet rice (shangbai nuomi上白糯米) and six portions of non-glutinous rice (jingmi粳米), one fen of dried foxnuts (qianshi芡實), ginseng, Atractylodes macrocephala (baishu白術), tuckahoe (Poria cocos, fuling茯苓), and Amomum villosum cardamoms (sharen砂仁), one fen in total. Grind till the powder is very fine and sift it thoroughly. Blend [the rice with] white granulated sugar and boiled water till it is even. Place in a steamer. For one dou of powder, use four liang of foxnutd (qianshi芡實), two liang of Atractylodes (baishu白術), two liang of tuckahoe (fuling茯苓), one liang of ginseng, and one qian of the cardamom (sharen砂仁). Grind them into fine powder and blend it with the powder. Then blend one sheng of white sugar wit it.

 

Recipe for fluffy cake (songgao fang松糕方)

 

Use one dou of old non-glutinous rice and three jin of granulated sugar. Wash the rice till it is very clean and bake it till it is dry. Mix it with sugar and spread water on it. Then mash it in a mortar. Keep two fen of rice to blend with [the mashed rice]. Mash [the rice] till any coarse grains disappear. Or one can add honey to it. Or one can use the pure powder and pick out the blackish rice. When one makes fluffy cakes, he should wait till the water is boiled and add the powder to it gradually. So the steam will move upwards. Do not let the steam out. Do not stop [the process] in the middle. It is fine to place the cakes sparsely in the steamer. Or one can spread straws in the steamer.

 

Recipe for wrapped cake (guogao fang裹糕方)

 

Steam sweet rice till it is soft and fully cooked. Blend it with sugar till it is even. Wrap it with bamboo leaves and make it into small-corner shape (xiaojiao’er小角兒). Then steam it again.

[“Small corner” refers to dumplings with pointed ends like corners or horns.]

 

Recipe for ground spices (fanyong xiangtou fa凡用香頭法)

 

Use one jin of granulated sugar, three garlic (for the large ones, cut them into pieces as long as three fen), seven stalks of green onion white with roots, seven slices of raw ginger, and a piece of muskiness (shexiang麝香) as large as a pea. Place them at the bottom of a steamer. Then place sugar on them. First, wrap it with bamboo leaves (?; huaruo花箬). Then seal it with a single piece of oilpaper. Then steam it for one day and one night (chongtang重湯). It will not spoil for years. When one uses it, use a small amount of it and [the food] will be delicious.

 

Recipe for round dumpling (rice ball or sweet soup ball pudding) (zhushatuan fa煮砂團法)

 

Add granulated sugar to red beans or green beans. Boil them till they become a dough. Wrap it with raw sweet rice paste and make it into large balls. Steam them. or one can boil them in boiled water.

 

Recipe for sticky rice dumplings (zongzi fa粽子法)

 

Wash sweet rice till it is clean. Add jujubes, chestnuts, dried persimmon (shigan柿幹), ginkgo biloba/gingko (yinxing銀杏), and red beans to [the rice]. Wrap [the mixture] with wildrice (Zizania aquatica/Z. latifolia) leaves (jiaoye茭葉) or bamboo leaves. Another recipe is to soak rice and wormwood leaves (aiye艾葉) in water and wrap [the rice]. This is called wormwood-rice dumpling (aixiang zongzi艾香粽子). When one boils rice dumplings, he should use the liquid that has been used to wash straw or fire wood ashes. Sometimes people also add some lime (shihui石灰) to the water when they boil rice dumplings. [By doing this,] they want to keep the greenness and fragrance of the wildrice leaves (jiaoye茭葉). [These are still made, and resemble contemporary Korean dumplings made of powdered wormwood leaves mixed with sticky rice.  Sumei Yi remembers bathing in wormwood-infused water, and putting wormwood branches in front of the house to drive off insects.]

 

Recipe for the Jade-Filled-Lung (yuguanfei fang玉灌肺方)

 

Use zhenfen (真粉, unclear), oily pies (youbing油餅), sesame, pinenuts, walnuts, and aniseeds. Blend these six ingredients and make them into rolls. Steam them in a steamer till they are fully cooked. Cut them into squares. It is very delicious. There is no need to add oil. If one uses powders and flours of every kind and blend them and steams them, it is also wonderful.  [Again this is basically a Near Eastern recipe.]

 

Recipe for ground pork paste (saoziroumian fa臊子肉面法)

 

Use tender pork and remove the tendons, skin, and bones. Use the same amount of fat and lean meat and cut them into dice-like pieces. Use proper amount of water and liquor to boil [the pork] till it is half cooked. Grind the fat (yizhi胰脂) into paste. Then blend it with soybean sauce and afterwards add fragrant pepper (xiangjiao香椒) and Amomum villosum cardamom (sharen砂仁) to it. Use the spices to flavor it. Do not use too much water and liquor. Place the fat pork [into the boiler] first. Then add green onion whites. Do not add green leaves of green onion. Blend green bean powder [with water] to make a paste (jiang糨).

 

Recipe for wonton (huntun fang餛飩方)

 

Use one jin of white flour and three qian of salt. Blend them for a continuous dough sheet (luosuomian落索面). Add water to it frequently and knead it into paste. After a while, knead it for one hundred times. Twist and break it into small pieces. Mould it with a rolling pin. Use green bean powder as wrapper? (bo[米孛]). The four margins should be thin. Stuff [the wrapper] with the stuffing. The wrapper should be strong. No fat should be mixed with the lean meat. Fry [the meat] with green onion white and oil till it is fully cooked. Then [the meat] will not have a rank smell. Use proper amount of Chinese pepper, minced ginger, apricot kernels, Amomum villosum (sharen砂仁), and soybean sauce and blend them. It will be even better if one adds it with deep-fried bamboo shoots (suncai筍菜), or any kind of radish (laifu萊菔), or shrimp meat, crab meat, Wisteria (Sollya; tenghua藤花), or any kind of fish. When one places the dumplings in a wok and boils them, he should stir the soup and place a bamboo utensil (zhuxiao竹篠)[83] in the boiled soup. Stir [?] frequently and let the soup be boiling as if fish are making bubbles. The wonton will not be broken and the wrapper will be strong (jian堅) and smooth.

[Fine wonton recipes, but Gao is stretching his definition of “sweets” quite far.  Evidently any casual snack could qualify.]

 

Recipe for water-smooth pastry (shuihuamian fang水滑面方)

 

Use one hundred percent white flour. Knead it into paste. For one of flour, make it into more than ten pieces. Place them in water. When the dough is fully leavened (houqi mianxing fade shifen manzu候其面性發得十分滿足), stretch and pull (chouzhuai抽拽) it off piece by piece and place it in boiled water. Fully cook them. It will be good if the stretched-and-pulled pieces are broad and thin. Use sesame butter (mani麻膩), apricot kernel butter (xingrenni杏仁膩), salted dried bamboo shoots, pickled gourd (jianggua醬瓜), salted eggplants (zaoqie糟茄), ginger, salted leek (yanjiu醃韭), and sliced cucumber. Make them into minced sauce (jitou齏頭). If one adds fried meat to it, it will be even better. [These “water-smooth” or “water-polished” noodles again seem Near Eastern or Central Asian in ultimate inspiration.  The name, and also the sauce mixture, especially the nut butters, are close to the mysterious and elaborate Central Asian recipes in the Yinshan Zhengyao.]

 

Recipe for in-mouth crisp (daokousu fang到口酥方)

 

Use ten liang of ghee, seven liang of white sugar, and one jin of white flour. Melt the ghee and pour it into a basin. Add white sugar to it and mix them evenly. Knead it with hands for one hour. Then add it to the flour and blend them into dough. Let it be even. Then mould [the dough] with a rolling pin and make into a long strip. Then divide it into small cakes and bake them in an oven with low fire. When it is fully cooked, one can eat it.

(Near Eastern or Indian background.]

 

Recipe for midriff-purifying cakes with persimmon frost(shishuang qingge bing fang柿霜清膈餅方)

 

Use two jin four liang of persimmon frost (shishuang柿霜)[84], eight liang of orange peels, four liang of Platycodon root (jiegeng桔梗), two liang of mints, two liang of dried kudzu vine root (gange幹葛), four liang of fangfeng root (Ledebouriella seseloides, 防風), and one qian of (piannao片腦) [an aromatic, almost certainly borneol camphor; see fn 98, p. 101; lit. “sliced brain,” a disturbing image]. Make them into powder. Blend them with liquorice paste (gancaogao甘草膏) and make them into cakes. Then print patterns on the cakes and [cook them and then] eat them. Another recipe: add one liang of Sichuan one-hundred-medicine decoction (chuanbaiyaojian川百藥煎)[85].

 

Recipe for chicken-crisp cakes (jisubing fang雞酥餅方)[86]

 

Use ten liang of white mei pulp (baimeirou白梅肉), six liang of lilyturf root (maimendong麥門冬), one jin of white sugar, six liang of perilla (zisu紫蘇), four liang of one-hundred-medicine decoction (baiyaojian百藥煎), two liang of ginseng, two liang of black plums (wumei烏梅), and four liang of mints. Make them into powder. Blend them with liquorice paste till the paste is even. Make the paste into cakes. Or one can make it into pills (wan丸) and coat them with white sugar.

 

Recipe for mei and perilla (meisuwan fang梅蘇丸方)

 

Use two liang of black mei pulp (wumeirou烏梅肉), six qian of dried kudzu roots (gange幹葛), one qian of sandal wood (tanxiang檀香), three qian of perilla (zisu紫蘇) leaves, one qian of baked salt, and one jin of white sugar. Make all the ingredients into powder. Mash the black mei pulp into mud-like stuff. Blend it with other ingredients and make it into small pills for usage.

 

Recipe for watery-and-transparent corners [pointed dumplings] (shuimingjiao’r fa水明角兒法)

 

Use one jin of white flour and dust it into boiled water bit by bit. Keep stirring it with hand till it becomes a thick porridge (hu糊). Divide it into ten to twenty portions and soak it in cold water till it turns snow white. Place it on a table and squeeze it till the water comes out. Add the same amount of soybean powder into it and knead it into thin wrappers (baopi薄皮). Wrap sugar and fruits in it as the stuffing. Then steam it in a bamboo steamer. It tastes very good.

 

Recipe for poppyseed curd (zaosufu fa造粟腐法)

 

Grind poppy seeds (yingsu罌粟) and water till fine. First, use a piece of cloth to sift through the shells. Then use a piece of silk cloth to sift. Add to boiled water and it will be like the fluid (jiang漿) for making toufu. Place it into a wok and boil it. Then add green bean powder and stir it till it is made into curd (fu腐). For one portion of poppy seed, use one portion of green bean powder.

Sesame curd should be made in the same way.

[Interesting recipes of obscure origin.  Poppy seed in China is generally a marker of an introduction from the far west—west Asia or Europe.  But no such dish exists there.]

 

Fish-like-taste bran (fuzha麩鮓)

 

Use one jin of bran (fu麩) and cut it into thin strips.  [The bran is evidently made up into some kind of cake.] Dye them with red yeast powder (hongqumo紅麴末). Use one sheng of miscellaneous spices (zaliaowu雜料物), dried bamboo shoots, carrots, and green onion white (all should be sliced). Use two qian of fully cooked sesame and Chinese pepper, half qian of Amomum villosum cardamoms (sharen砂仁), dill seeds (shiluo蒔蘿), and aniseeds, a small amount of salt, and three liang of fully cooked sesame oil. Blend them till they are even. Then it can be served. It will also be fine if one blend every kinds of ingredients and fry them with oil and make them into a minced dish (ji齏).

 

Fried bran (jianfu煎麩)

 

Place bran and germ (fupei麩胚) in a steamer and do not use a rock to press it. Steam it till it is fully cooked. Then cut it into large slices. Fully boil spices (liaowu料物), liquor, and soybean sauce. Dry it in the shade. Deep fry it with oil (fujian浮煎) and it can be eaten.

 

Cakes for immortals and rich-and-powerful people (shenxian fugue bing神仙富貴餅)

 

Use one jin of atractylodes (baishu白術) and one jin of sweetgrass (Acorus calamus, changpu菖蒲). Soak them in the water that has been used to wash rice. Then scrape off the blackish peels and cut them into slices. Add a small piece of [mineral] lime (shihui石灰) and boil it with them till the bitter flavor is removed. Dry them in the sun light. Then add four jin of yams (shanyao山藥) to them and make them into powder. Blend them with flour and make them into paste. Then steam the paste and make them into cakes and eat them. Or one can add white sugar to it and mould it into thin wrappers. It can be steamed or baked. It originally has a flavor of purity and luxury (fugui富貴).

 

Recipe for ghee (zaosuyou fa造酥油法)

 

Boil cow milk once or twice in a boiler. Then pour it into a basin. When it is cooled down, the surface will be congealed into a thin skin of cheese (laopi酪皮). Bake (jian煎) the layer of cheese in a wok till grease (you油) comes out of it. Pour the grease into a bowl and it is ghee. [Not a very good description of any normal ghee-making process.  Gao seems to have confused methods for making qaymaq and for making ghee.]

 

Recipe for pure baked cakes (guangshaobing fang光燒餅方)

 

For baked cakes, use one jin [of flour] and one and half liang of oil (shaobing meimian yijin, ruyou laingban 燒餅每面一斤,入油兩半). Use one qian of baked salt and blend it with [the flour] and cold water. Knead it into [dough] and mould [the dough] with a rolling pin (guluchui骨魯槌) till it is flattened. Bake it on a pan (ao鏊) till it becomes harder. Bake it with slow fire till what is inside is also fully cooked. When it is tasted, it is very delicious.

 

Recipe for twice-oven-baked cakes (fulu shaobing fa複爐燒餅法)

 

Use one jin of peeled walnut kernels and mince them. Add one jin of honey to [the minced walnuts]. Make one jin of ghee cakes baked in an oven (lushao suyoubing爐燒酥油餅) into crumbs. Blend them till they are even and make them into small balls (xiaotuan小團). Use the ghee cake crumbs to wrap [these] and make them into cakes. Then place them in an oven and bake them till they are fully cooked.

[I.e., make a coating of the blended crumbs for the walnut mixture.  This is a very Near Eastern or Central Asian recipe, not far from baklava.]

 

Recipe for thin-and-crisp caramel (tangbocui fa糖薄脆法)

 

Use one jin four liang of white sugar, one jin four liang of vegetarian oil (or clear oil; qingyou清油), two bowls of water, and five jin of white flour. Add a small amount of ghee, pepper, and salt to them. Knead them into dough. Then mould it into thin pies as large as the mouth of a liquor cup. Evenly spread peeled sesame on them. Place them in an oven and bake them till they are fully cooked. It tastes delicious and crisp.  [Another shortbread recipe of obvious Near Eastern origin; similar cookies are made in the Middle East today.]

 

Exclusive recipe for the yellow crisp (suhuang dufang酥黃獨方)

 

Slice fully cooked yams (yu芋). Make apricot kernels and Torreya nuts (feizi榧子) into powder. Blend them with flour and make them into a paste. Dip the yam slices into the paste and deep fry the yam slices with oil. It is delicious.

 

Recipe for Koguryo chestnut cake (gaoli ligao fang高麗栗糕方)

 

Use any amount of chestnuts. Dry them in the shade and remove the shells and mash them into powder. Use one third of it and blend it with sweet rice powder till they are even.[87] Blend honey liquid with it and moisturize it. Steam it till it is fully cooked. It is very good if one adds white sugar to it.

[The Korean origin is explicit here, and indeed similar recipes still exist in Korea.]

 

Recipe for catnip candy (jingjie tang fang荊芥糖方)

 

Use thin sticks of catnip (Schizonepeta) and bundle them up like flowers. Dip them with one layer of sugar sauce and then one layer of sesame. Bake them till they are dry. They can be eaten.

 

Recipe for crabapple cakes (huahong bing fang花紅餅方)

 

Use large crabapples (Malus asiatica) and remove the peels. Dry them in the sun for two days. Flatten them with hands. Then dry them in the sun again. Steam them till they are fully cooked. Then store them in a container. The large and hard ones [apples] are good. One should a knife to carve ridges [on the cakes].

 

Recipe for soybean paste cake (dougaobing fang豆膏餅方)

 

Bake and stir large soybeans and then remove the peels. Make them into powder. Then add white sugar, sesame, ground spices (xiangtou香頭). Blend evenly. Then make them into cakes and print patterns on them. Then these can be eaten.

 

 

 

FORMULATED MEDICINES (fazhi yaopin lei法制[88]藥品類), twenty-four kinds

 

Recipe for processing Pinellia ternata Breit. (fazhi banxia法製半夏)

 

開胃徤脾,止嘔吐,去胷中痰滿,兼下肺氣.

[it] opens the stomach and strengthens the spleen. It ends throwing-up. It removes phlegm congested in the chest. It also helps letting the lung qi.

 

半夏 八兩圓白 者切二片  晉州絳 四兩

丁皮 三兩   草荳蔲 二兩   生薑 五兩切 成片

Use Pinellia ternata Breit rhizome ([the author’s note:] eight liang. Use the round and white ones. Cut them into halves.) , four liang of the reddish alum (jiangfan絳[89]) from Jinzhou晉州[90], three liang of (dingpi丁皮), two liang of tsaoko cardamom (caodoukou草荳蔲), and five liang of sliced ginger.

 

右件洗,半夏去滑,焙乾.三藥麄剉.以大口瓶盛生薑片. 前藥一處用好酒三升浸.春夏三七日,秋冬一月.却取 出半夏,水洗焙乾.餘藥不用.不拘時候,細嚼一二枚,服 至半月,咽喉自然香甘.

Wash the materials mentioned on the right. Remove the smooth part (quhua去滑) of the Pinellia rhizome and bake it till it is dry. Roughly cut the three kinds of medicines and contain the sliced ginger in a large bottle. Use three sheng of good liquor to soak the medicines. In the spring and summer, it takes three to seven days. In the autumn and winter, it takes one month. [When it is ready,] take out the Pinellia. Wash it with water and bake it till it is dry. Do not use the remaining medicines. Whenever one has time, chew slowly one or two pieces. When he has taken it for half a month, his throat will be naturally fragrant and sweet.

 

Recipe for processing orange peels (fazhi jupi法製橘皮)

 

日華子云皮煖,消痰,止嗽,破癥瘕痃癖.

Rihuazi said, “[orange] peels are warm. It removes phlegm and stops coughing. It cures the illness of having moving or fixed hard tumor in the stomach. It cures the illness of having a tumor in the groin. And it cures the illness of having a tumor in the chest. (po zhengjia xuanpi破癥瘕痃癖)”[91]

 

橘皮 半斤 去穰  白檀 一兩   青鹽 一兩

茴香 一兩

Use half jin of orange peels ([the author’s note:] remove the pulp.), one liang of white sandalwood (baitan白檀), one liang of greenish salt (qingyan青鹽), and one liang of aniseeds.

 

右件四味用長流水二大椀同煎,水乾為度.揀出橘皮, 放於磁器内.以物覆之,勿令透氣.每日空心取三五片 細嚼,白湯下.

Use two large bowls of flowing water to boil the four materials mentioned on the right. When the water is out, it is ready. Then pick the orange peels out and place them in a porcelain container. Use something to cover it and do not let the gas come in or out. Every day one should eat three to five pieces with pure boiled water (baitang白湯), chewing carefully.

 

Recipe for processing apricot’s seeds (fazhi xingren法製杏仁)

 

療肺氣咳嗽,止氣喘促,腹脾不通,心腹煩悶.

[it] cures the qi in the lung. It kills coughing. It terminates short and fast breath. It cures congestions in the stomach and spleen. It cures anxiety and depression.

 

板杏 一斤滚灰水焯過,晒乾.麩炒熟.煉蜜拌杏仁勻,用下藥末拌.   茴香 炒   人參  砂仁 各三 錢    粉草 三錢    陳皮 三錢  白荳蔲 木香 各一錢

Use one jin of flat apricots’ [seeds] (banxing板杏). Blanch them in boiled limewater, and then dry them in the sun. Then stir and bake [them with]the bran till they are fully cooked. Then blend the apricot’s seeds with refined honey (lianmi煉蜜) till they are even. Then add the powder medicine of lower rank (xiayaomo下藥末) [to it] and blend them. Use three qian of baked aniseeds, ginseng, and Amomum villosum seeds (suosharen砂仁) respectively, three qian of (fencao粉草), three qian of preserved orange peels, one qian of white cardamom (Elletaria cardamomum, baidoukou白荳蔲) and muxiang(木香) respectively.

 

右為細末,拌杏仁,令勻.每用七枚,食後服之.

Grind the ingredients mentioned on the right into fine powder and blend it with the apricots’ seeds till they are even. Every time eat seven pieces. Eat them after meal.

 

Recipe for making crisp apricot seeds (su xingren fa酥杏仁法)

 

杏仁不拘多少,香油煠燋胡色為度.用鐵絲結作網兠 搭起.候冷定,食極脆美.

Use any amount of apricot seeds. Fry them with sesame oil till they are slightly burnt. Make a string bag with iron wires and put the seeds in it. When they are cooled down, one should eat them. they are very crisp and delicious.

 

Recipe for processing Amomum villosum cardamom fruits (fazhi susha法製砂)

 

消化水穀,温煖脾.

It helps digesting liquid and grains. It warms up the spleen.

 

砂 十兩去皮,以朴硝水浸一宿, 䀶乾.以蔴油焙燥,香熟為度.   桂花  粉草 各一錢半,已上共碾為細末.

Use ten liang of fruits. Peel them and soak them in the liquid dissolved with rough nitre (poxiaoshui朴硝水) [92] for one night. Then dry them in the shade. Then bake them with sesame oil till they smell good and are fully cooked. Use one and a half qian of osmanthus (guihua桂花) and (fencao粉草). Grind all the materials mentioned above into fine powder.

 

右件和勻為丸,遇酒食後細嚼.

Blend the materials mentioned on the right and make them into pills. One should chew it carefully after he drinks liquor or eats.

 

Precious crumbs for Tipsytown (i.e., for a drunken man) (zuixiang baoxie醉鄉寶屑)

 

解醒,寛中,化痰.

It sobers [the drunken man] up. It broadens/relaxes the internal organs (kuanzhong寛中). It dissolves phlegm.

 

陳皮 四兩   砂 四錢   紅豆 一兩 六錢  粉草 二兩 四錢

生薑 三錢   丁香 一錢 剉  葛根 三兩已上 共㕮咀   白荳蔲仁 一兩 剉  鹽 一兩   巴豆 十四粒不去皮殻,用鐵絲穿.

Use four liang of preserved orange peels, four qian of Amomum villosum (suosharen砂), one liang six qian of red beans (hongdou紅豆), two liang four qian of (fencao粉草), three qian of raw gingers, one qian of ground clove (dingxiang丁香), more than three liang of kudzu root (gegen葛根) (carefully chewed.[93]), one liang of ground white (small) cardamom (baidoukouren白荳蔲仁), one liang of salt, fourteen croton beans (badou巴豆) (do not peel them. piece them together with a iron wire)

 

右件用水二椀煑,耗乾為度.去巴豆,晒乾,細嚼,白湯下.

Boil the ingredients mentioned on the right with two bowls of water till the liquid is gone. Then remove the croton and dry [the remaining ingredients] in the sun. [when they are dry,] one can chew them carefully and eat them with pure boiled water.

 

Boiled muxiangjian (木香煎)

 

木香二兩,搗羅細末.用水三升煎至二升.入乳汁半升, 蜜二兩,再入銀石器中煎如稀麵糊.即入羅過粳米粉 斗合.又煎.候米熟稠硬,捍為薄餅,切成棊子,晒乾為度.

Use two liang of muxiang. Mash them into fine powder and boil them with three sheng of water till the liquid reduces to two sheng. Then add a half sheng of milk and two liang of honey to it. Boil it in a silverware or stoneware till it turns into a thin glutinous mush. Then add one dou one he of sifted non-glutinous rice powder. Boil it again till the rice is fully cooked and [the paste] turns thicker and harder. Then mould them into thin cakes and cut them into chess-piece-like pieces. Dry them in the sun till they are dry.

 

For processing quince (fazhi mugua法製木瓜)

取初收木瓜於湯内煠過,令白色,取出,放冷.於頭上開 為盖子,以尖刀取去穰了,便入鹽一小匙.候水出,即入 香藥:官桂,白芷,藁本,細辛,藿香,川芎,胡椒,益智子,砂仁.

Use freshly picked quinces and blanch them in boiled water till they turn white. Then take them out and let them cool down. Then cut one piece of skin from the base of the fruit and use the cut piece as a lid. Use a sharp knife to remove the pulp (rang穰) and add a small spoon of salt. When the liquid comes out, add spices and medicines (xiangyao香藥): royal cinnamon (guangui官桂), Angelica dahurica Benth. et Hook root (baizhi白芷), (gaoben藁本)[94],  Asarum sieboldii Miq (xixin細辛), ageratum (huoxiang藿香), Ligusticum Wallichii (or Conioselinum univittatum Turcz) (chuanxiong川芎), pepper, Alpinia oxyphylla fruit (yizhi益智), and Amomum villosum seeds (sharen砂仁).

右件藥搗為細末,一箇木瓜入藥一小匙,以木瓜内鹽 水調勻.更曝.候水乾,又入熟蜜令滿.曝.直候蜜乾為度.

Mash the medicines mentioned on the right into fine powder. Place a small spoon of the medicine into each quince and blend [the medicine] with the salty liquid inside the quince. Then dry them in the sun. When the liquid is gone, stuff with cooked honey (shumi熟蜜). Then dry it in the sun again till the honey is dry.  [Quince-honey syrup is still a standard, and very effective, cough medicine and throat soother in China.]

 

Recipe for processing shelled shrimps (fazhi xiami法製蝦米)

 

 

鰕米一斤去皮殻,用青鹽酒炒,酒乾再添,再炒,香熟為 度.真蛤蚧青鹽酒炙,酥脆為度.茴香青鹽酒炒四兩.淨

椒皮四兩青皮酒炒,不可過濁.煑酒約二升,用青鹽調 和為製.

Use one jin of shelled shrimps. Stir and bake them with blackish-salt liquor (qingyanjiu青鹽酒). When the liquor is dry, add liquor to [the shrimps] and stir and bake them again till [the shrimps] smell good and are fully cooked. Roast real gecko (zhengejie真蛤蚧)[95] with the blackish-salt liquor till it is crispy. Stir and bake four liang of aniseeds with the blackish-salt liquor. Stir and bake four liang of pure Chinese pepper skins (jingjiaopi淨椒皮) with the greenish-skin liquor (qingpijiu青皮酒)[96] and [the liquor] should not be too turbid. Boil about two sheng of liquor and blend it with blackish salt.

 

右先用蛤蚧,椒皮,茴香三味製鰕米.以酒盡為 度.候香熟,取上件和前三味一併拌匀.再用南木香麄 末二兩同和,乘熱入器盫,四圍封固,候冷取用每一兩. 空心,鹽酒嚼下.益精壯陽,不可盡述.

For the ingredients mentioned on the right, first use the three ingredients of gecko, pepper skins, and aniseeds to process the shrimps. When the liquor is gone, [the shrimps] are ready. When [the shrimps] smell good and are fully cooked, blend [the shrimps] with the three ingredients previously mentioned till they are even. Then blend them with two liang of coarse powder of southern muxiang(南木香) [unclear]. Place them into a container when they are still warm. When they are cooled down, one should eat one liang of them. Eat them with empty stomach (kongxin空心) and chew them with the salty liquor. It benefits the essence and strengthens the yang (yijing zhuangyang益精壯陽). [Its benefits] cannot be fully described.

Delicious tea cakes (xiangcha bingzi香茶餅子)

 

孩兒茶芽茶四錢,檀香一錢二分,白荳蔲一錢半,麝香 一分,砂仁五錢,沉香一分半,片腦四分,甘草膏和糯

米糊捜餅.

Use four qian of cutch (hai’rcha孩兒茶) and sprout tea (yacha芽茶)[97], one qian two fen of sandalwood (tanxiang檀香), one qian half fen of white cardamom (baidoukou白荳蔲), one fen of musk (shexiang麝香), five qian of Amomum villosum cardamom seeds (sharen砂仁), one and a half fen of Aquilaria agallocha Roxb. (lignaloes) (chenxiang沉香), four fen of borneol camphor (piannao片腦)[98], liquorice paste (gancaogao甘草膏), and sweet rice paste (nuomihu糯米糊). Blend them and make them into cakes.

 

Recipe for processing sprout tea (fazhi yacha法製芽茶)

 

芽茶二兩一錢作母.荳蔲一錢,麝香一分,片腦一分半, 檀香一錢細末,入甘草内纒之.

Use two liang one qian of sprout tea as the base (zuomu作母). Use one qian of white cardamom (doukou荳蔲), one fen of musk (shexiang麝香), one and a half fen of borneol camphor (piannao片腦), and one qian of fine powder of sandalwood (tanxiang檀香). Add them into liquorice and mix them.

 

Extremely fragrant pill (toudingxianwan透頂香丸)

孩兒茶,茶芽各四錢,白荳蔲一錢半,麝香五分,檀香一 錢四分,甘草膏子丸.

Use four qian of cutch (hai’rcha孩兒茶) and sprout tea (yacha芽茶) respectively, one and a half qian of white cardamom (baidoukou白荳蔲), five fen of musk (shexiang麝香), one qian four fen of sandalwood (tanxiang檀香), and liquorice paste. [Blend them and make them into] pills.

 

orax/sodium borate pill (pengshawan硼砂丸)

 

片腦五分,麝香四分,硼砂二錢,寒水石六兩,甘草膏丸, 硃砂四錢為衣.

Five fen of borneol camphor (piannao片腦), four fen of musk (shexiang麝香), two qian of borax (pengsha硼砂), six liang of calcite(?) (hanshuishi寒水石), and liquorice paste. [Make them into] pills. Use four qian of cinnabar (zhusha硃砂) for coating the pills.

 

Hawthorn paste (shanzhagao山查膏)

 

山東大山查刮去皮核,每斤入白糖霜四兩,搗為膏.明 亮如琥珀.再加檀屑一錢,香羙可供,又可放久.

Use large hawthorn paste (shanzha山查) and remove the skins and kernels. For every jin of them, add four liang of white frost sugar. Then mash them into a paste till it is as transparent as amber. Then add one qian of sandalwood powder (tanxie檀屑). It smells good and tastes delicious. It can also be preserved for a long time.

 

Sweet dew pill (ganluwan甘露丸)

百藥煎一兩,甘松,訶子各一錢二分半,麝香半分,薄荷 二兩,檀香一錢六分,甘草末一兩二錢五分,水撥丸.晒 乾,用甘草膏子入麝香為衣.

Use one liang of one-hundred-medicine decoction (baiyaojian百藥煎), one qian two and a half fen of spikenard (gansong甘松) and Terminalia chebula Retz fruit (hezi訶子),[99] a half fen of musk (shexiang麝香), two liang of mints (bohe薄荷), one qian six fen of sandalwood (tanxiang檀香), and one liang two qian five fen of liquorice powder. Add water to them and make them into pills. Then add musk into liquorice paste and make it into a coat [for the pill].

 

Recipe for salted apricot seed (xian xingren fa醎杏仁法)

用杏仁連皮以秋石和湯作滷,㣲拌,火上炒香燥,食之 亦妙.

Use unpeeled apricot seed and Prepared Salt (qiushi秋石)[100]. Add the Prepared Salt to boiled water and slightly blend it with [the apricot seeds]. Then stir and bake [the apricot seeds] on fire till it smells good and turns dry. It tastes also good.

Delicious orange cakes (xiangcheng bingzi香橙餅子)

用黄香橙皮四兩,加木香,檀香各三錢,白荳仁一兩,沉 香一錢,蓽澄茄一錢,氷片五分,共搗為末.甘草膏和成 餅子,入供.

Use four liang of yellow fragrant orange peels (huang xiangcheng pi黄香橙皮). Add three qian of muxiang (木香) and sandalwood (tanxiang檀香) respectively, one liang of white cardamom seeds (baidouren白荳仁), one qian of Aquilaria agallocha Roxb. (lignaloes, chenxiang沉香), one qian of cubeb (bichengqie蓽澄茄)[101], and five fen of borneol camphor (bingpian冰片). Mash them into powder. Blend it with liquorice paste and make them into cakes. Then it can be eaten.

 

Lotus seed twist (lianzichan蓮子纒)

用蓮肉一斤煑熟,去皮心,拌以薄荷霜二兩,白糖二兩. 褁身烘焙乾入供.杏仁,欖仁,核桃可同此製.

Boil one jin of lotus seeds till they are fully cooked. Remove the peels and hearts. Then blend two liang of frosted mint (boheshuang薄荷霜), two liang of white sugar. Coat the lotus seeds with [the mixture] and bake them till they are dried. Then they can be eaten. Apricot seeds, olive seeds (lanren欖仁), and walnuts can be processed in the same way.

Recipe for processing torreya nuts (fazhi feizi法製榧子)

將榧子用磁瓦刮黒皮,每斤淨用,薄荷霜,白糖熬汁拌. 炒香燥,入供.

Use porcelain or tile fragments to scrape off the blackish skins of the seeds (feizi榧子). Use the peeled seeds. Blend them with the syrup made from boiling frosted mint (boheshuang薄荷霜) and white sugar. Stir and bake them till they smells good and are dried. Then they can be eaten.

Recipe for processing gourd seeds (fazhi guazi法製瓜子)

燕中大瓜子用秋石化滷拌,炒香燥,入供.

Blend large gourd seeds found in the area of Yan燕[102] with the liquid made from dissolving Prepared Salt (qiushi秋石) in water. Then stir and fry them till they smells good and are dried. Then they can be eaten.

Canarium album pills (ganlanwan橄欖丸)

百藥煎五錢,烏梅八錢,木瓜,乾葛各二錢,檀香五分,甘 草末五錢,甘草膏為丸,晒乾用.

Use five qian of one-hundred-medicine decoction (baiyaojian百藥煎), eight qian of blackish (smoked) mei (wumei烏梅)[103], two qian of quince and dried kudzu roots (gange幹葛), five fen of sandalwood (tanxiang檀香), and five qian of liquorice powder. [Blend them] with liquorice paste and make them into pills. Dry them in the sun and then they can be used.

 

Recipe for processing  white cardamom (fazhi doukou法製荳蔲)

白荳蔲一兩六錢,腦子一分,麝香五厘,檀香七分半.甘 草膏,荳蔲作母,腦麝為衣.

Use one liang six qian of white cardamom (baidoukou白荳蔲), one fen of borneol camphor (naozi腦子)[104], five li of musk (shexiang麝香), seven and a half fen of sandalwood (tanxiang檀香). Use liquorice paste and white cardamom as the base and use the borneol camphor and musk as the coat.
Another recipe for processing orange peels (youzhi juepi又製橘皮)

塘南橘皮廿兩,鹽煑過,茯苓四錢,丁皮四錢,甘草末七

錢,砂仁三錢,共為末,拌皮,焙乾,入供.

Use twenty liang of orange peels found in Tangnan塘南[105] ([the author’s note:]boil them with salt), four qian of tuckahoe (fuling茯苓), four qian of (dingpi丁皮), seven qian of liquorice powder, and three qian of Amomum villosum seeds (sharen砂仁). Make them into powder and blend them with the orange peels. Then bake them till they are dried. Then they can be used.

Recipe for decocting liquorice paste (jian gancao gaozi fa煎甘草膏子法)

粉草一斤剉碎,沸湯浸一宿.盡入鍋内,滿用水煎至半. 濾去渣,紐乾,取汁.再入鍋.慢火熬至二碗.換大砂鍋,炭 火慢熬,至大碗.以成膏子為度.其渣減水煎三兩次,取 入頭汁内併煎.

Use one jin of (fencao粉草)[106]. Mince them and soak them in boiled water for one night. Then pour [the liquid with liquorice] in a boiler. Add water to the boiler till it is full. Then boil it till the liquid is reduced by half. Then sift through the dregs. Twist [the liquorices] till they are dried and take the liquid from them. Then place [the liquid] in the boiler and boil it with slow fire till the liquid turns into the amount of two bowls. Then replace the boiler with a large marmite/casserole (shaguo砂鍋) and boil it with slow fire (burnt from charcoals) till the liquid turns into the amount of one large bowl. When the liquid turns into a paste, it is ready. For the dregs, reduce the amount of water and boil them for two or three times. Then place them in the liquid that has been gathered for the first time and decoct them.

 

Recipe for decocting the Jade-Dew Frost (shenglian yulushuang fang升煉玉露霜方)

用真豆粉半斤,入鍋火焙無豆腥.先用乾淨龍腦,薄荷 一斤入甑中,用細絹隔住,上置豆粉,將甑封盖,上鍋蒸 至頂熱甚,霜以成矣.收起粉霜,每八兩配白糖四兩,煉 蜜四兩,拌勻.搗膩,印餅或丸.唅之消痰降火,更可當茶. 兼治火症. Use half jin of real soybean powder (zhendoufen真豆粉). Place in a wok and bake till it does not have the smell of beans. First, place one jin of clean borneol camphor (longnao龍腦) and mints in a steamer. Use a piece of thin silk cloth to cover them and then place the soybean powder on it. Cover the steamer and steam it till the top of the steamer is hot. Then the frost is ready. Gather the frost made from the soybean powder. For every eight liang of the frost, add four liang of white sugar and four liang of refined honey. Blend them till they are even. Mash them into butter. Mould them with print mold and make them into cakes or pills. When one place it in his mouth, it can remove the phlegm and reduce the fever. Moreover, it can be used as tea. It also cures the diseases that are caused by fire (huozheng火症).

 

Methods for taking cinnabar (fushifang lei服食方類) [107]

[Note that most of what follows in this section is traditional alchemy; by this time, “internal alchemy” consisting largely of meditation and herbs was replacing outright use of poisonous metal salts (“external alchemy”), but obviously had not replaced it in Gao Lian’s world.]

 

髙子曰:余錄神仙服食方藥,非泛常傳本,皆余數十年 慕道精力,考有成據.或得經驗,或傅老道,方敢鐫入.否 恐悞人,知者當着慧眼寳用.

Gaozi[108] says, “The recipes and medicines, used and taken by the immortals, that I have recorded, are not ordinary editions. They are the result of what I have learned after dozens of years of longing for and concentrating on the Dao. Some are what I gain from my own experiences. Others are what I learn from senior Daoist priests. Only them dare I record. Otherwise, I am afraid of misguiding people. The wise men should look upon them with insights and cherish them. ”

Method for taking pine resin (fu songzhi fa服松脂法)   採上白松脂 一斤,即今 之松香.  桑灰汁 一石.    先將灰汁一斗煑松脂半乾.將浮白好脂摝入冷水  凝.復以灰汁一斗煑之.又取如上.兩人將脂團圎  扯長十數遍.又以灰汁一斗煑之.以十度煑完遂成.  白脂研細為末.毎服一匙,以酒送下,空心近午晩,日  三服.服至十兩不饑,夜視目明,長年不老.

Pick one jin of the best white pine resin (shangbai songzhi上白松脂), which is now rosin (dried resin with volatiles evaporated out; songxiang松香). Use one shi of mulberry-ash liquid (sanghuizhi桑灰汁). First, use one dou of the ash liquid to boil the pine resin till [the liquid] dries to the half. Then place the good white rosin floating on the liquid into cold water and let it congeal. Then use another dou of ash liquid to boil the rosin. Then pick the rosin as above. Ask two persons to pull the rosin and let it elongate for more than ten times. Then boil it with the ash liquid. After it has been boiled for ten times, it is ready for use. Grind the white rosin into fine powder. Every time, take one spoon of it and take it with liquor. One should have an empty stomach and take it when it is close to noon or night. Take it three times every day. When one has taken about ten liang of it, he will not feel hungry. And he can see at night with bright eyes. He will not get older for years.

又一法 以松脂一斤八兩,用水五斗煑之.侯消去濁滓,取清浮 者投冷水中.如此投煑四十遍,方換湯五斗又煑.凡三 次一百二十遍止.不可率意便止.煑成脂味不苦為度. 其軟如粉,同白茯苓為粉,同煉脂,乘軟丸如豆.毎服三 十丸,九十日止.久當絶穀,自不欲飲食矣.

Another method

Use one jin eight liang of rosin and boil it with water. When the turbid sediments settle down, one should pick the pure and floating stuff and place it in cold water. Then boil it for forty times and replace five dou of water and boil it again. Repeat it for three times and thus boil it for one hundred twenty times in total. One should not be negligent and stop at will. Boil the rosin till it does not taste bitter. Then it is as soft as powder. Make it into powder together with white tuckahoe (baifuling白茯苓). Then make them into butter (zhi脂). Knead it into soft pills as big as peas. Every time one should eat thirty pills. After ninety days, he can stop. When one eats it for a long time, he will naturally stop eating grains. He will not want to eat food by himself.

 

又一蒸法 上白松脂二十觔為一劑.以大釡中著水,釡上加甑,甑 中先用白茅鋪密,上加黄山土一寸厚,築實以脂放上, 以物密盖,勿令通氣.灶用桑柴燃之.釡中湯乾以熱水 旋添.蒸一炊久,乃接取脂入冷水中凝.又如蒸.如此 三遍,脂色如玉乃止.每用白脂十觔,松仁三斤,栢子仁 三斤,甘菊五升,共為細末.煉蜜為丸,桐子大.每服十丸, 粥湯下.日三服或一服.百日已上,不饑,延年不老,顔色潤.

Another method (steaming)

Use twenty jin of the best white rosin for one dose (ji劑). Add water to a large boiler. Place a steamer on the boiler. Spread a thick layer of cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica, baimao白茅) in the steamer and then add a layer of yellow mountain earth (huangshantu黄山土) as thick as one cun. Punch the earth and make it tight. Then place the rosin on the earth and cover it with something tightly. Do not let the air come in or out. Use mulberry wood as the firewood. As soon as the liquid in the boiler is dry, add boiled water to it. Steam it for the time of a meal. Then pick the rosin and place it in cold water. When it congeals, steam it again. Repeat it for three times and stop when the color of the rosin is like that of jade. Use ten jin of white rosin, three jin of pine nuts, three jin of cypress nuts (baiziren栢子仁), five sheng of camomile (ganjuhua甘菊), and make them into fine powder. Refine it with honey and make it into pills as large as a tung nut (Aleurites fordii; name also includes Idesia polycarpa fruit) (tongzi桐子). Take ten pills with congee or soup. Take it three times or one time every day. After more than one hundred days, he will not feel hungry. His lifespan is elongated and he will not turn old. The color of his skin is shiny and moisturized.

Method for taking arsenic sulphide/king’s yellow/realgar (fu xionghuang fa服雄黄法)

透明雄黄 三兩,聞之不臭 如雞冠者佳.  次用甘草, 紫背天葵, 地胆, 碧稜花, 各五 兩. 四味為末,入東流水,同雄煑砂礶 内.三日漉出.搗如麄粉.入猪脂内,蒸一伏時.洗出又同 豆腐内蒸.如上二次.蒸時甑上先鋪山黄泥一寸,次鋪 脂,蒸黄.其毒去盡,收起成細粉.毎黄末一兩,和上松脂 二兩,為丸如桐子大.每服三五丸,酒下.能令人久活延

年,髪白再黒,齒落更生,百病不生,鬼神呵護,頂有紅光, 無嘗畏不敢近.疫癘不惹,特餘事耳.

Use three liang of transparent arsenic sulphide (realgar, xionghuang雄黄)[109] (those that do not smell and are in shape of cockscomb are best). Then use five liang of liquorice, Begonia fimbristipulata Hance (zibei tiankui紫背天葵)[110], cantharide beetles (didan地胆)[111], and (bilenghua碧稜花) respectively. Grind the four ingredients into powder and add them into water that is flowing east (dongliushui東流水). Boil them together with the arsenic sulphide in an earthenware pot (shaguan砂礶). After three days, pick them out. Mash them into coarse powder and steam them with pig fat for one day and one night. Take them out and wash them. Then steam them with toufu as mentioned above. Repeat twice. When steaming them, spread a layer of yellow mountain earth as thick as one cun. Then place the pig fat [on top of the earth]. Steam them till they turn yellow. Therefore, the poison毒 is removed. Pick them up and grind them into fine powder. For every liang of the yellow powder, add two liang of the best pine resin. Then make them into pills as large as a tung nut (Aleurites fordii; name also includes Idesia polycarpa fruit) (tongzi桐子). Every time, one should eat three to five pills with liquor. It can enable a person to live longer. It can change one’s white hair into black and make his teeth grow where they fell. He will not have any of the one hundred kinds of diseases. The ghosts and gods will protect him. On top of his head, there is red light. The ghost called “impermanent” is afraid of him and would not approach him.[112] Epidemic diseases would not touch upon him. Those will be matters that he does not have to pay attention to.

Another recipe for preparing arsenic sulphide (you zhixiong fa又製雄法)

用明雄 二兩,  先將破故紙 四兩,  杏仁 四兩,  枸杞 四兩,  地 骨皮 四兩,  甘草 四兩,  用水二斗煎至一斗,去渣留汁.又 取灶上烟筒内黒流珠四兩,山家灶中百草霜四兩,同 雄一處研細,傾入藥汁内,熬乾.入羊城礶内.上水下火, 打四炷香取出,冷定收起.每用以治心疾,風痺,及膈氣, 咳嗽,毎服一分效.

Use two liang of transparent arsenic sulphide (mingxiong明雄). First, use four liang of old paper (poguzhi破故紙), four liang of apricot seeds, four liang of wolfthorn fruits, four liang of the peels of wolfthorn roots (digupi地骨皮), four liang of liquorice, and boil them with two dou of water till the liquid reduces into one dou. Remove the dregs and keep the liquid. Then use four liang of black beads (heiliuzhu黒流珠)[113] that are taken from the chimney connected to the stove and four liang of frost of one hundred grasses (baicaoshuang百草霜)[114] that are taken from a stove of a household living in mountain area. Grind them into fine powder together with the arsenic sulphide. Then pour it into the liquid and boil it with slow fire till it is dry. Then place it into a Yangcheng pot (yangchengguan羊城礶)[115]. Add water to the upper portion and set on a fire in the lower portion. After burning four sticks of incense [for timing—so presumably these are burned consecutively], take them out and let them cool down. Then put in container.  They can be used to cure heart diseases (xinji心疾), the wind-and-numbness disease (fengbi風痺)[116], the qi in the midriff (geqi膈氣), and coughing. After the patient takes one fen of the medicine, the medicine will have effects.

 

Another recipe(又一法) 以黄入鴨肚煑三日夜,取黄用者.

Stuff arsenic sulphide into a duck’s stomach. The boil the duck for three days and nights. Then use the arsenic sulphide.

[Arsenic was well known as an alchemical drug; of course is was deadly, and countless adepts, including probably a few emperors, died of consuming arsenic and mercury compounds and other fatal medications.]

 

服椒法 陳晔恬為之歌

Method for taking Chinese pepper ([the author’s note:] Chen Yetian composed a song for it)

青城山老人服椒,得妙訣,年過九十餘,貌不類期耋.再拜而請之.忻然為我説:

The Old Man from Qingchengshan (qingchengshan laoren青城山老人)[117] takes Chinese pepper and obtained wonderful ideas about it. He is more than ninety years old, yet does not look like an old man. I saluted him again and again and asked him for the tips. He was glad to tell me:

 

蜀椒二斤淨(揀去梗核及閉口者.淨秤.) ,解鹽六兩潔 (其色青白,龜 背者良.細研.)

Use two jin of clean Sichuan pepper ([the author’s note:] pick out the sticks and closed ones. Clean the steelyard.) and six liang of pure salt from Xiezhou ([the author’s note:]the salt is good if it is greenish and white, in shape of a turtle’s back. Grind it finely).

糝鹽慢火煑,煑透滚菊末(糝鹽在椒上,用滚湯泡過椒五寸許,經宿以銀石器慢火煑.止留汁,汁半盞.掃乾地,鋪淨紙.傾椒在紙上.覆以新盆,封以黄土.經宿取置盆内,將乾菊花末六兩拌滚,令均.更洒所餘椒汁.然後攤於篩子内㫰乾.菊須花小,色黄,葉厚,莖紫.氣香味甘,名曰甘菊蕋,可作羮者,為真.隂乾為末.)

Blend [the Sichuan pepper] with the salt and boil them with slow fire. When [the pepper] is fully cooked, roll it in chrysanthemum powder; blend the salt with the Sichuan pepper. Soak the Sichuan pepper with boiled water as high as five cun. After one night, boil it in a silver or stone boiler with slow fire. Then keep a half cup of the liquid. Then sweep the floor and place a piece of clean paper on the floor. Pour the Sichuan pepper on the paper and cover it with a new basin. Then seal it with yellow earth. After one night, place the Sichuan pepper in a basin and blend it with six liang of dry chrysanthemum powder. Let them be even. Then spread the remaining liquid on them. Then spread them in a sifter and dry them in shade. The chrysanthemum is real only when it is with small flowers, being yellow, with thick leaves and purple stalks, smelling good and tasting sweet, called camomile blossoms (ganjurui甘菊蕋), and can be used to make a soup. Dry them in shade and make them into powder).

初服十五圎,早晩不可輟.

At first, one should take fifteen grains of [Sichuan pepper]. He should not stop in the morning or in the evening.

毎月漸漸増.累之至二百.(初服之月早十五,日晩如之.次月早晩各二十粒,第三日増十粒,至二百粒止.)

He should gradually increase the number of Sichuan pepper grains [small fruits] he eats every month. Gradually he comes to take two hundred [every day]. ([The author’s note:] for the first month, he should take fifteen grains in the morning. At noon and night, it is the same. For the second month, he should take twenty grains in the morning and evening. For the third day[118], add ten more grains. Increase the amount to two hundred grains and then stop increasing.)

鹽酒或鹽湯,任君意所歠.

Salted liquor or salted soup, drink as you want [when you take the Sichuan pepper].

服及半年間,胷膈㣲覺塞.

After you have taken the Sichuan pepper for half an year, you will feel your midriff be slightly stuffed.

毎日退十圎.還至十五粒.

Then decrease ten grains every day till you takes fifteen grains every day.

俟其無碍時,數復如前日. (服半年後,覺胷膈間横塞如有物礙,即毎日退十粒,退十五粒止.俟其無礙,所服仍如前.)

When you feel comfortable with this, take the same amount of [the Sichuan pepper] as you did before. After you have taken it for half an year, you will feel stuffing in your midriff. Then decrease ten grains every day and stop decreasing when you take fifteen grains every day. When you feel all right, take the same amount of the Sichuan pepper as before.)

常令氣裏蒸,否則前功失. (須終始服之,令椒氣早晩裏蒸. 如一日不服,則前功俱廢矣.)

Keep making the qi [of the Sichuan pepper] surround and steam (guozheng裏蒸) you. Otherwise, what you have done before will be wasted. ([Author’s note:] you should keep taking it and let the qi of the Sichuan pepper surround and steam you day and night. If you do not take it for one day, what you have achieved before will be wasted.)

飲食蔬果等,並無所忌節.

For food and vegetables, you do not have to avoid eating anything or having a diet on anything.

一年效即見,容顔頓悦澤.

After one year, you will see the result. Your face will turn shiny.

目明而耳聰.烏鬚而黑髪.

Your eyes will be bright and your ears be alert to any sound. Your beard will turn black and your head hair, too.

補腎輕腰身,固氣益精血.

[the Sichuan pepper] nourishes the kidney and lightens waist and weight. It solidifies the qi and benefits the essence and blood.

椒温鹽亦温,菊性去煩熱.

The Sichuan pepper is mild and the salt is mild, too. The nature of chrysanthemum is to reduce anxiety and fever.

四旬方可服,服之幸母忽.

One should take it when he is forty years old. And when he takes it, he should not be negligent.

逮至數十年,功與造化埒.

After dozens of years, his efforts will be comparable to those of the nature.

耐老更延年,不知幾歳月.(四十歳方可服. 若四十歳服,至老只如四十歳人顔容.此其騐也.)

He will not get old easily and his lifespan is extended. He will not feel how many years pass by. ([the author’s note:] one should take it when he is forty years old. When he takes it at forty, he will look like a person of forty years old when he gets old. This is the effect [of this recipe].)

嗜慾若能忘,其效尤卓絶.

If he could forget desires, the effects will be even better.

我欲世人安,作歌故怛切.

I wish people peace and thus compose this song sincerely.

 

Method for taking Siegesbeckia orientalis Linn (fu xixian fa服狶薟法)

狶薟俗呼火忺草,春生苗葉,秋初有花,秋末結實.近世 多有單服者,云甚益元氣.蜀人服之法:五月五日,六月

六日,九月九日,採其葉去根莖花實,淨洗,曝乾,入甑.層 層洒酒,與蜜蒸之.如此九過則已.氣味極香美.熬搗篩 蜜丸服之.云治肝腎風氣,四肢麻痺,骨間疼,腰膝無力. 亦能行大腸氣.張垂崖進呈表云:誰知至賤之中,乃有 殊常之效.臣吃至百服,眼目清明.至千服,髭鬢烏黒,筋 力較徤,效騐多端,陳書林《經騐方》叙述甚詳.療諸疾患, 各有湯使.今人採服.一就秋花成實後,和枝取用,洒酒 蒸,曝,杵臼中舂為細末,煉蜜為丸,以服之.

  1. orientalis Linn (xixian豨薟)[119] is called by the commoners huochuicao火忺草. In the spring, it grows sprouts and leaves. in the autumn, it blossoms. By the end of the autumn, it bears fruits. In recent years, people take it by itself and claim that it is good for the original qi (yuanqi元氣). This is how Shu people 蜀人 take it: on the fifth day of the fifth month, sixth day of the sixth month, ninth day of the ninth month, pick the leaves and remove the roots, stalks, flowers, and fruits. Wash them till they are clean and dry them in the sun. Place them in a steamer and spread liquor on each layer of the leaves. Steam them with honey. After nine times, stop steaming them. They will smell very good. Then boil and mash them. Sift them through and make them into pills with honey. Then they can be taken. It is said that it can cure the wind qi in the liver and kidney (ganshen fengqi肝腎風氣)[120], numbness in four limbs (sizhi mabi四肢麻痺), aches in bones (gujiantong骨間疼), and lack of strength in the waist and knees (yaoxi wuli腰膝無力). It can also make the qi in the large intestine (dachangqi大腸氣) move. Zhang Chuiya張垂崖[121] submitted a memorial and reported, “who knows that [S. orientalis] is among the things of lowest rank but having extraordinary effects? When I have taken one hundred doses, my eyes turn bright. When I have taken one thousand doses, my beard and hair turn black. My strength is enhanced. Its effects are various.” Chen Shulin陳書林described it in details in Jingyanfang經騐方. It cures every kind of diseases and it can be used for different decoctions. Order someone to pick it. Another method is to pick the branches with [the leaves] after it blossoms and bears fruits. Spread liquor on them and steam and dry them in the sun. Pound them into fine powders with a pestle and mortar. Refine honey and make them into pills. Then they can be taken.

Method for taking mulberry fruit (fu sangshen fa服桑椹法)

桑椹利五臟,闗節,通血氣.久服不飢.多收晒乾.搗末.蜜 和為丸.每日服十六丸.變白不老.取黒椹一升,和蝌蚪 一升,瓶盛封閉,懸屋東頭,盡化為泥,染白如漆.又取二 七枚,和胡桃二枚,研如泥,抜去白髪,填孔中,即生黒髪.  出本草拾遺.

Mulberry is good for the five internal organs and the joints. It opens the blood qi (tong xueqi血氣). After one has taken it for a long time, he will not feel hungry. Pick many of them and dry them in the sun. Then mash them and blend them with honey. Make them into pills. Take sixteen pills every day. It can change white hair and make the person look less old. Use one sheng of black mulberry and blend them with one sheng of tadpoles. Contain them in a bottle and seal the bottle. Hang the bottle in the east side of the house. When they turn into mud, [use the mud] to dye the hair and the hair will be as black as lacquer. Another method: use twenty-seven mulberries and blend them with two walnuts. Grind them into mud-like stuff. Pull out white hairs and [stuff the mixture] in the pores. Then black hairs will grow [out of the pores]. This comes from Bencao shiyi本草拾遺.

Recipe for baby chick cinnabar (jizidan fa雞子丹法)

養雞雌雄純白者,不令他雞同處.生卯扣一小孔,傾去

黄白,即以上好舊坑辰砂為末. (硃砂有毒,選豆辨舊砂, 豆腐同煑一日,為末.)  和塊,入卵中,蠟封其口.還令白雞抱之.待雛出,藥成.和 以蜜服,如豆大.毎服三丸,日三進.久服長年延算.

Raise pure white cocks and hens and do not let other chickens mix with them. Open a small hole on a raw egg [laid by the white chickens]. Pour out the yolk and white. Then make the best cinnabar found in the old mines in Chenzhou (shanghao jiukeng chensha上好舊坑辰砂)[122] into powder. ([Author’s note:] cinnabar is poisonous. Choose the bean-segment-like old cinnabar bits and boil them with toufu for one day. Then make them into powder.) Blend [the cinnabar] with water and make into a paste. Stuff the paste into the egg. Seal the egg with wax. Still let the white chicken sit on it. When the chicks hatch, the medicine is ready.  [Since the chick in the egg would be killed, this probably refers to other eggs in the clutch—used basically as timers.] Blend it with honey and make it into [pills] as large as peas. Every day take two pills and take them three times a day. After one has taken it for a long time, he will live longer and his lifespan is extended.

Long-life purple miraculous cinnabars made with pearls nourished by a greenish dragon (canglong yangzhu wanshou zilingdan蒼龍養珠萬壽紫靈丹)

丹法:入深山中,選合抱大松樹,用天月德金木并交日上,腰鑿一方孔,方圓三四寸者,入深居松之中,止。孔內下邊鑿一深凹。次選上等舊坑辰砂一斤,明透雄黃八兩,共為末,和作一處,綿紙包好,外用紅絹囊裹縫封固,納松樹中空處,以茯苓末子填塞完滿。外截帶皮如孔大楔子敲上,用黑狗皮一片釘遮松孔。恐有靈神取砂,令山中人看守。取松脂升降靈氣,將砂雄養成靈丹。入樹一年後,夜間松上有螢火光,二年漸大,三年光照滿山。取出二末,再研如塵,棗肉為丸,如梧子大。先以一盤獻祝天地神祇,後用井花水清晨服一二十丸,一月後,眼能夜讀細書,半年,行若奔馬。一年之後,三尸消滅,九蟲遁形。玉女來衛,六甲行廚,再行陰功積德,地仙可位。松乃蒼龍之精,砂乃赤龍之體,得天地自然升降水火之氣而成丹,非人間作用,其靈如何。

The method to make the cinnabar: [one should] enter the deep mountain and choose a pine tree big enough that one’s arms can barely reach around it. Pick a day that heavenly virtue, moon virtue, metal, and wood converge (yong tian yue de jin mu bing jiao ri shang用天月德金木并交日上). Dig a square hole on the waist of the tree. The hole should be as large as three to four cun by each side. Dig deeply into the middle of the pine tree and then stop digging. Dig a deep concave place under the hole. Then use one jin of the best cinnabar found in the old mines in Chenzhou and eight liang of transparent arsenic sulphide. Make them into powder and blend them together. Wrap them with cotton paper and seal it with red thick silk cloth. Then place the wrapper into the tree hole and stuff the hole with tuckahoe (fuling茯苓) powder. Cut a wedge with skin as large as the hole and pound it into the hole. Use a piece of black dog fur to cover the hole. Since spirits and gods might come to take the cinnabar, one should ask someone to stay in the mountain and watch over it. This will use the pine resin (songzhi松脂) to boost the miraculous qi [of the cinnabar and arsenic sulphide] and the cinnabar and arsenic sulphide will be cultivated into miraculous cinnabar (lingdan靈丹). After they are inserted into the tree for one year, fluorescence appears on the tree. After two years, the fluorescence becomes larger. After three years, the fluorescence lights up the whole mountain. Take out the two kinds of powder and grind them into dust-like stuff. Blend [the dust] with jujube pulp and make them into pills as large as a Chinese parasol tree fruit (Firmiana simplex, wuzi梧子). First, use one plate of the pills to offer to gods in heaven and earth. Then take ten to twenty pills with well water, which is freshly taken in the morning (jinghuashui井花水), in the early morning. After one month, he can read tiny words in the evening. After half a year, he can walk as fast as riding a horse. After one year, the Three Corpses/Cadavers (sanshi三尸)[123] will be separated out. The Nine Worms (jiuchong九蟲)[124] will flee and hide. The Jade Girl (yunü玉女) will come to protect him and the Liujia God (liujia六甲)[125] will come to do the cooking. If he accumulates hidden merits and virtues (yingong jide陰功積德), at least the position of an earthly immortal (dixian地仙) can be secured for him. The pine tree is the essence of a greenish dragon. The cinnabar is the body of a reddish dragon. They obtain the qi of water and fire that naturally ascends and descends in heaven and earth. Then they become cinnabar. They are not produced by human beings. How miraculous this all is!

 

Nine cycle longevity miraculous-tripod-and-jade-liquid cream (jiuzhuan changsheng shending yuye gao九轉長生神鼎玉液膏)

白术氣性柔順而補,每用二斤,秋冬採之,去粗皮 赤术即蒼术也。性剛雄而發,每用十六兩,同上。

The qi nature of Atractylodes macrocephala (baishu白术) is soft and compliant. Use two jin of it and pick it in the autumn and winter. Remove the coarse peels. Atractylodes sinensis (chishu赤术) is the same as (cangshu蒼术).[126] The nature of the latter is hard, male, and (gangxiong er fa剛雄而發). Use sixteen liang of the rhizomes. Repeat the method above [rather unclear which is intended].

二藥用木石臼搗碎,入缸中,用千里水浸一日夜,山泉亦好。次入砂鍋煎汁一次,收起,再煎一次。絹濾渣凈,去渣,將汁用桑柴火緩緩煉之,熬成膏,磁罐盛貯封好,入土埋一二日出火氣。用天德日服,三錢一次,白湯調下,或含化俱可。久服輕身延年,悅澤顏色,忌食桃李、雀、蛤、海味等食。更有加法,名曰“九轉”。

Mash these two medicines in a wood or stone mortar and then place them in an urn. Soak them in the One-Thousand-li water (qianlishui千里水)[127] for one day and one night. Mountain spring water is also good. Then place them in a earthenware pot and boil them for liquid. Then contain the liquid. Then boil them again. Use thick silk cloth to sift through the dregs and remove them. Refine the liquid with slow fire by burning mulberry woods. When it is slowly boiled into a cream, contain it in a porcelain jar and seal it. Inter the jar in the earth for one or two days in order to remove the fire qi (chu huoqi出火氣). Take it on a date of Heavenly Virtue (tianderi天德日). Take three qian of it every time with pure boiled water. Or he can also take it in his mouth and let it thaw. After he takes it for a long time, his weight will be lightened and his lifespan be extended. His skin will look shiny. He should avoid eating peach, apricot (li李), sparrow (que雀), clam (ha蛤), and sea food. Moreover, there is a method to enhance the effects of the medicine, which is called Nine Cycle.

二轉加人參三兩,煎濃汁二次熬膏,入前膏內。名曰長生神芝膏。

The second cycle: add three liang of ginseng. Boil the ginseng twice to get a thick liquid and boil the thick liquid slowly tillit forms a cream. Then add the cream to the previous made cream. This is called Miraculous-Mushroom-for-Longevity Cream (changsheng shenzhi gao長生神芝膏).

 

三轉加黃精一斤,煎汁熬膏,加入前膏內。名曰三台益算膏。

The third cycle: add one jin of polygonatum root (huangjing黃精). Boil it and use the liquid to refine a cream. Then add the cream to the previously made cream. This is called the Three-Prime-Minister-Extend-Lifespan Cream (santai yisuan gao三台益算膏).

 

四轉加茯苓、遠志,去心,各八兩熬膏,加入前膏。名曰四仙求志膏。

The fourth cycle: add tuckahoe Polygala root (yuanzhi遠志)[128]. Remove their hearts. Use eight liang of them respectively and boil them slowly till they turn into a cream. Add this cream to the previously made cream. This is called Four-Immortal-seek-Cream (sixian qiuzhi gao四仙求志膏).

 

五轉加當歸八兩,酒洗熬膏和前膏內。名曰五老朝元膏。

The fifth cycle: add eight liang of angelica (danggui當歸). Wash it with liquor and boil it into a cream. Then add the cream into the previous made cream. This is called the Five-Old-Men-Paying-Homage-to-the-Premordial-Celestial-Worthy Cream (wulao chaoyuan gao五老朝元膏).

 

六轉加鹿茸、麋茸,各三兩、研為末熬膏和前膏內。名曰六龍御天膏。

The sixth cycle: add antler velvet of a young deer (lurong鹿茸) and elk’s horn (mirong麋茸). Add three liang of them respectively. Grind them into powder and boil them into a cream. Add this cream into previously made cream. This is called the Six-Dragon-Ruling-Heaven Cream (liulong yutian gao六龍御天膏).

 

七轉加琥珀,紅色如血者佳。飯上蒸一炊為細末,一兩,和前膏內。名曰七元歸真膏。

The seventh cycle: add amber (hupo琥珀). The amber that is as red as blood is best. Steam it on rice till the rice is ready. Then grind the amber into fine powder. Use one liang of it and add it to the previous made cream. This is called the Seven-Stars-Returning-Their-Original-Status Cream (qiyuan guizhen gao七元歸真膏).

 

八轉加酸棗仁,去核凈肉八兩,熬膏和前膏內。名曰八神衛護膏。

The eighth cycle: add sour jujube kernels (suanzaoren酸棗仁). Remove the kernels [and evidently grind them to pulp] and use eight liang of the pure pulp. Boil them into a cream and add it to the previously made cream. This is called the Eight-Gods-Protecting Cream (bashen weihu gao八神衛護膏).

 

九轉加柏子仁,凈仁四兩、研如泥,加入前膏內。名曰九龍扶壽膏。

The ninth cycle: Add arborvitae seeds (baiziren柏子仁). Use four liang of the shelled seeds and grind them into mud-like stuff. Add it to the previously made cream. This is called the Nine-Dragon-Enhancing-Longevity Cream (jiulong fushou gao九龍扶壽膏).

 

丹用九法加入,因人之病而加損故耳。又恐一并煉膏,有火候不到,藥味有即出者,有不易出者,故古聖立方,必有妙道。

The cinnabar is made by adding ingredients in nine ways, which are based upon the disease one has and [the ingredients] are added. I am also afraid that if one uses all of them to make the cream at one time and the heat is not reached yet, some effects of the medicine are done and others are not. Therefore, when the ancient sages make a recipe, they must have a wonderful way.

 

The Mysterious-Origin Protecting-Life Purple-Miraculous-Mushroom Cup(Xuanyuan huming zizhibei玄元護命紫芝)

此杯能治五勞七傷,諸虛百損,左癱右瘓,各色風疾,諸邪百病。昔有道人王進服之,臨死,見二鬼排闥視立久之而去。後夢一人語之曰:“道者當死,昨有無常二鬼來拘,因公服丹砂之靈,四面紅光,鬼不能近而去。過此,公壽無量。”此道後活三百餘歲仙去。

This cup can cure the Five Strains and the Seven Impairments (wulao qishang五勞七傷)[129], every kind of weakness and one hundred sorts of damages (zhuxu baisun諸虛百損), paralysis (zuotan youhuan左癱右瘓), every kind of wind sickness (fengji風疾)[130], every kind of bad influences and one hundred kinds of illnesses (zhuxie baibing諸邪百病). Once there was a Daoist practitioner Wang Jin who took it. When he was dying, he had a dream, in which two ghosts opened the door and came in. They watched him for a while and then left. Later he had another dream, in which someone told him that, “you should have died at that time. When the two Impermanent Ghosts came to catch you, your face had a red light because you had taken the miraculous cinnabar. Therefore, the ghosts could not approach you. After this event, your lifespan cannot be measured.” Later, this Daoist priest lived for over three hundred years and then achieved transcendence.

 

用明凈朱砂一斤半,先取四兩入水火陽城罐,打大火一日一夜,取出研細。又加四兩,如此加添打火六次足,共為細末。將打火鐵燈盞改打一鐵大酒杯樣,摩光作塑,懸入陽城罐內。鐵杯渾身貼以金箔五層厚,罐內裝砂,口上加此杯盞,打大火三日夜,鐵盞上面,時加水擦,內結成杯在於塑上,取下。每用好明雄三厘,研入朱杯內,冲熱酒服。二杯一次,收杯再用,妙不盡述。

Use one and a half jin of transparent and clean pieces of cinnabar (mingjing zhusha明凈朱砂). First, take four liang of them and place them in a water-and-fire Yangcheng pot (shuihuo yangcheng guan水火陽城罐)[131]. Boil them with high fire for one day and one night. Then take them out and grind them finely. Then add another four liang [of cinnabars]. Repeat the process of adding [cinnabars] and boiling [cinnabars] with high fire till the sixth time. Make all the cinnabars into fine powders. Forge the iron lamp into a large liquor cup. Polish it and make it into a mould (zuosu作塑). Then hang it in the Yangcheng pot. Paste five layers of gold foils on the body of the iron cup. Stuff the pot with cinnabars and place the cup on the mouth of the pot. Burn it with high fire for three days and nights. Frequently rub the iron cup with water till [the cinnabars] congeal and form a cup attached to the iron cup. Then take [the cinnabar cup] off. Use three li of good bright arsenic sulphide (mingxiong明雄). Grind it and place it in the cinnabar cup. Pour warm liquor into the cup and drink it. Drink two cups every time and then keep the cup for future use. It is so wonderful that cannot be described.

 

            The Immortals’ Method for Taking the Miraculous Herb Sweetgrass (Acorus calamus) (Taiqingjing shuo shenxian lingcao changpu fushi fa《太清經》說神仙靈草菖蒲服食法)

The method: pick sweetgrass  (changpu菖蒲)] on the third day of the third month, the fourth day of the fourth month, the fifth day of the fifth month, the sixth day of the sixth month, the seventh day of the seventh month, the eighth day of the eighth month, the ninth day of the ninth month, the tenth day of the tenth month. One should pick those growing in water above clean rocks and it would be better if the stream flows south. It is not good if the stream flows north. Wash the picked sweetgrass till it is clean. Remove all the root hairs carefully. Then contain it in a bag and soak the bag in water. Remove the turbid liquid and hard pieces and slice up. Dry it in the sun.  Pestle it into powder and sift it through to get really fine powder. Select an auspicious day of the Heavenly Virtue and the Yellow Path (huangdao黃道)[132] to make it. The method of making it: soak aged sweet rice in water for one night and then remove the rice wash water (migan米泔). Grind [the soaked sweet rice] in a sandstone mortar and make it into fine powder. Cook [the powder] into congee on fire. Then blend [the congee] with the previously made sweetgrass powder. More than two hands are required to make them into pills. Otherwise, it is difficult to make them into pills when [the congee] is dried. The pill should be as large as a tung nut (wutongzi梧桐子). Dry them in the sun light and contain them in a box. First, take ten pills every time and then chew one mouth of rice and swallow it with the pills. Later on, drink liquor to swallow [the pills]. It would be even better if he eats [the pills] with some dimsum (dianxin點心). He should not worry about avoiding anything. He will feel his body become warm. Decoct one or two qian of Gentiana macrophylla Pall. roots (qinjiao秦艽)[133] into a soup. Drink it when it is cooled down and [his body temperature] will be normal because the gentian serves as an envoy drug (shi使). After he takes it for one month, his spleen will be pacified and it helps digesting (hepi xiaoshi和脾消食). After two months, any cold diseases (lengji冷疾) will be cured. After one hundred days, one hundred kinds of diseases will disappear. Its functions include pacifying the heart (relieving palpitation; zhenxin鎮心)and enhancing and replenishing qi (yiqi益氣). It strengthens the memory (qiangzhi強志) and the spirit (zhuangshen壯神). It replenishes the marrows (tiansui填髓) and the sperm (bujing補精). It blackens the hair (heifa黑髮) and lets the teeth grow (shengchi生齒) [in place of fallen teeth]. After ten years, one’s skin become fine and smooth. One’s face is like a peach blossom. Thousands of spirits serve and watch over the taker. His essence will never be exhausted (jingxie bugan精邪不乾).[134] He is promised longevity and transcendence (dushi度世).[135]

法用三月三日,四月四日,五月五日,六月六日,七月七日,八月八日,九月九日,十月十日,採之。須在清凈石上水中生者,仍須南流水邊者佳,北流者不佳。採來洗凈,細去根上毛鬚令盡,復以袋盛之,浸凈水中,去濁汁硬頭,薄切,就好日色曝乾,杵羅為細末。擇天德黃道吉日合之。和法:用陳糯米水浸一宿,淘去米泔,砂石盆中研細末,火上煮成粥飲。將前蒲末和搜,須多手為丸,免得乾燥難丸。丸如梧桐子大,曬乾,用盒收貯。初服十丸一次,嚼飯一口,和丸咽下。後用酒下,便吃點心更佳。百無所忌,惟身體覺暖,用秦艽一二錢煎湯,待冷飲之即定,蓋以艽為使也。服至一月,和脾消食;二月,冷疾盡除;百日後,百疾消滅。其功鎮心益氣,強志壯神,填髓補精,黑髮生齒。服至十年,皮膚細滑,面如桃花,萬靈侍衞[136],精邪不乾,永保長生度世也。

 

The Recipe for the Immortal’s First-Rate Yellow-Dragon Cinnabar (shenxian shangcheng huanglong dan fang神仙上乘黃龍丹方)

Ten liang of halloysite (red bole, chishizhi赤石脂)[137], three large sheng of yellow cow [an ordinary cow, as opposed to special cattle such as black cattle or water buffaloes] meat juice (huangniu rouzhi黃牛肉汁)[138], one jin of transparent frankincense (mingruxiang明乳香)[139],one jin of white honey (baimi白蜜), three liang of liquorice powder, and three dou wu sheng of white non-glutinous rice (baijingmi白粳米) ([author’s note:]divide it into five portions to cook with the medicine till it is fully cooked).

赤石脂十兩 黃牛肉汁三大升 明乳香一斤 白蜜一斤  甘草末三兩 白粳米三斗五升,分作五分炊藥,以熟為度

 

Use the above six ingredients. Make the red bole into powder. Put it in a raw thick silk bag and soak [the bag] in water which was used to wash rice, for half a day. Knead the medical bag with hands and shake it in water. Take the stone powder that settles at the bottom of the water and place it on a piece of paper to let it dry. Use five liang of clean and fine powder and contain it in a silver box. If there is no silver box, a Blue-and-White porcelain round box (qingbaici yuanhe青白磁圓盒) is also fine. For the first time, on the seventh or eighth day [of the month], wash seven sheng of the rice and place it in a steamer. Then place the box containing the medicines inside of the rice and cook them till the rice is fully cooked. Then remove the cover of the box and place it under the stars for one night. For the second time, on the day around full moon(yuewang月望), cook seven sheng of rice as before. Place the box inside of the rice and steam it. Then remove the cover and place it in the sun light. Therefore, it absorbs the three kinds of lights of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. For the fourth time, first pour three sheng of cow milk into an earthware pot. Boil it with charcoal fire till the water has bubbles as large as fish eyes. Then add the frankincense powder into it. When this melts, add the red bole powder that has been steamed for three times into the cow milk. Use a willow stick (liutiao柳條) to mix them till they are even. Then pour them into a mortar and grind them thoroughly. Then place them into the previous box again. Steam seven sheng of rice and place the box inside of the rice. Take the box out when the rice is fully cooked. For the fifth time, add two jin of honey into the earthen pot and boil it with slow fire till the boiling water has bubbles as large as fish eyes. Then pour the medicines in the steamed box into the honey and continuously stir it with a willow stick till it is even. Then add three liang of liquorice powder and boil them together till it is wet (daishi帶濕). Then place seven sheng of rice into the steamer and then place the box into the rice. Steam it till the rice is fully cooked. Then take out the box and place it in a basin of water. Soak the box in the water for half day and do not let the water get into the box. Then take the box out and place it in a clean container. When one starts to take it, he should choose an auspicious day having the Heavenly Virtue, the Moon Virtue, and the Yellow Path (tianyuede huangdao jiri天月德黃道吉日). In the early morning, he burns incense and salutes the east for seven times with an empty stomach. Then mix it with a spoon of good liquor [and take it]. This is an immortals’ cinnabar that is precious in this world and can prolong one’s lifespan. It does not have the poison of metals and rocks (jinshizhidu金石之毒). Neither does it have the mechanics that incurs loss in one’s life (wushengzhili誤生之理). After one takes it, the Four Qi is harmonious (siqi tiaohe四氣調和)[140] and the “hundred bones” [the hundreds of bones in the body] are eased (baihai shuchang百骸舒暢). Its wonderful functions cannot be entirely recorded. If he only uses it to help others achieve transcendence and does not make profits from it, its effects will be especially fast. After one takes the pill for about ten days, he will feel his internal organs being opened (zangfu tongkuai臟腑通快) and his spirits pure (jingshen qingshuang精神清爽). All kinds of diseases that are difficult to treat, such as the Wind Diseases [paralysis and the like], the Labor Diseases [tuberculosis?], the Cold Diseases, and the Qi diseases (feng lao leng qi風勞冷氣), will be cured. If he takes double doses, he will live as long as one hundred years. For every person, he should nourish his spleen. If the spleen is nourished, the liver will flourish (piyang ze ganrong脾養則肝榮)[141]. When the liver flourishes, the heart will be strong (ganrong ze xinzhuang肝榮則心壯). When the heart is strong, the lung will be vigorous (xinzhuang ze feisheng心壯則肺盛). When the lung is vigorous, the Original Organ will be solidified (feisheng ze yuancang shi肺盛則元藏實)[142]. When the Original Organ is solidified, the foundation [of the body] is stabilized (yuancang shi ze genben gu元藏實則根本固).Therefore, the way to deeply cultivate and solidify the root as well as a wonderful way to achieve longevity can be found in this medicine. How could it be any ordinary medicine? The vessels used to make the medicine are described as below:

上六味,將赤石脂為末,以生絹夾袋子盛貯於泔水盆內浸半日。以手揉搓藥袋,擺在水中,澄底石末刮下,紙上控乾。取凈細末五兩,入銀盒內盛之,無銀盒用青白磁圓盒亦可。第一次,須初七八日淘米七升,上甑,以藥盒安米中炊之,以飯熟為度。收去盒蓋,星辰下露一宿。第二次,以月望前後,如上炊飯七升,蒸盒,夜露月明中一宿。第三次,以二十四日前後早晨,依前法炊飯七升,將盒安內蒸之,去蓋,曬於日中,取足日月星三光之氣。第四次,先將牛乳汁三升入砂鍋,炭火逼令如魚眼沸,下乳香末,候化,入前三次蒸過赤石脂末,傾牛乳汁內,用柳條攪勻,傾在乳鉢內細研,復入原蒸盒內。又用七升米炊之,將盒安置米中,米熟取起。第五次,以蜜二斤入砂鍋內,慢火逼之如魚眼滾起,將蒸過盒內藥物傾入蜜內,用柳木不住手攪勻。入甘草末三兩同熬,帶濕便住。再用米七升入甑,安盒入米中蒸之,飯熟取起。以盒入水盆內,浸盒底半日,不令水入盒內,取起,以凈器收貯。初服,選天月德黃道吉日,清晨空心,焚香面東七拜,好酒調下一匙。此乃稀世延年仙丹,無金石之毒,亦無誤生之理。服食之後,乃得四氣調和,百骸舒暢,功妙無窮。但許度人,不得索利,則效乃神速。此丹服之旬餘,自覺臟腑通快,精神清爽,凡風勞冷氣一切難病,悉皆除去。若服兩料,則壽延百歲。凡人須養脾,脾養則肝榮,肝榮則心壯,心壯則肺盛,肺盛則元藏實,元藏實則根本固。是為深根固蒂,長生久視妙道,在此藥中得矣,豈尋常之藥物也哉?合藥器用如下:

 

Two silvers: one large silver pot and one small silver box. The smaller one can contain five or six liang of medicine and has a cover. The capacity of the larger one is five dou. If the pot is porcelain inlaid with silver, it is wonderful.

大小銀盒鍋二具小容五六兩藥盒子有蓋者,大容五斗,磁鍋有銀絕妙。

 

Three unused earthen basins. They should be able to contain one dou of beans.

新瓦盆三個,盛一斗豆者。

 

One wood steamer. It should be able to contain one dou of cooked rice.

木甑一個,容斗飯者。

 

One basin that is used to cover the steamer, one set of unused pot and stove, one mortar, two bamboo or wood spoons (large and small), three to five willow forks (liumuqiao柳木鍬), one small bamboo strainer (zhaoli笊籬), and one hundred jin of firewood.

蓋甑盆一只,新鍋灶一副,乳鉢一個,竹木匙大小二個,柳木鍬三五把,小笊籬一把,柴用一百斤。

 

 

Wolfthorn tea (gouqicha枸杞茶)

Pick red and ripe wolfthorn fruits in the late autumn. Blend with dry flour and make them into a paste. Then mold into thin cakes with a rolling pin and dry in the sun. Then grind them into fine powder. For every liang of river tea (jiangcha江茶), use two liang of the wolfthorn fruit powder. Blend them till they are even. Then add three liang of melted ghee or sesame oil. Then immediately add boiled water and make them into a paste. Add a small amount of salt and decoct them in a pot till they are fully cooked. Then they can be drunk. It is very good for health and brightens eyes.

[An interesting contrast with the wild alchemy above.  This is a perfectly practical recipe which would, in fact, work, because of the high vitamin and mineral content of the wolfthorn berries.]

於深秋摘紅熟枸杞子,同乾麵拌和成劑,擀作餅樣,曬乾,研為細末。每江茶一兩,枸杞子末二兩,同和勻,入煉化酥油三兩,或香油亦可。旋添湯攪成膏子,用鹽少許,入鍋煎熟飲之,甚有益及明目。

The recipe for the Replenishing-Qi Cow Milk (yiqi niuru fang益氣牛乳方)

Yellow cow milk is best for old men. Its nature is neutral (xingping性平). It enriches the blood and pulses (buxuemai補血脈). It replenishes the heart qi (yixinqi益心氣). It lets the muscles grow (zhangjirou長肌肉). It enables the body to be healthy, strong, radiant, and moisturized (lingren shenti kangqiang runze令人身體康強潤澤). It makes one’s face radiant with good color (mianmu guangyue面目光悅). It makes the memory not decline (zhibushuai志不衰). Therefore, people should take it frequently and make it a daily food. Or one can make milk cakes (rubing乳餅) or milk drinks (ruyin乳飲) as long as he would like to take it and takes plenty of it. This thing is much better than meat.

[Again, we are back to perfectly practical advice here. “Yellow cow” probably means ordinary cow as opposed to water buffalo, not necessarily a literally brown or yellow cow.]

黃牛乳最宜老人,性平,補血脈,益心氣,長肌肉,令人身體康強潤澤,面目光悅,志不衰。故人常須供之,以為常食,或為乳餅,或作乳飲等,恒使恣意充足為度。此物勝肉遠矣。

 

The Jade Cream of Mr. Iron Jar (tieweng xiansheng qiongyu gao鐵瓮先生瓊玉膏)

This cream replenishes the essence and marrows (tianjing busui填精補髓). It transforms the intestines into tendons (chang huawei jin腸化為筋).[143] It makes thousands of spirits complete (wanshen juzu萬神俱足) and enriches the Five Internal Organs (wuzang yingyi五臟盈溢). It transforms the white hair into black. It rejuvenates the old man into a childlike condition and enables him to walk as fast as a galloping horse. If he takes it several times a day and does not eat other food, he will not feel hungry. it opens [the body] and strengthens the memory (kaitong qiangzhi開通強志). It enables the person read ten thousand words a day. It makes his spirit superior (shenshi gaomai神識高邁) and enables him not to have dream at night (ye wu mengxiang夜無夢想). After he takes ten doses, he will suppress his desires (jueqiyu絕其欲) and cultivate secret virtues and become an Earthly Transcendent (xiu yingong cheng dixian修陰功成地仙). Divide one dose into five portions and each portion can cure five patients with grievous sores (yongji癰疾). Divide one dose into ten portions and each portion can cure ten patients with the Labor Diseases/phthisis (laoji癆疾). When one makes the medicine, he should take a bath and purify his mind and does not show it to others impudently.

此膏填精補髓,腸化為筋,萬神俱足,五臟盈溢,髮白變黑,返老還童,行如奔馬。日進數服,終日不食亦不飢,開通強志,日誦萬言,神識高邁,夜無夢想。服之十劑,絕其欲,修陰功成地仙矣。一料分五處,可救五人癰疾;分十處,可救十人癆疾。修合之時,沐浴洗心[144],勿輕示人。

 

Twenty-four liang of Silla [Korean] ginseng (xinluoshen新羅參) ([author’s note:] remove the leaves?(lu蘆)). Sixteen jin of raw Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch roots (sheng dihuang生地黃) ([author’s note:]take the juice). Forty-nine liang of peeled white tuckahoe (baifuling白茯苓). Ten jin of refined and pure white granulated honey (baishami白沙蜜).

新羅參二十四兩,去蘆 生地黃一十六斤,取汁 白茯苓四十九兩,去皮  白沙蜜十斤,煉凈

 

Make the above-mentioned ginseng and tuckahoe into fine powder. Sift the honey with a piece of raw thick silk cloth. Squeeze the natural juice (ziranzhi自然汁) from the Rehmannia roots. When mashing these, do not use bronze or iron vessels. After taking all of the juice, remove the dregs. Blend the medicines together till they are even and contain them in a silver or stone ware or good porcelain container. Use twenty or thirty layers of paper to seal the container. Place [the container] in boiled water and boil it with mulberry firewood for three days and nights. Then take [the container] out. Wrap the mouth of the bottle with several layers of wax paper. Then place [the bottle] in a well in order to remove the fire poison (huodu火毒)[145]. Take it out after one day and one night. Then place it into the previous boiled water and boil it for one day. Let the vapor out and then take [the bottle] out. Unseal [the bottle] and take three spoons [of the medicine] and contain them into three cups. [Use the three cups of medicine] as offerings to gods in heaven and on earth. He should be pious when he sets up the offerings and salutes.every day, he should mix the medicine with a spoon of liquor and take it with an empty stomach. The original recipe is like this. However, for those who have phthisis and cough, whose qi is high (lao sou qisheng癆嗽氣盛), who have blood deficiency and lung-heat (xuexu feire血虛肺熱), ginseng should not be used.

上件,人參、茯苓為細末用。蜜生絹濾過,地黃取自然汁,搗時不用銅鐵器,取汁盡,去滓。用藥一處拌和勻,入銀石器或好磁器內,用凈紙二三十重封閉。入湯內,以桑柴火煮三晝夜,取出,用蠟紙數重包瓶口,入井中去火毒。一伏時取出,再入舊湯內煮一日,出水氣,取出,開封,取三匙作三盞,祭天地百神,設拜至誠端心。每日空心酒調一匙頭服。原方如此,但癆嗽氣盛,血虛肺熱者,不可用人參。

 

The Earthly-Transcendents’ Decoction (dixianjian地仙煎)

 

It cures aches in the waist and knees (yaoxi tengtong腰膝疼痛) and every kind of Cold Diseases in the stomach (funei lengbing腹內冷病). It makes one’s skin easy on the eyes and moisturized (yanse yueze顏色悅澤). It strengthens the bones and marrows and enables people walk as fast as galloping horses.治腰膝疼痛,一切腹內冷病,令人顏色悅澤,骨髓堅固,行及奔馬。

 

One jin of yams (shanyao山藥). One sheng of apricot seeds ([author’s note:]soak them in boiled water and remove the peels and tips (pijian皮尖)).two jin of raw cow milk.

山藥一斤 杏仁一升,湯泡去皮尖 生牛乳二斤

 

Grind the above mentioned apricot seeds finely. Then add cow milk and yams into [the apricot seeds]. Blend them and squeeze them to get the juice. Put [the juice] in an unused porcelain bottle and seal [the bottle]. Boil [the bottle] for one day. Every day one should mix one spoon of the medicine with liquor and take it with an empty stomach.

上件,將杏仁研細,入牛乳和山藥拌絞取汁,用新磁瓶密封,湯煮一日。每日空心酒調服一匙頭。

 

 

The Golden-Water Decoction (jinshuijian金水煎) [146]

 

[it] elongates the lifespan. It replenishes the essence and marrows (tianjing busui填精補髓). If one takes it for a long time, his white hair will change into black and he will be rejuvenated and become like a child.

延長益壽,填精補髓,久服髮白變黑,返老還童。

 

Any amount of wolfthorn fruits. Pick the red and ripe ones.

枸杞子不拘多少,採紅熟者

 

Soak the above ingredients in No-Ash liquor (wuhuijiu無灰酒) for six days if it is in the winter and for three days if it is in the summer. Place [the wolfthorn fruits] in an earthen basin and grind them very finely. Then use a cloth bag to squeeze juice [out of the ground wolfthorn fruits]. Then boil [the juice] and the previous used liquor with slow fire till they become a cream. Place the cream in a clean porcelain container and seal it. Then steam [the container]. Every time, take one spoon of it. Add a small amount of sesame oil to it and mix it with warm liquor. Then take it.

上用無灰酒浸之,冬六日,夏三日,於砂盆內研令極細,然後以布袋絞取汁,與前浸酒一同慢火熬成膏,於凈磁器內封貯,重湯煮之。每服一匙,入酥油少許,溫酒調下。

 

Lilyturf Cream (tianmendonggao天門冬膏)

 

It cures the Accumulated Disease (jiju積聚)[147] and removes  the wind-phlegm (fengtan風痰)[148]. It cures epilepsy (dianji癲疾). It kills the Three Worms and lying corpse (fushi伏尸). It drives off the epidemics (wenyi瘟疫). It lightens the body and replenishes the qi (qingshen yiqi輕身益氣).

去積聚風痰癲疾,三蟲伏尸,除瘟疫,輕身益氣,令人不飢,延年不老。

 

Any amount of lilyturf  roots. Peel them and remove the hearts. Wash the roots till they are clean.

天門冬不以多少,去皮去心、根鬚洗凈

 

Mash the above material and squeeze juice out of them with a piece of cloth. Then sift through [the juice] and take the pure liquid. Pour the liquid in a porcelain, sandstone, or silver pot and boil it with slow fire till it turns into a cream. Every time, take one spoon of it and mix it with warm liquor and then eat it with an empty stomach.

上件搗碎,布絞取汁,澄清濾過,用磁器、砂鍋,或銀器,慢火熬膏。每服一匙,空心,溫酒調下。

[The Three Worms, or Three Types of Worms, are in the body and nourished by grains; a goal of alchemy is reducing or even getting rid of them—but some say they are essential and can only be reduced.  No doubt the idea came from observing parasitic worms.]

 

Not-Fearing-Cold Recipe (buweihan fang不畏寒方)

 

Use lilyturf (tianmendong天門冬) and tuckahoe (fuling茯苓) and make them into powder. Mix them with liquor or water and take them. every day, take them frequently. When it is extremely cold and [one takes it], he will sweat and forget out the coldness even if he wears one-layer clothes.

取天門冬、茯苓為末,或酒或水調服之。每日頻服,大寒時汗出單衣忘冷。

Sayings about taking Acanthopanax spinosus Miq bark(fu wujiapi shuo服五加皮)

 

Shun used to climb up [Mt.] Cangwu and said, “This is a Golden-and-Jade fragrant herb (jinyu xiangcao金玉香草).”He is referring to the acanthopanax bark (wujiapi五加皮). If one takes it, he will achieve longevity. Therefore, it is said that, “one would rather have a handful of acanthopanax than a cart full of gold and jade. One would rather have one jin of Sanguisorba officinalis root (diyu地榆)[149] than precious pearls like a bright moon.” In the past, the mother of Lord Dinggong in Lu drank acanthopanax liquor alone and achieved longevity. As for Zhang Zisheng, Yang Shijian, Wang Shucai, and Yu Shiyan, they are ancient persons. They drank acanthopanax liquor and had sex (fangshi房室) frequently. [Wujiapi liquor abounds today in Chinese markets, so the reader can try this.]  All of them achieved longevity and had many children. There are many persons who achieved longevity by drinking acanthopanax liquor. [Author’s note:] this comes from the Perfected East-Flower’s Classic of Boiling Rocks (donghua zhenren zhushijing東華真人煮石經) .

舜嘗登蒼梧,曰:“厥金玉香草。”即五加皮也,服之延年。故曰:“寧得一把五加,不用金玉滿車;寧得一斤地榆,不用明月寶珠。”昔魯定公母,單服五加皮酒,以致延生。如張子聲、楊始建、王叔才、于世彥等皆古人,服五加皮酒,房室不絕,皆壽考多子。世世有服五加皮酒,而獲年壽者甚眾。出《東華真人煮石經》。

 

The method of taking pine nuts (fu songzi fa服松子法)

 

Use any amount of pine nuts and grind them into a cream. Mix one spoon of it with warm liquor and take it with an empty stomach. Take it three times every day. Then he will not feel hungry or thirsty. If he takes it for a long time, he will be able to walk five hundred li every day and his body is lightened and becomes strong. [In spite of the wild exaggeration at the end, the ancient and still-current tradition of eating pine seeds for health is a sound one.  These seeds are extremely rich in vitamins, minerals, and easily digested proteins and oils.]

不以多少,研為膏,空心溫酒調下一匙。日三服,則不飢渴;久服,日行五百里,身輕體健。

 

The method of taking Sophora japonica (pagoda tree) fruits (fu huaishi fa服槐實法)

 

Soak the pagoda tree fruits in cow gall (niudan牛膽) for one hundred days and then dry them in the shade. Every day, one should take one piece and his body will be lightened after one hundred days. After one thousand days, his white hair will become black. After he takes it for a long time, he will become enlightened (tongming通明).

於牛膽中漬浸百日,陰乾。每日吞一枚,百日身輕,千日白髮自黑,久服通明。

 

 

The method of taking lotus blossoms (fu lianhua fa服蓮花法)

 

Pick seven fen of lotus blossoms on the seventh day of the seventh month. Pick eight fen of lotus roots on the eighth day of the eighth month. Pick nine fen of lotus seeds on the ninth day of the ninth month. Dry them in the shade and eat them. they will let people not turning old.

七月七日採蓮花七分,八月八日採蓮根八分,九月九日採蓮子九分,陰乾食之,令人不老。

 

The method of taking pine roots (fushi songgen fa服食松根法)

 

Use pine roots that grows eastwards (dongxing songgen東行松根). Remove the white peelings and finely cut them up. Then dry them in the sun and pestle and sift them. One should eat them till he feels full. Then he will be able to renounce grains (juegu絕谷). If he feels thirsty, he can drink water.

取東行松根,剝取白皮,細銼曝燥,搗篩,飽食之,可絕谷,渴則飲水。

 

The method of taking tuckahoe (fushi fuling fa服食茯苓法)

 

Remove the black skins of the tuckahoes and mash them into powder. Fully soak them into good liquor in a earthen ware. Then cover the earthen ware and tightly seal it with mud. After fifteen days, open the earthen ware and make [the tuckahoes] into cakes like making cinnabars (ershi餌食). Eat it three times a day. One can also make them into powder and take one one-cun-square spoon (fangcunbi方寸匕)[150] of it. He will not feel hungry or thirsty. It cures illnesses and helps people achieving longevity.

茯苓削去黑皮,搗末,以醇酒於瓦器中漬令淹足。又瓦器覆上,密封泥塗。十五日發,當如餌食造餅,日三,亦可屑服方寸匕。不飢渴,除病延年。

 

The method of taking (fushi shu fa服食术法)

 

Use one shi of Atractylodes macrocephala root found in Yuqian (yuqianshu于潛术)[151]. Wash them till they are clean. Then mash them. Use two shi of water and soak in the water for one night. Then boil them till the liquid is reduced to half. Then add five sheng of pure liquor (qingjiu清酒) and boil them again. Take one shi and squeeze them and remove the dregs. Then boil them with low fire. Add two sheng of soybean powder and one sheng of lilyturf root (tianmendong天門冬) powder. Blend and make into pills as large as a bullet. Take three pills in the morning and take one pill during the day. One can also use it to replace food when he lives in mountains or travels. It helps people resist the wind and chill (naifenghan耐風寒). It helps people achieve longevity and make him not affected by any illnesses. This method is invented by Cuiyezi. One should remove the hearts and peels of the lilyturf.

于潛术一石,凈洗搗之,水二石,漬一宿,煮减半。加清酒五升,重煮,取一石絞去滓,更微火煎熬。納大豆末二升,天門冬末一升,攪和丸如彈子。旦服三丸,日一,或山居遠行代食。耐風寒,延壽無病。此崔野子所服法。天門冬去心皮也。

The method of taking Solomon’s seal (fu huangjing fa服食黃精法)

 

Finely cut one shi of Solomon’s seal. Use two shi five sheng of water ([author’s note:] another saying is six shi) to boil over low fire from the morning to the evening. When they are fully cooked, one should take them out and let them cool down. Then mash them with hands. Use a cloth bag to squeeze juice from them and boil [the juice]. Dry the dregs in the sun and make them into powder. Add [the powder] into [the liquid] in the pot ad boil them slowly. Then make them into pills as large as eggs. Take one pill every time and take three times every day. Then he will not want to eat grains (juegu絕穀). And it cures the hundred diseases. His body will be lightened and become strong. If he takes less of it, he will become normal. But he should not take too much of it or stop taking it in the middle. If he feels thirsty, he can drink water. This method is the best. It comes from the Five Charms五符.

黃精細切一石,以水二石五升,一云六石,微火煮,旦至夕,熟出使冷,手擂碎,布囊榨汁煎之。滓曝燥搗末,合向釜中煎熬,可為丸如雞子。服一丸,日三服,絕穀,除百病,身輕體健,不老。少服而令有常,不須多而中絕。渴則飲水云。此方最佳,出《五符》中。

Another method又法

 

Mash the Solomon’s seal and take three sheng of the juice. If they cannot produce so much juice, pour water on them and then squeeze them to get the juice. Use three sheng of raw Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch roots (sheng dihuang生地黃) juice and three sheng of lilyturf root (tianmendong天門冬) juice. Blend them and boil them with low fire till the liquid is reduced to one half. Then add five jin of white honey into them and boil them again till they can be made into pills. Make them into pills as large as a bullet. Take them three times every day. Then he will not feel hungry and his skin color will be good. One can also merely squeeze three sheng of the juice and boil it till it can be made into pills. Take one pill as large as an egg every day. After he takes it for thirty days, he will not feel hungry and will be able to walk as fast as a galloping horse. One should remove the hearts and peels of the lilyturf.

取黃精搗捩,取汁三升,若不出,以水澆榨取之。生地黃汁三升,天門冬汁三升,合微火煎减半。納白蜜五斤,復煎,令可丸,如彈丸。日三服,不飢美色。亦可止榨取汁三升,湯上煎可丸。日服如雞子大一枚,再服三十日,不飢,行如奔馬。天門冬去心皮。

 

The method of taking Maianthemum racemosum(fushi weirui fa服食葳蕤法)

 

Usually pick Maianthemum racemosum [false lily-of-the-valley, a small lily-like plant] leaves on the ninth day of the second month. Then mince the leaves and dry them. Then take one one-cun-square spoon of it every time and take it three times a day. One can also take it as taking the Solomon’s seal [and?] cinnabar. It opens the qi pulses (daoqimai導氣脈) and strengthens the tendons and bones. It cures stroke/the strike of a wind (zhongfeng中風). It cures twisted tendons and muscles (diejin jierou跌筋結肉). It removes wrinkles in the face (mianzou面皺). It makes one’s skin color good. If one takes it for a long time, he will achieve longevity and become a transcendent.

常以二月九日,採葉切乾治,服方寸匕,日三。亦依黃精作餌法服之。導氣脈,強筋骨,治中風,跌筋結肉,去面皺,好顏色,久服延年神仙。

 

Method of taking lilyturf (fushi tianmendong fa服食天門冬法)

Use ten jin of dried lilyturf root and one sheng of apricot seeds. Mash them into powder and blend (the powder) with honey. Take one one-cun-square spoon full (fangcunbi方寸匕) three times during the day and once at night. This is what Gan Shi甘始[152] took. It is called the Immortals’ Food (xianren liang仙人糧).

干天門冬十斤,杏仁一升,搗末,蜜搜,服方寸匕,日三夜一。甘始所服,名曰仙人糧。

Method of taking black sesame (fushi jusheng fa服食巨勝法)

Use any amount of black and thick sesame seeds. Winnow them with a bamboo fan (bozhi簸治) and steam them. Let the hot steam surround them as in cooking rice. Then put them under the sun. On the second day, steam them and place them in the sun again. Repeat the process nine times and then stop. If the sunlight is scorching, one can steam and dry them in the sun three times a day. Thus he can finish the procedure of nine times of steaming and drying in the sun in three days. When they are thoroughly dried, briefly dip them in boiled water and mash them in a mortar till they become white. Then dry them in the sun again and winnow them in order to remove the peels. Then cook them till they smell good. Then mash them quickly and sift them roughly. Take them at will. Take two or three sheng of them one day. One can also make them into honey-blended pills as large as an egg. Take five pills one day. One can also blend them with maltose (yi飴) or blend them with liquor. Gradually reduce [the dose]. After one hundred days, he will not have any diseases. After one year, his body and face will be smooth and radiant. When he washes [his body and face], the water will not stay on the flesh. After five years, water or fire will not harm him and he can walk as fast as a galloping horse.

胡麻肥黑者,取無多少,簸治蒸之,令熱氣周遍如炊頃,便出曝,明旦又蒸曝,凡九過,止。烈日亦可一日三蒸曝,三日凡九過。燥訖,以湯水微沾,於臼中搗使白。復曝燥,簸去皮,熬使香,急手搗下粗篩,隨意服,日二三升。亦可以蜜丸如雞子大,日服五枚。亦可飴和之,亦可以酒和服。稍稍自减,百日無復病,一年後身面滑澤,水洗不著肉。五年,水火不害,行及奔馬。

The Immortals’ method of taking caltrop (shenxian er jili fang神仙餌蒺藜方)

Use one shi of caltrop (Tribulus terrestris). It is usually ripe in the seventh and eighth months. Pick them then. Then dry them in the sun. First pestle them in a mortar in order to remove the sticks (ci刺). Then make them into fine powder. Take two spoonfuls of them each time. Blend them with water taken recently (xinshui新水)[153] and eat them. Take them three times a day and do not terminate [the process]. Taking [them] will help one achieve longevity. After taking them for one year, he will neither feel cold in the winter nor feel hot in the summer. After taking them for two years, he will be rejuvenated. His white hair will turn black. His fallen teeth will be replaced by new ones. After taking them for three years, his body will be lightened and he will achieve longevity.

蒺藜一石,常以七八月熟,收之。採來曝乾,先入臼舂去刺,然後為細末。每服二匙,新水調下,日進三服,勿令斷絕,服之長生。服一年後,冬不寒,夏不熱。服之二年,老返少,頭白再黑,齒落更生。服至三年,身輕延壽。

The Immortals’ method of taking Sophora japonica (Chinese scholar tree) seeds and thus achieving longevity and being ageless (shenxian fu huaizi yannian bulao fang神仙服槐子延年不老方)

Usually the seeds should be picked on the third day of the third month.[154] Then place them in a new porcelain container and cover [the container] with a basin. Seal it with mud and do not let the gas come in or out. After twenty one days, open it and remove the peels. Take them in the beginning of a month. Take one pill with water every day. Take one more pill every day till the fifteenth day of the month. Then take one pill less every day. Repeat the process. It will make the person be able to see tiny characters at night. After taking them for a long time, his strength will be enhanced one hundred times.

常以十月上巳日,取在新磁器內盛之,以盆合其上,密泥勿令走氣。三七日開取,去皮。從月初,日服一粒,以水下,日加一粒,直至月半,卻减一粒為度。終而復始,令人可能夜看細書,久服此,氣力百倍。

The method of eating no grains and living and eating (bigu zhushi fang辟谷住食方)

Use one dou of sorghum and rice(shumi秫米),fried with six liang of sesame oil and then cooled down. [It would seem that abstaining from grains is not quite total here!] Use ten liang of salt powder, Sichuan ginger (chuanjiang川薑), and small peppers (xiaojiao小椒) respectively. Use three sheng of turnip seeds (manjingzi蔓菁子) and five sheng of large dried jujubes (gandazao乾大棗).

秫米一斗,麻油六兩炒,冷 鹽末 川薑 小椒各等分,十兩 蔓菁子三升  乾大棗五升

 

Make the above six ingredients into thin powder. Take one large spoon of it with water newly taken (xinshui新水) every time. Take three times every day. One will feel hungry or thirsty (ru jike如飢渴).[155] He will gradually have strength. He can eat every kind of fruits and teas at will. He must not eat meat. It is the greatest taboo.

There are eight great taboos in food:

上六味,為細末。每服一大匙,新水調下,日進三服。如飢渴,漸有力,如吃諸般果木茶湯任意。不可食肉,大忌也。食品大忌有八:

 

A horse that dies when walking, a donkey that dies when drinking, a cow that dies when it is overfed, and a ram with red eyes.

走死的馬,飲殺的驢,脹死的牛,紅眼的羊,

 

A pig that dies by itself, a turtle with eggs,[156] a pregnant rabbit, and a scaleless fish.

自死的豬,有彈的鱉,懷胎的兔,無鱗的魚。

 

In the ancient book, it is said that, “all of them cannot be eaten. If one eats them, he will have one hundred kinds of diseases.”

古書云:“皆不可食之。若食之者,生百疾也。”

[Likely true for the self-dying animals—they would be sick—but the other taboos seem more related to conservation and to possible religious influence.]

The method of eating no grains and escaping from famine (bigu bihuang fang辟谷避荒方)

On the seventeenth day of the second month, the second year of the Yongning永寧 Reign (120-121), the Attendant at the Yellow Gate (huangmen shilang黃門侍郎), Liu Jingxian劉景先, submitted a memorial, saying that “I met a hermit from Mountain Taibei and received this recipe. I hear that the price of rice in the capital runs very high. I think that it is appropriate to relieve it by using this recipe. It will let a person avoid feeling hungry. His eyes will turn bright and his ears can hear weak sounds. The color of his skin will be radiant. If I am lying, my whole family should be punished by the law. In the four seasons, use five sheng of black beans. Wash them till they are clean and then steam them for three times. Then dry them in the sun light and remove their peels. Then use three sheng of large hemp seeds (dahuomazi大火麻子) and soak them in boiled water for one night. Then take them out of the water and dry them in the sun. Blend them with the sticky liquid (jiaoshui膠水) and dry them in the sun. Then peel them and wash them till they are clean. Then steam them three times and mash them with a pestle. Then add soybeans to them and make both of them into thin powder. Blend [the powder] with sweet rice congee and make them into round pills as large as a fist. Then place [the pills] in a steamer and steam them from the evening to the midnight. Then quench the fire. Take [the pills] out [of the steamer] at the three to five o’clock in the morning. Place them in a porcelain container and cover them and do not let them be dried by the wind. Take three pieces every time. Refrain from eating till full. Do not eat any other food. After the first meal, he will not feel hungry for seven days. After the second meal, he will not feel hungry for seven times seven days. After the third meal, he will not feel hungry for three hundred days. His looks will be good and not emaciated. If he feels thirsty, he should grind hemp seeds and drink the liquid, which nourishes the internal organs. If he wants to eat [ordinary] food again, he should mash three he of cluster mallow fruits (kuizi葵子) and boil them into a soup and drink the soup. The soup will open the stomach (kaidao weiwan開導胃脘) and make it peaceful (chonghe冲和). It is harmless.”this recipe is carved in a stone at the Taiping Xingguo Temple太平興國寺 in Mt. Dabieshan大別山, Hanyang Military Prefecture漢陽軍.

永寧二年二月十七日,黃門侍郎劉景先表言:“臣遇太白山隱士得此方,臣聞京師米糧大貴,宜以此濟之。令人不飢,耳目聰明,顏色光澤。如有誑妄,臣一家甘受刑戮。四季用黑豆五升,凈洗後,蒸三遍,曬乾去皮。又用大火麻子三升,湯浸一宿,漉出曬乾,膠水拌曬,去皮,淘凈,蒸三遍,碓搗。次下黃豆,共為細末,用糯米粥合成圓,如拳大,入甑蒸。從夜至子住火,至寅取出,於磁器內盛,蓋不令風乾。每服三塊,但飽為度,不得食一切物。第一頓,七日不飢;第二頓,七七日不飢;第三頓,三百日不飢,容顏佳勝,更不憔悴。渴即研火麻子漿飲,更滋潤臟腑。若要重吃物,用葵子三合,杵碎,煎湯飲,開導胃脘,以待冲和,無損。”此方勒石漢陽軍大別山太平興國寺。

 

The recipe of the Purple-Cloud Cup(zixia bei fang紫霞杯方); this is a wonderful secret recipe.此至妙秘方。

This cup of medicine [helps the person be] in tune with nature (peihe zaohua配合造化) and nurses the yin and yang(tiaoli yinyang調理陰陽). It takes the peaceful qi in heaven and earth and acquires the recipe that saves one from fire and water (duo tiandi chonghe zhi qi, de shuihuo jiji zhi fang奪天地冲和之氣,得水火既濟之方). It is neither cold nor hot, neither slow nor fast. It has the effect of achieving longevity and the anti-aging effect. It has the wonderful effect of transforming one’s inner embryo and bones (tuotai huangu脫胎換骨). It can greatly purify the upper [body] and nourish the lower [body](qingshang buxia清上補下). It makes the yin and yang rise up and fall down (shengjiang yinyang升降陰陽). It opens the nine holes (tong jiuqiao通九竅)[157]. It kills the Nine Worms (jiuchong九蟲). It prevents wet dreams (nocturnal emission, mengxie夢泄). It makes one looking pleasant (yue rongyan悅容顏). It relieves the head wind (jie toufeng解頭風)[158]. It makes the body lighter and stronger. It makes the internal organs work in harmony (zangfu hetong臟腑和同). It opens the chest midriff (kai xiongge開胸膈). It removes phlegm and saliva. It brightens one’s eyes. It moisturizes the skin. It increases the essence (or sperm, tianjing添精). It cures hernia (juan shanzhui蠲疝墜)[159]. It also cures the women’s diseases of weakness and cold in the blood sea (xuehai xuleng血海虛冷)[160],and the gynecological disease of having red and white sticky discharges (chibai daixia赤白帶下). Only the pregnant women cannot use this medicine. For other men and women, the old and young, in the early morning, pour warm liquor into the cup and drink two or three cups of it. It cures one hundred kinds of diseases. Other medicines cannot be better than this recipe. [the author’s note:]when one uses the cup for a long time, it becomes thin. Then take one bowl of bran (kangpi糠皮) and place the cup in the bran. Then pour the liquor into the cup and drink it. If the cup is broken into pieces, take one fen of the medicine in the cup and grind it. Then add it to the liquor and drink it. When the pieces of the cup are used up, make another one.

此杯之藥,配合造化,調理陰陽,奪天地冲和之氣,得水火既濟之方。不冷不熱,不緩不急,有延年卻老之功,脫胎換骨之妙。大能清上補下,升降陰陽,通九竅,殺九蟲,除夢泄,悅容顏,解頭風,身體輕健,臟腑和同。開胸膈,化痰涎,明目,潤肌膚,添精,蠲疝墜。又治婦人血海虛冷,赤白帶下。惟孕婦不可服。其餘男婦老少,清晨,熱酒服二三杯,百病皆除,諸藥無出此方。用久杯薄,以糠皮一碗,坐杯於中,瀉酒取飲。若碎破,每取杯藥一分,研入酒中充服,以杯料盡,再用另服。

 

One qian of pearls (zhenzhu真珠), one qian of amber, one qian of frankincense (ruxiang乳香), twenty pieces of gold foil (jinbo金箔), one qian of arsenic sulphide (xionghuang雄黃), one qian of actinolite (陽起石yangqishi)[161], one qian of fragrant Angelica dahurica Benth. Et Hook (xiangbaizhi香白芷), one qian of cinnabar/cinnabaris (zhusha硃砂), one qian of hemonode (xuejie血結), one qian of borneol camphor (piannao片腦), one qian of camphor (chaonao潮腦)[162] ([Author’s note:]add it when the cup is toppled), seven and a half fen of musk, one qian of Kaempferia galanga (sannai三奈), one qian of purple powder (zifen紫粉), one qian of halloysite (red bole, chishizhi赤石脂), one qian of muxiang (木香), one qian of benzoin (anxi安息)[163], one qian of lignaloes (chenxiang沉香), and one qian of myrrh (moyao沒藥).

真珠一錢 琥珀一錢 乳香一錢 金箔二十張 雄黃一錢 陽起石一錢 香白芷一錢 朱砂一錢 血結一錢 片腦一錢 潮腦 一錢,傾杯方入 麝香七分半 甘松一錢 三奈一錢 紫粉一錢 赤石脂 一錢 木香一錢 安息一錢 沉香一錢 沒藥一錢

 

Method of making sulfur (liu硫)

 

Place Spirodela polyrhiza (zibei fuping紫背浮萍) in a pot. Wrap sulfur with a piece of thick silk cloth bag and hang the bag in the pot. Boil [the sulfur] till the liquid is boiled for dozens of times and then take it out and let it dry. Grind it into powder. Use ten liang of the powder and previously mentioned spices and place them in a bronze spoon. Melt them down with slow fire. Then taken them out and let the fire qi disperse for awhile. Use a liquor cup with a good shape and wrap it with cloth and paper. Open a hole in the [wrapper] and pour the sulfur into it. Hold the cup with a hand and rotate it till [the sulfur] is even. Then place [the cup] in a basin of cold water. Then take it out. If one has fire diseases (huozheng火症), he should not take it.

製硫法:用紫背浮萍於罐內,將硫磺以絹袋盛,懸繫於罐中,煮滾數十沸,取出候乾,研末十兩,同前香藥入銅杓中,慢火熔化。取出,候火氣少息,用好樣銀酒盅一個,周圍以布紙包裹,中開一孔,傾硫磺於內,手執酒盅旋轉,以勻為度,仍投冷水盆中,取出。有火症者勿服。

The method of making the Rising-and-Mysterious Transparent Powder(shengxuan mingfen fa升玄明粉法)

Use five jin of good and pure sulfate of soda (pixiao皮硝), half jin of Chinese honey locust Fruit (zaojiao皂角), and more than ten jin of white daikon (bailuobo白蘿蔔). Slice [the daikon] and use more than half pot of water and boil the slices for more than ten times. Then take out the daikon slices and do not use them. Then slice the daikon and boil the slices again. Repeat this for three or four times till the daikon does not have a bitter taste. Then use a thin silk to sift through dregs and contain it in a pot. Place the pot outside for one night. On the next day, teeth-like soda sulfate (yaxiao牙硝) appears in the pot. Take it out and wrap it with a piece of cotton paper bag. Hang the bag in a windy place and it will turn into powder by itself. In the summer months, for every liang of the powder, use one qian of liquorice and blend. Take one qian of it with boiled water every time. It can greatly relieve the summer-heat (jie shure解暑熱) and dissipate phlegm that has been there and cannot be eliminated for a long time (hua wanjie laotan化頑結老痰). It is a wonderful medicine for releasing the phlegm fire from the after-body (cong hou xiechu tanhuo shengyao從後瀉出痰火聖藥)[164].

好凈皮硝五斤,皂角半斤,白蘿蔔十數斤,切片,用水大半壇,煮滾十數次,漉出蘿蔔勿用,仍切蘿蔔再煮。如此三四次,以蘿蔔無鹹味為度。再用稀絹濾去渣,以鍋盛之,露一宿。次日鍋中皆牙硝,取出以綿紙袋盛裹,懸於當風去處,自化成粉。夏月,每粉一兩,用甘草末一錢和之。每服一錢,沸湯調下。大能解暑熱,化頑結老痰,從後瀉出痰火聖藥。

The Above-the-River Gentleman’s method of taking foxnut medicinal powder (Heshanggong fu qianshi san fang 河上公服芡實散方)

Use one jin of husked foxnut (qianjitoushi千雞頭實), honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica, rendong忍冬) stalks and leaves ([the author’s note:]pick the fresh and thick ones with no worm’s stains. It is the same as the gold-and-silver flower,jinyinhua金銀花.), and dried lotus roots respectively.

千雞頭實去殼 忍冬莖葉揀無蟲污新肥者,即金銀花也 乾藕各一斤

 

Cut the three above ingredients into slices and pieces and steam them till they are fully cooked. Then dry them in the sun and mash and sift them into powder.  After one has a meal, he should eat one one-qian spoon of it with warm soup in the winter and with water in the summer. After he takes it for a long time, he will achieve longevity and his body will be lightened and he will not become old. The color of his skin will be pleasant. It will strengthen the skin and the spleen and stomach. It will remove what stays inside of the body (qu liuzhi去留滯). Its good effects cannot be entirely listed. One will know it by himself after he uses it for a long time.

上三味為片段,於甑內炊熟,曝乾,搗羅為末。每日食後,冬湯夏水服一錢匕。久服益壽延年,身輕不老,悅顏色,壯肌膚,健脾胃,去留滯。功妙難盡,久則自知。

The method of taking lilyturf root (fu tianmendong fa服天門冬法)

Use two jin of lilyturf and one jin of cooked Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch roots (shu dihuang熟地黃).Mash and sift them into powder. Refine honey and make them into pills as large as a bullet. Take three pills with warm liquor every time and take it three times every day. After one takes it for a long time, it will strengthen the bones and marrows, rejuvenate the looks, and remove the Three Corpses. It helps the person abstain from grains, and lightens his weight. It helps him achieve longevity and is anti-aging. He will not have any diseases. If he takes it with the same amount of Tuckahoe, he will sweat even if he wears one-layer clothes in the winter. He should not eat carp or any kind of rank-smelling food.[165]

取天門冬二斤,熟地黃一斤,搗羅為末,煉蜜為丸,如彈子大。每服三丸,以溫酒調下,日三服。久服強骨髓,駐容顏,去三尸,斷谷輕身,延年不老,百病不生。若以茯苓等分為末同服,天寒單衣汗出。忌食鯉魚并腥膻之物。

 

The method of taking lotus seeds and stalks (fu oushi jing fa服藕實莖法)

It tastes sweet. Its nature is neutral. It is cold. It is non-poisonous. (wei gan ping han wudu味甘平寒無毒). It mainly nourishes the Middle Burner and the spirit (buzhong yangshen補中養神). It enhances the qi and strength. It cures one hundred kinds of diseases. After one takes it for a long time, his body will be lightened and he will not turn old. He will not feel hungry and he will achieve longevity. It is also called shuizhi水芝. In the Danyaoxinglun丹藥性論 (Thesis on the Nature of the Cinnabars), it is said that, “the lotus juice can also be used separately. It tastes sweet. It can trim the bruises that have not disappeared for a long time. Mash the lotus burls and take the juice. It mainly cures continuous bleeding in the mouth and nose and hematemesis (koubi tuxue buzhi口鼻吐血不止) and it can cure all of them.” It is also said that, “the nature of the lotus seed is cold. It mainly cures the deficiency in the Five Internal Organs (wuzang buzu五臟不足), the damaged Middle Burner and breathlessness (shangzhong qijue 傷中氣絕),and benefits the blood qi [circulating in] the twelve pulses (liyi shier jingmai xueqi利益十二經脈血氣)[166]. If one eat the raw [lotus seeds], it will slightly arouse the qi (wei dongqi微動氣). It is good if he eats the lotus seeds after steam them. Besides, when they are cooked, remove the hearts and make them into powder. Blend them with wax-like honey (lami蠟蜜) and make them into pills. Take ten pills every day and they will let the person feel no hunger. This recipe is used by the transcendent.”Chen Cangqi陳藏器 said that, “the lotus pedicel (hebi荷鼻) tastes bitter and its nature is neutral. It is non-poisonous. It mainly prevents miscarriage and protects the embryo (antai安胎). It removes bad blood and keeps the good blood (qu exue, liu haoxue去惡血,留好血). If one has bloody diarrhea (xueli血痢), he will be cured after taking the boiled lotus pedicels. As for the lotus leaves, pedicels, and lotus seed pod (heye bing di ji lianfang荷葉并蒂及蓮房), they mainly cure hemorrhagic distension and stomachache (xuezhang futong血脹腹痛). It cures the condition of failure to deliver the afterbirth (chan hou taiyi buxia產後胎衣不下). Boil them with liquor and take them. Besides, if one is poisoned by poisonous mushrooms, he can be cured by boiling and taking them.”The lotus starch (oufen藕粉) was made by  Shuiyunshenchu水云深處 (the deep place amidst the clouds and water)[167]. Take the thick [lotus rhizomes] and wash them till they are clean. Mash them and squeeze them with a piece of cloth in order to get the liquid. Then use a piece of thickly-woven cloth (mibu密布) and sift [the lotus root powder] again. Then let it settle down and remove the clean water above. If the liquid is too thick to be settled down, add water to it and stir. Then it will become the starch. [Note that this very standard method of getting lotus starch—once a very common starch in China—is found earlier in the book by itself as a simple recipe.] If one eats it, his body will be lightened and he will achieve longevity.

味甘平寒無毒,主補中養神,益氣力,除百病。久服,輕身耐老,不飢延年。一名水芝。《丹藥性論》云:“藕汁亦單用,味甘,能消淤血不散。節搗汁,主口鼻吐血不止,并皆治之。”又云:“蓮子性寒,主五臟不足,傷中氣絕,利益十二經脈血氣。生食微動氣,蒸食之良。又,熟,去心為末,蠟蜜和丸。日服十丸,令人不飢。此方仙家用爾。”陳藏器云:“荷鼻味苦平,無毒,主安胎,去惡血,留好血。血痢,煮服之即止。荷葉并蒂及蓮房,主血脹腹痛,產後胎衣不下,酒煮服。又,食野菌毒,用水煮服。”藕粉,水云深處曾製,取粗者,洗凈搗爛,布絞取汁,以密布再濾過,澄去上清水。如汁稠難澄,添水攪即成為粉。服之,輕身延年。

The method of taking the Cinnabar-and- Arsenic Sulphide Cup (fu zhusha xionghuang bei fa服朱砂雄黃杯法)

Grind the cinnabar found in Chenzhou into thin powder. Melt down white wax and add the cinnabar into it. Then pour them into a liquor cup and make them into a cup as the previous mentioned method. It pacifies the heart and the mind (ningxin anshen寧心安神) and it helps one person achieve longevity. If one takes arsenic sulphide, the method is the same. It has the power of detoxification and repelling one hundred kinds of worms (jiedu bi baichong解毒辟百蟲). I am afraid that these two kinds of cups are not as good as the Purple-Cloud Cup.

碾好辰砂為細末,白蠟溶開,入砂,傾入酒盅內,如前法取起成杯。有寧心安神,延年益算之功。用雄黃者,亦如此法。有解毒辟百蟲之力。恐二杯皆不如紫霞杯之妙也。

 

The Transcendent’s Recipe of the Black Sesame Pill (shenxian jusheng wan fang神仙巨勝丸方)

It lightens the body and strengthens the yang (qingshen zhuangyang輕身壯陽). It rejuvenates the person. It removes the Three Corpses. It kills the Nine Worms. It cures ten thousand kinds of diseases.

輕身壯陽,卻老還童,去三尸,下九蟲,除萬病。

 

Use one liang of black sesame ([Author’s note:] soak them in liquor for one night. Then steam and dry them in the sun for nine times), Achyranthes bidentata (niuxi牛膝) ([author’s note:] soak them in liquor and slice and bake them), Morinda offcinalis root (bajitian巴戟天)[168] ([author’s note:]remove the hearts), lilyturf roots (tianmendong天門冬) ([author’s note:] remove the hearts and bake them), cooked and dried Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch (shu gan dihuang熟乾地黃), tender cinnamon branches(liugui柳桂)[169] ([the author’s note:] remove the rough peels), jujube kernels (suanzaoren酸棗仁), raspberry (fupenzi覆盆子)[170], Cuscuta sinensis Lam. seeds (tusizi兔絲子) ([author’s note:]soak them in liquor and mash them and bake them till they are dry), wild yam (shanyu山萸), Polygala root (yuanzhi遠志) ([author’s note:] remove the hearts), chrysanthemum, ginseng, white Tuckahoe (beifulin白茯苓) ([author’s note:] remove the black peels) respectively.

巨勝酒浸一宿,九蒸九暴 牛膝酒浸切焙 巴戟天去心 天門冬去心焙  熟乾地黃焙 柳桂去粗皮 酸棗仁 覆盆子 兔絲子酒浸別搗焙乾  山萸 遠志去心 菊花 人參 白茯苓去黑皮。各一兩

 

For the above fourteen ingredients, pick and trim them. Then mash and sift them into powder. Blend them with refined honey and make them into pills as large as a tung nut (tongzi桐子). When one takes it, he should have an empty stomach and take twenty pills with warm liquor. After he takes it for one month, his body will be lightened and strengthened. Ten thousand kinds of diseases will not strike him.

上一十四味,揀擇凈,搗羅為末,煉蜜為丸,如梧桐子大。每服,空心溫酒下二十丸。服一月,身輕體健,萬病不侵。

The method of taking cypress seeds (fu baishi fa服柏實法)

 

In the past, in the eighth month, dry the cypress seed pod (baifang柏房) in the sun. Let it breach and the kernels will fall down by themselves. Place [the kernels] in clean water and take the heavy ones that sink at the bottom of the water. Then pour out the water and lightly pestle the kernels in order to take the seeds. Every time, take one two-qian-capacity spoon of it with liquor. In the winter months, take it with warm liquor. Take one doze in the early morning, at noon, and at dusk. Gradually increase the dose to four or five qian. One can also add the same amount of chrysanthemum to it and make them into honey-mixed pills (miwan蜜丸) as large as a tung nut. Take ten pills or twenty pills every time. Take it three times every day with liquor.

古於八月,合取柏房曝之令坼,其子自脫。用清水淘取沉者,控乾,輕椎取仁,搗羅為細末。每服二錢匕,酒調下,冬月溫酒下。早晨、日午、近晚各一服,稍增至四五錢。加菊花末等分,蜜丸如梧桐子大。每服十丸、二十丸,日三服,酒下。

The method of taking the Great-Tuckahoe Pills (fushi dafulin wan fang服食大茯苓丸方)

 

Use one liang of white Tuckahoe ([author’s note:] remove the black peels), Tuckahoe that have a piece of wood in the middle (fushen茯神)([author’s note]: it is said to embrace a piece of wood. Remove the wood), large jujubes, and cinnamon ([the author’s note:]remove the rough peels) respectively. Use twelve liang of ginseng, Atractylodes macrocephala (baishu白術), Polygala root (yuanzhi遠志) ([author’s note:] remove the hearts and stir and bake them till they turn yellow), Asarum (xixin细辛) ([author’s note:] remove the sprouts and leaves), sweetgrass (shichangpu石菖蒲) ([author’s note:] use those as long as one cun and having nine joints. Soak them in  rice washing liquid (migan米泔) for three days and replace the liquid every day. Then finely mince them and dry them in the sun). Use eight liang of liquorice ([author’s note:]dip them in water and split them. Then roast them), and five liang of dried ginger ([author’s note:]roast it till it is split).

白茯苓去黑皮 茯神抱木者,去木 大棗 桂去粗皮,各一兩 人參 白术 遠志去心炒黃 細辛去苗葉 石菖蒲一寸九節者,米泔浸三日,日換泔浸,碎切曝乾,各十二兩  甘草八兩,水蘸擘破炙 乾薑五兩,炮裂

 

As for the above eleven ingredients, mash them and sift them till they become powder. Refine honey till it is yellow and skim the foam. Let it cool down and blend it with [the powder] and make them into pills as large as a bullet. Take one pill every time. After one takes it for a long time, he will not feel hungry or thirsty. If he eats raw food and fruits with cold water and will not digest, he will immediately be well after taking it. For those having the reversing qi gather in the Five Internal Organs (wuzang juji qini五臟聚積氣逆), those having sharp heartaches or stomachaches (xinfu qietong心腹切痛), those having stagnant qi and abdominal distension (jieqi fuzhang結氣腹脹), or those that throw up and cannot ingest any food (tuni bu xiashi吐逆不下食), take the pill with boiled ginger soup. If he is weak and skinny and does not have an appetite, take it with liquor. As long as he takes it, it will cure ten thousand kinds of diseases and allow the person achieve longevity. When making the medicine, one should do it at the chen hours[171] of the chen day (chenri chenshi辰日辰時), in an empty room, wearing clean clothes, and do not let chickens, dogs, women, or sons in mourning (xiaozi孝子) see it.

上十一味,搗羅為末,揀蜜黃色,掠去沫,停冷拌和為丸,如彈子大。每服一丸,久服不飢不渴。若曾食生菜、果子,食冷水不消者,服之立癒。五臟聚積氣逆,心腹切痛,結氣腹脹,吐逆不下食,生薑湯下。羸瘦,飲食無味,酒下。但服之,去萬病,令人長生不老。合時須辰日辰時,於空室中,衣服潔凈,不得令雞犬、婦人、孝子見之。

Li Babo’s recipe of the Apricot Golden Cinnabar (Li Babo xing jindan fang李八伯杏金丹方)

Use five dou of thick apricot seeds and put them in a cloth bag. Soak [the bag] in well water that is freshly taken in the morning (jinghuashui井花水) for three days. Then place [the seeds] in a steamer and cover it with a piece of thick silk cloth. Then place yellow mud as thick as five cun on top of it. Steam it for one day and then remove the mud and take out [the seeds]. Then place [the seeds] in the middle of millet (su粟) and steam them for one day. Then steam [the seeds] in the middle of wheat (xiaomai小麥) for one day. Press [the seeds] to get five sheng of oil from them. Then let it settle down and remove the dregs. Make a silver bottle in shape of a bottle for containing water. If one does not have silver, he should make a good earthenware pot. Put the oil in [the silver bottle] and do not let the bottle be full. Then use a piece of round silver foil as large as the bottle mouth to cover the mouth. Melt down silver and use the liquid silver to seal the apertures around the bottle mouth. Then place the bottle in a large pot and boil it for seven days. Stir it frequently. When the oil congeals (kan you jie看油結), open [the bottle] and take out the medicine. Put it in a container. When the fire qi disappears, [the medicine] becomes a liquid (huoxiao chengzhi火消成汁). Pour out the liquid and let it cool down. the color [of the medicine] is like that of gold. Then place [the medicine] in a mortar and mash it. When it can be made into pills, make it into pills as large as glutinous millet grains (huangmi黃米). One should have an empty stomach when taking it and take it with liquor in the morning and at evening. Or he can take twenty pills with saliva (jinye津液)[172]. After one takes it for a long time, it will save the qi (baoqi保氣)  and help the person achieve longevity. It will turn his white hairs into black. It can cure ten thousand kinds of diseases.

取肥實杏仁五斗,以布袋盛,用井花水浸三日。次入甑中,以帛覆之,上鋪黃泥五寸,炊一日,去泥取出,又於粟中炊一日,又於小麥中炊一日。壓取油五升,澄清,用銀瓶一只,打如水瓶樣,如無銀者,用好砂罐為之。入油在內,不得滿。又以銀圓葉可瓶口大小蓋定,銷銀汁,灌固口縫,入於大釜中,煮七復時,常撥動,看油結,打開取藥入器中,火消成汁,傾出放冷,其色如金。後入臼中搗之,堪丸,即丸如黃米大。空心,旦暮酒下,或用津液下二十丸。久服保氣延年,髮白變黑,能除萬病。

(見圖)

 

The recipe for the Lightening-Body-and-Achieving-Longevity Theurgical Pill (qinshen yannian xianshu wan fang輕身延年仙術丸方)

 

Soak Atractylodes sinensis  (cangshu蒼術) in rice swill for three days if it is in the summer and autumn or for seven days if it is in the spring. Remove the peels and wash them till they are clean. Steam them for half day. Then slice them and bake them till they are dried. Mash them in a stone mortar and make them into powder. Blend them with refined honey and make them into pills as large as a tung nut. Take fifty pills in the morning and at noon every day.

蒼术米泔浸,夏秋三日,春七日,去皮洗凈,蒸半日,作片焙乾,石臼搗為末,煉蜜為丸,如梧桐子大。每日早晨,日午,酒下五十丸。

The recipe for the Wolfthorn Decoction (gouqi jian fang枸杞煎方)

 

Use any amount of wolfthorn fruits and remove the pedicels. Wash them with clean water and take them out of the water and drain them. use one double-layer cloth bag and place the wolfthorn fruits in it. Pestle [the bag] on a clean chopping block. Then take the natural juice (ziranzhi自然汁) and let it settle down for one night. Then remove the dregs and boil it in a piece of stoneware with slow fire till it becomes a decoction. Then take it out and contain it in porcelain. Take half spoon of it with warm liquor every time. It brightens eyes and prevents one’s looking old (zhuyan駐顏). It strengthens the vital qi (zhuang yuanqi壯元氣) and moisturizes the skin. If one takes it for a long time, it is very beneficial. If it is warm when one makes it, the pressed juice do not need to be preserved overnight. This decoction will not spoil in two or three years. If one takes the decoction long after it was made, it does no harm to boil it again [before taking it].

採枸杞子,不拘多少,去蒂,清水凈洗,漉出控乾。用夾布袋一枚,入枸杞子在內,於凈砧上碓壓,取自然汁,澄一宿,去清,石器內慢火熬成煎,取出,磁器內收。每服半匙頭,溫酒調下。明目駐顏,壯元氣,潤肌膚,久服大有益。如合時天色稍暖,其壓下汁,更不用經宿。其煎熬下三兩年并不損壞。如久遠服,多煎下亦無妨也。

[Again, a rare recipe for something actually practical.]

 

The recipe for the [Curing-]Ten-Thousand-Disease Solomon’s-seal Pill(wanbing huangjing wan fang萬病黃精丸方)

 

Use ten jin of Solomon’s- seal (huangjing黃精) ([the author’s note:] clean them. Steam them till they can be easily mashed), three jin of white honey, three jin of lilyturf ([author’s note:] remove the hearts and steam them till they can be easily mashed).

用黃精十斤凈,洗蒸令爛熟 白蜜三斤 天門冬三斤,去心蒸令爛熟

 

As for the above three ingredients, blend them till they are even. Place [the mixture] in a stone mortar and pestle it for ten thousand times.  [Hopefully intended as a hyperbolic number!] Then divide it into four portions. Pestle each portion for another ten thousand times. When they are thoroughly mashed, take them out and make them into pills as large as a tung nut. Take thirty pills with warm liquor every time. Take it three times every day. One does not have to take it at specific times. It helps achieve longevity and nourishes the qi. It cures ten thousand kinds of diseases.  One can expect to obtain the position of a transcendent.

上三味,拌和令勻,置於石臼內搗一萬杵。再分為四劑,每一劑再搗一萬杵,過爛取出,丸如梧桐子大。每三十丸,溫酒服下,日三,不拘時服。延年益氣,治療萬,可希仙位。

The recipe for the Anti-Aging Seven-Essence Powder (quelao qijing san fang卻老七精散方)

 

Use three liang of Tuckahoe, which is the essence of heaven. Use two liang of Rehmannia glutinosa (dihuanghua地黃花), which is the essence of earth, and mistletoe (sangjisheng桑寄生)[173], which is the essence of wood, respectively. Use one liang three fen of chrysanthemum, which is the essence of moon. Use one liang three fen of bamboo fruits(zhushi竹實)[174], which is the essence of the Sun, Kochia scoparia seeds (difuzi地膚子)[175], which is the essence of the stars, and plantain seeds(Plantago sp., cheqianzi車前子)[176], which is the essence of the thunder, respectively.

用茯苓,天之精三兩 地黃花,地之精 桑寄生,木之精各二兩 菊花,月之精一兩三分 竹實,日之精 地膚子,星之精 車前子,雷之精各一兩三分

 

As for the above seven ingredients, they are correspondent with the Sun, the Moon, and stars above the sky. If one wants to make this medicine, he should pick a thriving or supportive date in the four seasons(sishi wangxiang ri四時旺相日)[177], fast for nine days, burn incense in a quiet room, and make the medicinal powder by mashing and sifting. Every time, take three one-cun-square spoon of it with well water that is freshly taken in the morning.He should face the Sun when he takes the medicine. Take one dose on a yang date and two doses on a yin date. After forty nine days, it will solidify the essence and help the person achieve longevity. It will cure one hundred kinds of diseases. It will improve eyesight and hearing. It is very effective. The Rehmannia should be picked in the fourth month. Bamboo fruits are found in the bamboo forests in Lantian.

上七種,上應日月星辰,欲合藥者,以四時旺相日,先齋戒九日,別於靜室內焚香修合搗羅為細散。每服三方寸匕,以井花水調下,面向陽服之。須陽日一服,陰日二服,滿四十九日,即能固精延年,卻除百病,聰明耳目,甚驗。地黃花須四月採,竹實似小麥,生藍田竹林中。

The Removing-the-Three-Corpses and Killing-One-Hundred-Worms and Beautifying and Improving-Eyesight-and-Hearing arsenic sulphide Pill (qu sanshi mie baichong mei yanse ming ermu wan去三尸滅百蟲美顏色明耳目雄黃丸)

 

Use one liang of arsenic sulphide ([author’s note:] use transparent ones in shape of cockscomb that is not mixed with other rocks. Mash and sift them) and rosin (songxiang松香) ([the author’s note:] pick the transparent, clean, and pure white rosin. Boil it in water for once or twice. Use what is floating [on the water] as the previous method mentions).

用雄黃透明如雞冠,不雜石,搗羅一兩  松香採明凈純白者,水中煮一二炊,將浮起者取用,如前法

 

Blend above two ingredients till they are even. Pestle them and make them into pills as large as a bullet. Take one pill with liquor every morning. After ten days, the Three Corpses and the One Hundred Worms will be excreted from the lower part of the body. The purple and black complexion (qise氣色) on the face will be eliminated, too. After one takes it for one month, one hundred kinds of diseases will be cured. He should keep pure and clean. Otherwise, [anything that is not pure or clean] will harm the efficacy of the pill.

上二物和勻,杵為丸,彈子大。每早酒下一丸。服十日,三尸百蟲自下出,人面紫黑氣色皆除。服及一月,百病自瘥。常須清凈,勿損藥力。

Mr. Gao’s Theory on the Harms of the Sex Drugs (Gaozi lun fangzhong yaowu zhi hai高子論房中藥物之害)

Mr. Gao[178] says, “ever since Bijue比覺’s theory of the Mud-and-Water [medicine] (nishui zhi shuo泥水之說) became popular, the art of the bedchamber (fangzhong zhi shu房中之術) is rampant. Therefore, the medical stones/medicines (yaoshi藥石) start to poison human beings. [I.e., people are having too much sex and then depending too much on dangerous aphrodisiacs.] How can the harms be entirely enumerated? A human being receives the essence/sperms and blood (jingxue精血) from his parents. If [the essence/sperms and blood] are thick, his life is strong. Thus he will have enough to spend even if he has many desires. If [the essence/sperms and blood] are thin [depleted], his life is weak. Thus he will be inefficient even if he has few desires. There are strong persons dying because of having too much sex, while there is not a single weak person achieving longevity because he has excessive sex. Drinking, eating, and sex are major desires of a human being. He should neither quit them nor have too many of them. If he has too many of them and is not content with them, he will be tired and cannot bear them anymore. Then he will seek medical stones to strengthen his body in order to satisfy his desires. Therefore, the magicians and sorcerers (fangren shushi方人術士) are able to meet his interests and show off their techniques. They make hot and poisonous medicines and claim that [the medicines] come from mysterious recipes from oversea. For the ears, there is the Ear-Pearl Pill(erzhudan耳珠丹). For the nose, there is the Enhancing-the-Desire Incense (zhuqingxiang助情香). For the mouth, there is the lignaloes Mixture (chenxianghe沉香合). For grasping in the hand, there is the Violet-Gold Seal(zijinqian紫金鈐). For sealing the navel, there are the Protecting-the-Nature Cream (baozhen gao保真膏), the One-Sphere-of-Gold [Pill](yiwanjin一丸金), the Steaming-the-Navel Cake (zhengqibing蒸臍餅), and the Fire-Dragon Talisman (huolongfu火龍符) . For strengthening the waist, there are the Spider Cream(zhizhugao蜘蛛膏) and the Massaging-the-Waist Cream (moyaogao摩腰膏).  For inserting the penis (han yu gui含於龜), there is the Nourishing-the-Nature One-Pill Cinnabar (xiantian yili dan先天一粒丹). For applying on the penis, there are the Three-Li powder (sanlisan三厘散) and the Rejuvenating-in-Seven-Days Recipe (qiri yixin fang七日一新方). For tying the penis, there are the Mr. Lü’s Cord (lügongtao呂公縧), the Sulphur Band (liuhuanggu硫磺箍), the Centipede Tie (wugongdai蜈蚣帶), the Precious Tie (baodai寶帶), the [Feeling]-the-Wonderful-Night-Too-Short [Medicine](liangxiaoduan良宵短), and the Fragrant Silk Kerchief (xiangluopa香羅帕). For covering the lower abdomen, there are the Downwind Flag (shunfengqi順風旗), the Jade-Toad (yuchan 玉蟾), and the Dragon-and-Tiger Coat (longhuyi龍虎衣). For rubbing the penis, there are the Long-Penis Recipe (changjingfang長莖方) and the Gold-in-the-Hand (zhangzhongjin掌中金). For inserting in the vulva (yinhu陰戶), there are the Lifting-the-Quilt Fragrance (jiebeixiang揭被香), the Warm-Stove Powder (luanlusan暖爐散), the Narrow-Vulva Cream (zhaoyingao窄陰膏), and the Every-Night-Is-Licentious (yeyechun夜夜春). For inserting anally, there is the Kingkong Wedge (jingangxie金剛楔). These are applied on the skin and ignite the fire in the kidney by using the qi (yi qi gan shen jia xiang huo以氣感腎家相火) . Then the person can erect for a while and [the medicines] can enhance his desire and support him to enjoy the sex. If he does not cease to use them, the poison will turn into a Waist ulcer (yaoju腰疽) if it flows and turn into a Excretion carbuncle/ulcer(bianyong便癰) if it gathers. It will cause the glans penis (guishou龜首) and the anus to rot.  [All these conditions sound suspiciously like syphilis, but they might also follow from too many medicines containing heavy metals and the like.] Although the harm is as rampant as roaring flame, the person can still extricate himself. If one uses only one or two [of those medicines], they are useful and not all of them are [as ferocious/harmful] as tigers and wolves (hulang虎狼). For internal medicines (fushi zhi yao服食之藥), there are many of them, such as the Peach-Headstream Secret-Treasure Cinnabar (taoyuan mibao dan桃源秘寶丹), the Male-Dog Pill (xionggoudan雄狗丸), the Sealing-the-Sperms Talisman (bijingfu閉精符), and so on. The toxicity in those medicines harms people. Nine out of ten persons will die after taking them.  They cannot be saved.  And [the medicines] frequently cause serious calamities and diseases, making the intestines fester and the skin chap. These are faults that happened to or were made by people in the past. How could one not know them? [As to the libertine,] his desire is stronger than his knowledge and he [is like someone who] would like to step on a knifepoint. Seen from those persons that eat greasy and delicious food and drink good liquor, nourish their lives every meal, even they cannot reverse the passing of months and days. They cannot avoid becoming thin [eventually]. Neither are they able to make the essence and spirit complete. However, [those magicians and sorcerers claim that] a small amount of medicinal pills and powder can make an impotent person erect immediately and allow the tired person to be potent. How wonderful are their effects!”

[This is an amazing insight into the sexual life of late Ming!  One recalls, vividly, that Gao was writing about the same time that the author of the Jin Ping Mei was immortalizing many of the practices above.]

高子曰:自比覺泥水之說行,而房中之術橫矣。因之藥石毒人,其害可勝說哉?夫人之稟受父母精血,厚者其生壯,即多欲尚可支;薄者其生弱,雖寡欲猶不足。故壯者恣欲而斃者有之,未有弱者恣欲而壽者矣。飲食男女,人之大欲也,不可已亦不可縱。縱而無厭,疲困不勝,乃尋藥石以強之,務快斯欲,因而方人術士得以投其好,而逞其技矣。構熱毒之藥,稱海上奇方:入於耳者,有耳珠丹;入於鼻者,有助情香;入於口者,有沉香合;握於手者,有紫金鈐;封於臍者,有保真膏、一丸金、蒸臍餅、火龍符;固於腰者,有蜘蛛膏、摩腰膏;含於龜者,有先天一粒丹;抹其龜者,有三厘散、七日一新方;縛其龜根者,有呂公縧、硫磺箍、蜈蚣帶、寶帶、良宵短、香羅帕;兜其小腹者,有順風旗、玉蟾、龍虎衣;搓其龜者,有長莖方、掌中金;納其陰戶者,有揭被香,暖爐散、窄陰膏、夜夜春;塞其肛門者,有金剛楔。此皆用於皮膚,以氣感腎家相火,一時堅舉,為助情逸樂。用不已,其毒或流為腰疽,聚為便癰;或腐其龜首,爛其肛門。害雖橫焰,尚可解脫,內有一二得理,未必盡虎狼也。若服食之藥,其名種種,如:桃源秘寶丹、雄狗丸、閉精符之類頗多。藥毒誤人,十服九斃,不可救解,往往奇禍慘疾,潰腸裂膚。前車可鑒,此豈人不知也?欲勝於知,甘心蹈刀。觀彼肥甘醇厚,三餐調護,尚不能以月日起人癯瘠,使精神充滿;矧以些少丸末之藥,頃刻間致痿陽可興,疲力可敵,其功何神?

 

[Those medicines have some effects because they] rely upon toxic heat (redu熱毒) in them. For example, gecko (gejie蛤蚧)[179], sea horse (haima海馬), dog kidney (goushen狗腎), earthworm (dilong地龍), musk bag of musk-deer (sheqi麝臍), spirifer (shiyan石燕)[180], (woliu倭硫), actinolite (yangqi陽起), honeycomb (fengfang蜂房), ants or ant eggs (yizi蟻子), and so on. This is like that one boils water by blaze. The blaze warms up the water just as the kidney is warmed up at the moment and thus the person is able to erect. How could those medicines be the transcendents’ cinnabars and elixirs, which have miraculous effects so fast? How could people who nourish the life not fear, and stop having the idea of improving [the potency] ? A guest may say, “someone named XYZ uses some medicine. He achieves longevity. How could you be so starchy about all this?” I say, “this is really true. However, two or three out of ten persons using the medicines for external use would survive, while there is not a single person out of ten or one hundred persons survive after he takes the oral medicines. As for the oral medicines and medicines for external use, how could there not be any person who has real miraculous power? How could one obtain his miraculous teaching? Bijue’s theory is a side door beside the Great Way. It uses the yin and yang wonderfully. Thus he belongs to the Righteous School (zhengmai正脈) . His theory is not used to achieve licentious pleasure. The activity of a human body is related to the Ren and Du Pulses (Ren Du ermai任督二脈). The Du pulse is the father of yang, while the Ren pulse is the mother of yin. [The acupuncture points of](weilü尾閭) and (jiaji夾脊) are the gates of the Du pulse, while [the acupuncture points of]the Middle Stomach (zhongwan中脘)[181] and (danzhong膻中)[182] are the holes of the Ren pulse. The Ren qi gathers in the sea of qi, while the Du qi gathers in the brain (niwan泥丸)[183]. Yin and yang rise up and fall down. When the person inhales, [yin and yang] are rising up from the navel. When he exhales, [yin and yang] are falling down to the brain.[184] The vital qi (xingqi行氣) meets and converges. When [the vital qi] moves to the anal, the qi converges if the person makes [the anal] contract tightly (jinti緊提).when [the vital qi] moves to the Earth Gate (dihu地戶)[185], the qi meets if he closes [the Earth Gate] tightly. As the Genuine Qi (zhenqi真氣) descends, the Heavenly Qi (tianqi天氣) comes in and meets with the Earthly Root (digen地根). It stops there since it gets the earth (detu ze zhi得土則止). As the Genuine Qi ascends, the Grain Qi (guqi谷氣)[186] comes out and meets with the Heavenly Root (tiangen天根)[187]. It rests there since it meets with the earth. This is the most important key of yin and yang. Its principle is the most apparent as well as most secret. This is so called that the nature and the life stay together (xing yu ming xiangshou性與命相守), while the spirit and the qi depend on each other (shen yu qi xiangyi神與氣相依). Therefore, it is said in the Classic, ‘the spirit controls the qi and the qi keeps the body (qi liu xing氣留形). One needs no other medicines to achieve longevity. If one acts like this morning and night, he will naturally have plenty of essence (jingman精滿) and the Gu Gods exist (gushen cun谷神存)[188]’. At the important moment of life and death, one should understand that exploring the extremes of this wonderful state (qiong cimiaojing窮此妙境) is the greatest medicine for me to take care of my life(wu sheng booming dayao吾生保命大藥). If one seeks the miracles of the nature from metals and stones—[medicines] like tigers and wolves, how many mistakes he is making? I am deeply sighing for those who die while not knowing the harms [of the metal and stone medicines]!”

不過仗彼熱毒,如蛤蚧、海馬、狗腎、地龍、麝臍、石燕、倭硫、陽起、蜂房、蟻子之類,譬之以烈火灼水,燔焰煎煿,故腎臟一時感熱而發,豈果仙丹神藥,乃爾靈驗效速也耶?保生者,可不惕懼以痛絕助長之念!客曰:“某某者,每用某藥,今以壽考,何子之泥也?”余曰:“是誠有之也。但外用者十全二三,內服者無一全於十百。若內若外,豈真無異術者哉?何能得其異傳?况比覺為大道旁門,得陰陽之妙用,率歸正脈。其說匪徒淫姤快欲之謂。人之一身,運用在於任督二脈。督為陽父,任為陰母。尾閭、夾脊為督脈之關,中脘、膻中為任脈之竅。任氣聚於氣海,督氣聚於泥丸。故陰陽升降,吸即升也,起於臍;呼即降也,轉於腦。其行氣交會,行之至肛門,緊提則氣會;行之至地戶,緊閉則氣交。真氣一降,則天氣入交於地根,得土則止;真氣一升,則谷氣出接於天根,逢土則息。此為陰陽大竅,其理最顯最密,所謂性與命相守,神與氣相依者此耳。故《經》曰:‘神馭氣,氣留形,不須別藥可長生。如此朝朝并暮暮,自然精滿谷神存。’生死要關,須知窮此妙境,為吾生保命大藥,乃於金石虎狼,求全造化神靈,其謬失不既多乎?吾重為死不知害者感也!”

遵生八箋/延年卻病箋下/高子三知延壽論/飲食當知所損論(P.447)

The Thesis on What is Bad for Drinking and Eating(yinshi dang zhi suo shun lun飲食當知所損論)

Mr. Gao says, “Drinking and eating can nourish the life.But the greed for eating without any restriction could benefit people as well as harm people. Especially for those who eat what is not nourishing the life and just want to taste special food and satisfy his mouth, the hidden damage is usually not trivial. I mean one serving of vegetable, one serving of fish, one serving of meat, and one serving of rice are rich for a scholarly official. However, they are not enough for a feast with lovely songs, liquor, musical instruments, and silver mats. If one prepares food that fill the Five Tripods (wuding五鼎)[189] and displays the Eight Precious Dishes (bazhen八珍), they are sumptuous even for what the Emperor’s kitchen serves. Why will someone still collect strange food from far away in order to satisfy his mouth and stomach? I think that both the Qiongsu liquor (qiongsu瓊蘇)[190] contained in a jade cup and ordinary liquor contained in an earthenware jar can make a person drunk. Both chicken claws and bear paws (jizhi xiong雞跖熊蹯) and brown rice and wild vegetables (lifan lizheng糲飯藜蒸) [i.e. the greatest delicacies and the plainest food] can feed a person. If one can be drunk and fed up by either liquor and food, why we discriminate [food] by luxury and thrift? How could one person not know that good fortune should be cherished? Nonetheless, it is said in the Treatise on the Principle of Things (Wulilun物理論)that, ‘if the Grain Qi is more thriving than the Vital/Original Qi (yuanqi元氣), the person will be fat. But he will not achieve longevity.’The techniques of nourishing the life require the Grain Qi to be little. Thus the person will not have diseases. It is required such as this for the Grain Qi. For the delicious food with five flavors, aren’t they harmful to the Five Internal Organs? I conclude that birds and beasts which eat grains are good for human beings. They are the normal food in the world. As for those precious food coming from far away and the wild animals from remote valleys, I am afraid what they eat have a lot of toxicity. Even though sometimes people advocate precious food, whether those foods are good or bad for the internal organs of a man is unknown. How precious would it be to satisfy the mouth and feed up the intestines? Therefore, the sage from the West asks us to stop killing and eat vegetables. Is he really pursuing a different/vicious Dao? When the person does not kill, his nature is lenient and has good will (shannian善念). [If he] eats vegetables, his heart is pure and his stomach and intestines are thick. [If he] is neither angry nor greedy, he will not be unlike this. Therefore, aren’t Confucius’ praises of coarse clothes and rough food (eyi eshi惡衣惡食) and his saying one should not seek to be full when eating (shi quqie bao食無求飽) the same Dao? I record the maxims from every kinds of scriptures and feel that they knew how to restrict drinking and eating and thus they achieved longevity.”

高子曰:飲食所以養生,而貪嚼無忌,則生我亦能害我,况無補於生,而欲貪異味,以悅吾口者,往往隱禍不小。意謂一菜,一魚,一肉,一飯,在士人則為豐具矣,然不足以充清歌舉觴,金匏銀席之燕。但豐五鼎而羅八珍,天廚之供亦隆矣,又何俟搜奇致遠,為口腹快哉?吾意玉瓚瓊蘇與壺漿瓦罐,同一醉也;雞跖熊蹯與糲飯藜蒸,同一飽也。醉飽既同,何以侈儉各別?人可不知福所當惜。况《物理論》曰:“穀氣勝元氣,其人肥而不壽。”養性之術,當使穀氣少,則病不生矣。穀氣且然,矧五味饜飫,為五內害哉?吾考禽獸穀食者宜人,此世之常品是也。若遠方珍品,絕壑野味,恐其所食多毒,一時尚珍,其於人之臟腑宜忌,又未可曉。悅口充腸,何貴於此?故西方聖人,使我戒殺茹素,豈果異道者哉?人能不殺則性慈而善念舉,茹素則心清而腸胃厚,無嗔無貪,罔不由此。即宣尼惡衣惡食之戒,食無求飽之言,謂非同一道耶?余錄諸經法言,覺彼飲食知忌,俾得人元之壽。

 

It is said in the Internal Classic Neijing內經 that, “If the person is cautious when making the five flavors, his bones will be rectified and his tendons will be soft (guzheng jinrou骨正筋柔). His qi and blood will flow fluently. His skin will be tight. He will have the life bestowed by Heaven for ever. Too much sour food will harm the spleen. The muscles will crumple up and the lips will peel. Too much salty food will harm the heart. The blood will congeal and the color [of the skin] will change. Too much sweet will harm the kidney. The bones will be sick and the teeth will be rotten. Too much bitter food will harm the lung. The skin will be dry and the hair will be shed. Too much spicy food will harm the liver. The tendons will contract and the nails will be dry.”When eating, one should first eat hot food, then warm food, and then cold food. After he eats the hot and warm food, if there is no cold food, he should drink one two mouth of cold water. It is very good. If one can keep this in mind for ever, this would be the key method of nourishing the life. When eating, one should inhale once or twice and then eat. It will make him avoid diseases. The Perfected Person (zhenren真人) said, “hot food harms the bones. Cold food harms the internal organs. [One should not eat] hot food that burns his lips. [One should not eat] cold food that causes a toothache. If one walks slowly after a meal, he will achieve longevity. If he is full, he should not speak aloud. Drinking too much [liquid] will close the blood pulses. Being drunk will make the mind distracted. In the spring, it is good to eat spicy food. In the summer, it is good to eat sour food. In the autumn, it is good to eat bitter food. In the winter, it is good to eat salty food. These [techniques] will help the Five Internal Organs and nourish the blood qi and cure every kind of disease. Do not eat too much sour, salty, sweet, or bitter food. In the spring, do not eat liver. In the summer, do not eat heart. In the autumn, do not eat lung. In the winter, do not eat kidney. In the four seasons, do not eat spleen. If one can eat none of the Five Internal Organs, he will follow the principle of the nature even closer. Do not eat sparrow, which will turn into a jiao dragon (jiao蛟) in water. Do not kill what a snake swallows. If one lies down immediately after he is fed up, he will be sick and have a backache.

《內經》曰:“謹和五味,骨正筋柔,氣血以流,腠理以密,長有天命。酸多傷脾,肉䐢而唇揭;鹹多傷心,血凝而色變;甘多傷腎,骨病而齒敗;苦多傷肺,皮槁而毛落;辛多傷肝,筋急而爪枯。”凡食,先欲得食熱食,次食溫暖食,次冷食。食熱溫食訖,如無冷食者,即吃冷水一兩咽,甚妙。若能恒記,即是養性之要法也。凡食,欲得先微吸取氣咽一兩咽,乃食,主無病。真人言:熱食傷骨,冷食傷臟。熱勿灼唇,冷勿痛齒。食訖踟躕,長生。飽食勿大語。大飲則血脈閉,大醉則神散。春宜食辛,夏宜食酸,秋宜食苦,冬宜食鹹。此皆助五臟,益血氣,辟諸病。食酸鹹甜苦不得過分。春不食肝,夏不食心,秋不食肺,冬不食腎,四季不食脾,如能不食此五臟,尤順天理。燕不可食,入水為蛟。蛇所吞亦不宜殺之。飽食訖即臥,成病,背疼。

 

One should not drink too much liquor. If he drinks too much liquor, he will throw up and throwing up is not good. If one is drunk and lying down, he should not stay at a windy place. Neither should he use a fan. [The wind and the fan] will harm him. Do not eat white honey with plum (lizi李子). It will harm the Five Internal Organs. If one is drunk, he should not be forced to eat. Otherwise he will have superficial infection (yongju癰疽) and ulcer (chuang瘡). If one has sex (jiaojie交接) when he is drunk and full, he will have a blackish and withered face (miangan面皯) and cough if it is not serious; or he will be unlucky, his internal organs and pulses will be hurt, and his life is damaged, if it is serious.

飲酒不宜多,多即吐,吐不佳。醉臥不可當風,亦不可用扇,皆損人。白蜜勿合李子同食,傷五內。醉不可強食,令人發癰疽,生瘡。醉飽交接,小者令人面皯咳嗽,大則不幸傷絕臟脈,損命。

 

As for food, one should keep eating warm foods, which are appropriate for ingesting and easy for digesting. [Keeping eating warm foods] are better than being used to cold foods.

凡食欲得恒溫暖,宜入易消,勝於習冷。

 

As for food, the fully cooked is better than the raw. Eating less is better than eating more. If one is full and rides a horse, his heart will be stupefied (xinchi心痴). When drinking, one should not ingest the water quickly. Otherwise he will have a qi disease (qibing氣病) and water tumor (shuipi水癖). When eating cheeses, one should not eat vinegar. Or [the cheese and vinegar] will transform into bloody phlegm (xuetan血痰) and haematuria (niaoxue尿血). When the person is eating hot food and thus is sweating, he should not wash his face. It will make him lose the [healthy] color [of the skin]. And he will feel as if a worm is crawling in his face (mian ru chong xing面如蟲行). After eating hot food, one should not rinse the mouth with vinegar. Or he will have bad breath and bleeding teeth (xuechi血齒). If the sweat, breath, and tail hair of a horse is mixed with food, it will harm people, too. Do not eat chicken, rabbit, and dog meat together. If the water drops from a rotten animal hutch and has stood overnight, it is called yupu鬱脯. Eating it will harm people.

凡食皆熟勝於生,少勝於多。飽食走馬,成心痴。飲水勿急咽之,成氣病及水癖。人食酪勿食酢,變為血痰及尿血。食熱食汗出勿洗面,令人失顏色,面如蟲行。食熱食訖,勿以醋漿漱口,令人口臭及血齒。馬汗息及馬尾毛入食中亦能害人。雞兔犬肉不可合食。爛茅屋上水滴浸宿脯,名曰鬱脯,食之損人。

 

Perfected Person Sun (Sun zhenren孫真人)[191] said, “if one has been hungry for a long time, he should not eat too much. If he eats too much, he will have a tumor (pibing癖病). If one is fed up and sleeps at night without having himself covered, the person will usually die from cholera (huoluan霍亂). If one is recently recovered from an epidemic (shibing時病), he should not eat raw fish. Or he will have unstoppable diarrhea. If one eats raw fish, he should not eat cheese, or they will transform into worms. When one eats rabbit meat, he should not eat dried ginger. Or they will cause cholera. When one eats meat, he should not choose the fattest portion, which everyone would like to choose. Eating it will cause a qi stagnation (jieqi結氣) and contagious diseases (zhuli疰癘) . If one eats it, he will have it.”

孫真人曰:“久飢不得飽食,飽食成癖病。飽食夜臥失覆,多霍亂死。時病新瘥,勿食生魚,成痢不止。食生魚勿食乳酪,變成蟲。食兔肉勿食乾薑,成霍亂。人食肉,不用取上頭最肥者,必眾人先目之食,食者變成結氣及疰癘。凡食皆然。”

 

It is said in Mr. Councilors’ Book (Canzanshu參贊書)that, “do not eat raw fruits with an empty stomach. It will cause the heat above the midriff (geshangre膈上熱) or it will cause bone steaming transform into  ulcers (guzheng zuo yongjie骨蒸作癰癤)[192]. If one covers food with a bronze and sweat is falling into the food, eating the food will cause ulcers on the head and in the muscles(fachuang rouju髮瘡肉疽). If one catches a cold and does not recover from it (chuhan weijie觸寒未解), he will have a spiky wind (chifeng刺風) when eating hot food. If one drinks liquor and feels hot, he should not wash face with cold water before the heat is over. Ot he will have ulcer in the face. When drinking and eating, one should not wash the hair. Or he will have a head wind (toufeng頭風). If one eats buckwheat (qiaomai蕎麥) together with pork for three meals, he will have the hot wind (refeng熱風). Dried meat should not be placed in a millet container(shumi秫米). Eating it will cause the person to choke up (biqi閉氣). If one does not move the dried meat when roasting it, moves it when taking it out of the fire, and the tendons intersect when the meat is cut open, eating this meat will cause disease (huanren患人) or cause the person to commit manslaughter (sharen殺人). A piece of ball-like meat in a sheep spleen is called yangxuanjin羊懸筋. Eating it will cause epilepsy (dianxian癲癇). For every kind of wet food (shishi濕食) that does not have a shape or shadow, eating it will cause a contagious disease (zhu疰) and abdominal distension (fuzhang腹脹). One must not drink liquor after being struck by a serious disease suddenly. It will cause the heat above the midriff.”

《參贊書》云:“凡空腹勿食生果,令人膈上熱,骨蒸作癰癤。銅器蓋食,汗出落食中,食之髮瘡,肉疽。觸寒未解,食熱食亦作刺風。飲酒,熱未解,勿以冷水洗面,令人面發瘡。飲食勿沐髮,沐髮令人作頭風。蕎麥和豬肉食,不過三頓成熱風。乾脯勿置秫米瓮中,食之閉氣。乾脯火燒不動,出火始動,擘之筋縷相交者,食之患人或殺人。羊脾中有肉如珠子者,名羊懸筋,食之患癲癇。諸濕食不見形影者,食之成疰,腹脹。暴疾後不用飲酒,膈上變熱。”

 

It is said in What Should Not Be Eaten(Shiji食忌), “When one is recently recovered from a disease, he should not eat raw jujube, lamb, and raw vegetables. They will damage the color [of his skin] and it will be so for his whole life. It usually cause death and the heat and steaming above the midriff (geshang re zheng膈上熱蒸). If one eats hot greasy cakes, he should not eat cold vinegar or liquor. Otherwise, he will lose his voice and speak as if sobbing. Eating raw green onion white with honey will harm people. One should definitely avoid it. If dried meat moves by itself when being placed in water, it will kill people. If one dries meat in the sun in order to make dried meat while the meat cannot be dried, do not eat the meat. Do not eat sheep liver with pepper. They will hurt the heart. If one eats (hugu胡菰) together with lamb, he will have fever.”

《食忌》云:“凡新病瘥,不可食生棗、羊肉、生菜,損顏色,終身不復,多致死,膈上熱蒸。凡食熱脂餅物,不用飲冷醋、漿水,善失聲若咽。生葱白合蜜食害人,切忌。乾脯得水自動,殺人。曝肉作脯不肯燥,勿食。羊肝勿合椒食,傷人心。胡菰合羊肉食之,發熱。”

 

It is said in Prolonging Life (Yanminglu延命錄): “drinking nourishes yang, while eating nourishes yin. One should always eat less food, while he should not make the stomach be empty. If one is not hungry and still eats, the spleen will be tired. If one is not thirsty and still drinks, the stomach will have gaseous distention. In the winter, do not keep the stomach empty in the morning. In the summer, do not be full at night. If one is fed, he should not lie on his back. Otherwise, he will have the qi tumor in the chest and abdomen (qipi氣痞). If one sleeps right after eating, he will have one hundred kinds of diseases. For food, do not eat those with a bad color. Do not eat those with a bad smell. If the food is not well cooked, do not eat it. If it is not the meal time, do not eat it. Do not eat [the animals] that belongs to your parents’ or your zodiac sign (shengxiao生肖). Do not eat uncovered food. Do not eat preserved food that has not been tightly sealed. Do not eat abnormal food. Do not eat the Three Abominations (sanyan三厭).[193] If a fish does not have intestines or gall, do not eat it. Do not eat food of strange shapes. If a mushroom has hair or it does not have patterns on the back, do not eat it. Do not eat Chinese pepper that does not open the mouth (bikoujiao閉口椒). [The peel of a mature Chinese peppercorn splits; before that it is generally too green to eat.] Do not eat food that has tiny white or black powder on it. Do not eat roasted food that is still hot. Do not eat preserved food that emits gas. Do not eat food that is covered by a bronze vessel. Do not eat raw vinegar that is recently made. Do not eat animal brains. Do not eat the Six Kinds of Domestic Animals (liuchu六畜)[194] that die by themselves. If a kernel has two seeds, do not eat them. If a piece of meat moves by itself, do not eat it. Do not eat chicken heart. Do not eat animals that have hair on their paws and claws. Do not eat birds that have six fingers, three feet, or four short fingers on the back of the bird’s legs(ju距). Do not eat eggs that have a mark like character ‘八’. For every kind of living beings/raw food (shengwu生物), what should not be eaten in certain month (yueling dang ji月令當忌), and what is harmful to the Five Internal Organs, one should prepare the Edible Herbs (Shijian bencao食鑒本草) on his desk. Then he can look up everyday food in this book and should not think it trivial. Drinking liquor and eating meat is called the Stupid Grease (chizhi痴脂), who is sorrowful, mad, and not persistent (youkuang wuheng憂狂無恒).  Those who eat good medicines (liangyao良藥) and the five grains are satisfied and pleasant (chongyue充悅), who are the Middle shi (zhongshi中士). They would worry about the diseased and the suffered. Those eating qi and maintaining the spirit and gods are called the Upper shi (shangshi上士). They will live as long as Heaven.”

[Long lists of food prohibitions, mixing practical and magical lore, are a stock feature of Chinese medical-nutrition books. Many of the above tips are shared with the Yinshan Zhengyao.]

 

《延命錄》曰:“飲以養陽,食以養陰。食宜常少,亦勿令虛。不飢強食則脾勞,不渴強飲則胃脹。冬則朝勿令虛,夏則夜勿令飽。飽食勿仰臥,成氣痞。食後勿就寢,生百疾。凡食,色惡者勿食,味惡者勿食,失飪不食,不時不食,父母并自己生肖犯者勿食。露食勿食。藏物不密者勿食。物色異常者勿食。三厭勿食。魚無腸膽勿食。異形勿食。菌有毛、背無紋者勿食。閉口椒勿食。飲饌上有細白末子并黑細末子者勿食。炙煿承熱勿食。藏物作氣勿食。銅器蓋物勿食。旋作生酢勿食。獸禽腦子勿食。六畜自死勿食。果實雙仁勿食。肉塊自動者勿食。雞心勿食。蹄爪帶毛者勿食。凡禽六指三足四距者勿食。凡卵上有八字痕者勿食。種種生物,或月令當忌,或五臟相反,或宜或忌者,座右當置《食鑒本草》,以為日用口食考證,無俟瑣綴。飲酒食肉,名曰痴脂,憂狂無恒。食良藥,五穀充悅者,名曰中士,猶慮疾苦。食氣,保精存神,名曰上士,與天同年。”

 

Mr. Gao says, “if one knows what should not be eaten, there are eighteen kinds of good ways to achieve longevity:

高子曰:飲食知忌者,延年之效有十八:

 

Vegetarian food and soup, happily eaten, can bring longevity.

蔬食菜羹,歡然一飽,可以延年。

 

Following time and following a proper course, and not having vile ideas, can bring longevity.

隨時隨緣,無起謀念,可以延年。

 

Not being obsessed by slaughtering, or making oneself an opponent to living things, can bring longevity.

毋好屠宰,冤結生靈,可以延年。

 

Finding it unbearable to cook or cut up the living can bring longevity.

活烹生割,心慘不忍,可以延年。

 

If one feels the suffering when hearing the sounds [of slaughtering],or one feels the pain when seeing the killing, one can achieve longevity.

聞聲知苦,見殺思痛,可以延年。

 

For birds and animals, do not seek them far away, and you can achieve longevity.

禽羞獸品,毋過遠求,可以延年。

 

Do not eat the farm cattle, do not eat the Three Righteous (sanyi三義), and you can achieve longevity.([Author’s note:] the Three Righteous are the wild goose, dog, and mullet.)

勿食耕牛,勿食三義,可以延年。三義者,狗,雁,黑魚也.

 

Do not eat raw meat frequently, do not too much meat preserved overnight, and you can achieve longevity.

勿尚生醢,勿飽宿脯,可以延年。

 

Do not hinder [the growth of] sprouts, disturbing the nature of Heaven, and you can achieve longevity.

勿耽曲蘖,致亂天性,可以延年。

 

Being afraid to use knife and chopping block, and hating cooking pots, can bring longevity.

懼動刀砧,痛燔鼎鑊,可以延年。

 

[If you do not use so many] peppers and other spices with the five flavors that you poison the five sense organs, you can achieve longevity.

椒馨五味,勿毒五官,可以延年。

 

What a bird carries in the beak and what mice steal, do not eat, and you can achieve longevity.

鳥銜鼠盜,勿食其遺,可以延年。

 

Do not eat [animals] killed by others, do not eat [animals] killed at home, and you can elongate your years.

為殺勿食,家殺勿食,可以延年。

 

Do not eat when hearing [an animal] being killed, do not eat when seeing [an animal] being killed, and you can achieve longevity.

聞殺勿食,見殺勿食,可以延年。

 

Do not pursue food, by setting up crafty snares, and you can achieve longevity.

勿以口食,巧設網阱,可以延年。

 

Do not punish the cook for ruining the taste, and you can achieve longevity.

勿以味失,笞責烹調,可以延年。

[The previous directions have been Buddhist morality, but this one is a solid Chinese secular injunction.]

 

For every bowl of congee and every plate of vegetables, by cherishing thoughts of their origins, one can achieve longevity.

一粥一菜,惜所從來,可以延年。

 

 

If you cannot bear to waste even a bit or grain, you can achieve longevity.

一顆一粒,不忍狼藉,可以延年。

 

靈秘丹藥箋  上卷

高子曰:食藥者,可以長年,仙經論之矣。故羲皇嚅藥制醫,治人百疾,自華扁諸家,復遺方書,以利天下後世,好生之德,何無量哉!今人天真散失,幻體空虛,不思補髓填精,斡旋造化,長年將無日矣。悲歟!余幼病羸,復苦瞶眼,癖喜談醫。自家居客游,路逢方士,靡不稽首傾囊,以索奇方秘藥,計今篇篇焉盈卷帙矣。即余自治羸疾頓壯,朦疾頓明,用以治人,應手奏效。神哉。藥之方歟!余寶有年,計所徵驗,不可枚舉。茲不自秘,并刻以助遵生一力。他若條分疾病,次備方藥,當執之專科,無問是編。所冀智者原病合方,心運妙用,寶以護命,兼以活人,則方寸即為壽域,豈不勝彼寶金玉而甘心泉壤者哉?錄成箋曰《靈秘丹藥》。

 

 

 

 

[1] An office from the Han dynasty, taking charge of food in the palace.

[2] Ear, eye, mouth, nose, and tongue.

[3] The author meant Sun Simiao.

[4] It is because the spleen belongs to the earth and the earth is yellow. It is also because the spleem assumes the nourishing role of mother or grandmother.

[5] The upper cinnabar field (shangdantian上丹田).

[6] The original meaning of li is that water cannot flow freely. It is used to refer natural disaster or illness.

[7] Zang includes heart, liver, spleen, lung, and kidney. Fu includes stomach, gallbladder, triple burners, bladder, large intestine, and small intestine.

[8] A stringed instrument.

[9] The formal way to write it should be 香葇. It is also called xiangru香薷.

一年生或多年生草本植物,茎呈方形,紫色,叶子对生,卵形,全草可入药。茎和叶可以提取芳香油。

香薷, 一年生或多年生芳香草本植物。茎和叶可以提取芳香油。全草入药。 宋  赵叔向 《肯綮录·香薷》:“藥有所謂香薷者,薷字不見于《篇韻》,獨《本艸》音柔,今人多不識此字,北人呼爲香茸,南人呼香蕕,其實皆音譌耳。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草三·香薷》:“香薷有野生,有家蒔。中州人三月種之,呼爲香菜,以充蔬品。”

[10] Or baitiao白鰷.

[11] 車螯, 蛤的一种。璀璨如玉,有斑点。肉可食。肉壳皆入药。自古即为海味珍品.

[12] 一种油炸的面食。 北魏  贾思勰 《齐民要术·饼法》:“環餅,一名‘寒具’;截餅,一名‘蝎子’。皆須以蜜調水溲麪。若無蜜,煮棗取汁。牛羊脂膏亦得;用牛羊乳亦好--令餅美脆。”明  李时珍 《本草纲目·穀部四·寒具》:“ 林洪 《清供》云:寒具,捻頭也。以糯粉和麪,麻油煎成,以糖食之。可留月餘,宜禁煙用。觀此,則寒具即今饊子也。以糯粉和麪入少鹽,牽索紐捻成環釧之形,油煎食之。”

A kind of fried pastry. Before frying, add honey water, jujube juice, cow and sheep fat, or cow and sheep milk, to the flour.

[13] This is a metaphor. The image of hanju is like a flattened gold bracelet.  There is a double-entendre for lovesickness here.

[14] It is said in Buddhist scripture that tiansutuo is the food served in heaven or the ancient India. 古 印度 酪制食品名。《法苑珠林》卷一一二:“諸天有以珠器而飲酒者,受用酥酡之食,色觸香味,皆悉具足。” 宋  林洪 《山家清供·玉糁羹》:“ 東坡 一夕與 子由 飲,酣甚,槌蘆菔爛煮,不用他料,只研白米爲糝。食之,忽放箸撫几曰:‘若非 天竺 酥酡,人間決無此味。’”Unknown in China.

[15] The collected works composed by Wenzhongzi, or Wang Tong, Sui Dynasty.

[16] Huang Tingjian.

[17] Also called chicken-head; Euryale sp.

[18] It is also called wujincao烏金草.

[19] Here I follow the translation provided in the book, in which binzha is bin and zha, or pinang and crab apple. But there is a kind of plant called binzi槟子, a kind of apple, which is red and turns purple when ripe, small, sour and acerb. 槟子树,一种苹果树。果实红色,熟后转紫,个小,味酸甜带涩

[20] It is also called chilu池鷺  and luci鸬鹚.

[21] It is zhuyu茱萸.

[22] Or wujing芜菁.

[23] Nowadays Southern Sichuan, Northern Yunnan and Guizhou.

[24] in Zhejiang.

[25] Dragon-well might be wrong.

[26] Said to be a ginger-like plant, spicy.  We cannot trace it; presumably a type of cardamom, possibly fresh large cardamom.

[27] A kind of medicine made from gallnuts and tea.

[28] A cream made by cooking liquorice with honey.

[29] Slipperiness refers to the intestines. When the intestines are slippery, they cannot absorb nutrition in the food and the food will slide out.

[30] This should be a book title. Brief.

[31] 多年生草本植物。叶椭圆形,开白色小花。块茎可入药,为利尿剂。Chinese editor’s note.  We can’t trace the plant.

[32] It is a kind of weakness in yin. According to Chao Yuanfang, the root of guzheng is located in the kidney. The patient’s body is cold in the morning, while hot at night. 骨蒸, 中医学病症名。为阴虚劳瘵的一种症状。 隋  巢元方 《诸病源候论·虚劳病诸候下》:“夫蒸病有五,一曰骨蒸,其根在腎,旦起體凉,日晚即熱。”

[33] Xiayuan is located under the navel. It is said in Yunji qiqian, composed in the Song, that there are three cinnabar fields in the human body, which are the upper yuan, midlle yuan, and lower yuan…the lower yuan cinnabar field is the sea of qi, which is also called the gate of the essence.

气功意守部位名称,即下元丹田,位于脐下。《云笈七籤》卷五九:“人有三丹田,上元、中元、下元是也……下元丹田氣海也,亦名精門。

[34] 药草名。多年生草本植物,羽状复叶,叶片狭长,开白色小花。根供药用,有镇痛、祛痰等作用。《新唐书·方技传·许胤宗》:“即以黄耆、防風煑湯數十斛,置牀下,氣如霧,熏薄之,是夕語。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草二·防风》:“銅芸、茴草、屏風、蕳根、百枝、白蜚。防者,禦也。其功療風最要,故名。屏風者,防風隱語也

[35] It is also written as huangqi黄芪. 多年草本植物,奇数羽状复叶,小叶卵形,花黄色,果为荚果,其根入药.

[36] Bake new bamboo stalks on fire and there will be clean juice trickling down from inside. This liquid is zhuli.

[37] It is also called maimendong麦门冬, maidong麦冬, or tianmendong天门冬. 一种多年生草本植物,叶条形,丛生,初夏开紫色小花,总状花序,果实裂开露出种子,块根略呈纺锤形,可入药. 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草五·麦门冬》:“虋冬, 秦 名羊韭。俗作門冬,便于字也。”

[38] 荩草 [hispid arthraxon]。一种一年生草本植物(Arthraxon hispidus),茎很细,花灰绿色或带紫色,茎和叶可做黄色染料,纤维可做造纸原料。[The plant is an annual herb, usable for dye or fibre as well as medicine.]

[39] 旧俗农历十二月廿五日煮赤豆粥,全家计口而食,称“口數粥”或“口數”。 宋  范成大 《腊月村田乐府十首》序:“二十五日煮赤豆作糜,暮夜闔家同饗,云能辟瘟氣,雖遠出未歸者亦留貯口分,至襁褓小兒及僮僕皆預,故名口數粥。”按,一说云:廿四日作糖豆粥,谓之“口數”

[40] ,亦作鮆 [long-tailed anchory]。体狭而扁,头小,口大,脊鳍短,臀鳍甚长,生活在近海,春季上溯于江河而产卵。太湖中亦有产者,全体银白色,亦名“刀鱼”、“鲚刀鱼”

[41]多年生草本植物,根粗大;茎叶有细毛,夏天开白色小花,果实椭圆形。根可入药。简称“芷”;亦称“辟芷”。

[42] The editor notes that this might be wrong because fish cannot be eaten together with catnip. Also the recipe did not mention how to deal with the fish afterwards.  [The catnip might be necessary as a preservative.  The fish is obviously put in the scale stock—the scales have a jelling agent in them—and then the dish cooled.]

[43] 蛤蜊科的双壳类软体动物。壳形卵圆,长寸余,壳色淡褐,稍有轮纹,内白色,缘边淡紫色,栖浅海沙中,肉可吃

[44] 鲱科鱼,体侧扁,长70厘米,银白色,分布于中国、朝鲜、菲律宾沿海,是一种名贵食用鱼

[45] When lotus seeds are withered in the autumn and become as hard as stone, they are called stone lotus seeds, or shilianzi.

[46] The text does not mention five qian of what. Since it does not mention salt at all, we suspect it means salt.

[47] Maihuang is a kind of cake made from Aspergillus fungus (qumei曲霉) and its substrate (usually wheat, bran, and soybean). It is used for brewing liquor or making sauce. In Bencao gangmu, Li Shizhen explains that huangyi is also called maihuang, which is made by blending rice and wheat flour and steaming them till they turn yellowish. That is how it gets its name.

麥黄, 用曲霉和它的培养基(多为麦子、麸皮、大豆的混合物)制成的块状物,用来酿酒或制酱。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·穀四·黄蒸》:“黄衣,麥黄。此乃以米、麥粉和罨,待其薰蒸成黄,故有諸名。”

[48] Moxiang means ground eaglewood, sandalwood, and so on.

末香, 指捣成细末状的沉香、檀香等。 明  沈榜 《宛署杂记·经费下》:“末香一斤,價二分五厘。”

[49] Sentence raised in our edition.

[50] This is a couplet.

[51] Sheri is a festival to make sacrifices for the earth gods. Usually, it is the fifth day (using the ten heavenly branches to count days) after the days Spring Begins or Autumn Begins.

[52] We cannot find what sanhecai means here. Cai means vegetables or food. Sanhe has three meanings. But none of them seems to explain our case. First it means tuning a stringed instrument three times. Second, it means three kinds of offerings. Third, it was a word used in the Yuan and Ming: Feeding domestic animals was called sanhe. Sanhe means feeding three times.  Literally, the word means “three harmony vegetables,” and one suspects from the recipe that the name here simply refers to harmonizing the three liquids used.

三和1.三次调弦演奏。 北周  庾信 《周祀圜丘歌》之三:“六變鼓鐘,三和琴瑟。”2.指三种祭品。 北周  庾信 《周祀五帝歌》之六:“三和實俎,百味浮蘭。”3. 元  明 俗语,喂牲口谓之撒和,三和谓喂料三次。 明  朱有燉 《香囊怨》第二折:“便驢騾也與他槽頭細草添三和。”

[53] It is unclear what this recipe refers to.

[54] Since no garlic was mentioned in this recipe at all, I suspect that garlic/suan was a typo for sour/suan酸.

[55] I.e., unboiled water

[56] Made from baked bran (chaofupi炒麩皮) and soybeans [as in above recipe].

[57] According to the Chinese editor’s note, shixiang is a mixture of aniseeds, fennels, ginger, and vinegar.

[58] She,社. People made sacrifices for the Earth God twice a year, in spring and autumn respectively.

[59] According to the editor’s note, shixiang is a mixture of aniseeds, fennels, ginger, and vinegar.

[60] 芎藭, 植物名。多年生草本,叶似芹,秋开白花,有香气。或谓嫩苗未结根时名曰蘼芜,既结根后乃名芎藭。根茎皆可入药。以产于 四川 者为佳,故又名川芎。

[61] It is made from baked bran (chaofupi炒麩皮) and soybeans; see above.

[62] The date or when the vegetables are contained?

[63] According to the editor’s note, shixiang is a mixture of aniseeds, fennels, ginger, and vinegar.

[64] Wang Pan王磐, zi Xilou, a Gaoyou native in the Ming.

[65] Perennial aquatic herb. The leaves are round and float on water. There is sticky liquid on the stalks and the back of the leaves. The flower is dark red. The tender leaves can be used to cook soup.

即莼菜。又名凫葵。多年生水草。叶片椭圆形,浮水面。茎上和叶的背面有粘液。花暗红色,嫩叶可做汤菜。

[66] Geng means a kind of food that has thick juice or is pasty, usually being boiled or steamed.

[67] Ji means one sort of food that is composed of minced vegetables or meat and blended with vinegar and soybean sauce. 用醋、酱拌和,切成碎末的菜或肉。

[68] 桑菌,即桑耳。木耳的一种。 宋  黄庭坚 《上萧家峡》诗:“趁虚人集春蔬好,桑菌竹萌煙蕨芽。”一说为桑椹。[A Song poet wrote about the mulberry ear-fungus.]

柳菌,木耳的一种, 生于柳树上的木耳。 唐  韩愈 《独钓》诗之二:“雨多添柳耳,水長減蒲芽。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·菜三·木耳》:“柳耳,主治補胃理氣。”

 

[69] 馬藍頭,亦作“ 馬藍 ”。亦作“ 馬蘭頭 ”。亦作“ 馬攔頭 ”。

野菜名。即马兰。也称鸡儿肠。 清  顾张思 《土风录》卷四:“有馬藍頭可食。按《爾雅·釋草》:‘葴,馬藍。’ 郭璞 注:‘今大葉冬藍也。’俗以摘取莖葉故謂之頭。” 清  袁枚 《随园诗话补遗》卷四:“ 汪研香 司馬攝 上海縣 篆,臨去,同官餞别江滸。村童以馬攔頭獻。某守備賦詩云:‘欲識村童攀戀意,村童争獻馬攔頭。’馬攔頭者,野菜名。京师所謂‘十家香’也。用之贈行篇,便爾有情。” 章炳麟 《新方言·释植物》:“﹝馬藍﹞今人摘食其芽,謂之馬藍頭。”

[70] 3.指菜花。 晋  张翰 《杂诗》之一:“青條若總翠,黄華如散金。” 唐  司空图 《独望》诗:“緑樹連村暗,黄花入麥稀。” 清  袁枚 《随园诗话》卷十五:“ 張翰 詩:‘黄花若散金’,菜花也。通首皆言春景。 宋真宗 出此題,舉子誤以爲菊,乃被放黜。”4.指金针菜。 老舍 《四世同堂》十五:“又关了城?我还忘了买黄花和木耳,非买去不可呢。”

[71] Qiu means baked wheat or rice flour, which is used as dry provisions.

[72] Chinese editor’s note: it is the fruit growing from the wildrice or “barbarian rice” stem before the black-powder fungus influences it.  [I.e., apparently, the mushroom-like beginning of a fungal infection is what is used here.  That would make this Zizania, still eaten when fungus infection makes the stem thick and succulent.]

[73] the ash-juice is made as below: burn plants into ashes, soak the ashes in water, let the ashes settle down, and the clear liquid is ash-juice.

[74] Pulu has two meanings: one is Typha angustifolia (cattail, pucao 蒲草) and bulrush (luwei芦苇); the other is puqie蒲且,which we cannot identify at present.  Presumably the cattail is meant, being common and edible.

[75] The text uses zaohe枣核, jujube kernel shape.

[76] It is very confusing here. The author assumes the audience knows what he omits.  And he may not have known the process well himself.

[77] 导气引体。古医家、道家的养生术。实为呼吸和躯体运动相结合的体育疗法。近年出土的 西汉 帛画有治疾的《导引图》。《素问·异法方宜论》:“其民食雜而不勞,故其病多痿厥寒熱,其治宜導引按蹻。” 唐  慧琳 《一切经音义》卷十八:“凡人自摩自揑,申縮手足,除勞去煩,名爲導引。若使别人握搦身體,或摩或揑,即名按摩也。”

[78] The liquid should be made to flow in a small stream, like one coming out from the mouth of a tea pot, and with strength.

[79] Should it be saqima? 薩齊瑪,糕点名。满语。今写作“萨其马”。 清  富察敦崇 《燕京岁时记·萨齐玛》:“薩齊瑪乃 滿洲 餑餑,以冰糖、奶油合白麪爲之。” Saqima is a Manchu word, and this Manchu—ultimately Near Eastern—sweet was and is popular in the north.  In a later variant, it is made into puffy noodle-like strands, pressed and cut into cubes.  Charles Perry informs ENA that it is made by cutting dough into tiny bits, frying these, and binding them with honey or syrup.  He sees no relationship between “shanshima” and “saqima”—the latter is a noun from the verb “sachimbi,” “to chop.”  Charles Perry, email of Feb. 4, 2015.

[80] White maltose is a kind of sugar made by cooking rice or other grainswith wheat sprouts or rice sprouts with slow fire.白餳,用米或杂粮加麦芽或谷芽熬成的一种糖。 北魏  贾思勰 《齐民要术·饧餔》:“煮白餳法:用白芽散糵佳;其成餅者,則不中用。用不渝釜,渝則餳黑。”

[81] 大酒1.醇酒。常与“肥肉”并举,谓酒席丰盛。 2. 宋 代称冬腊酿蒸,候夏而出者为“大酒”。

[82] It should be 芋艿.

[83] A kind of tool used to weed in the field.

[84] When persimmon is dried, there is white sugary material like frost congealed on its surface. This is called shishuang, or persimmon frost.

[85] Baiyaojian is a kind of medicine. It is a grey and bitter liquid. It is also called xianyao, or Immortal’s medicine.

百藥煎,中药物。褐色味苦的液体,作收敛剂用。又名仙药。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·虫一·五倍子附百药煎》:“百藥煎,功與五倍子不異,但經釀造,其體輕虚,其性浮收,且味帶餘甘。治上焦心肺、咳嗽、痰飲、熱渴諸病,含噙尤爲相宜。”

[86] Chicken is not mentioned or used in this recipe.  However, Sumei Yi remembers a pastry like this in Guangjou that does have chicken in it.

[87] Or blend it with sweet rice powder, whose amount is one third of the chestnuts?

[88] Fazhi means law and regulations, or formulations.

[89]Jiangfan is one kind of alum. It is made from the greenish alum (qingfan). It is reddish and is a lucid crystal. It is found in Shanxi and Anhui.

【絳礬】明矾之一种。由靑矾煅成,呈赤色,为透明结晶体。产于 山西 、 安徽 等地。可用于粉刷涂料及油漆。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·石三·绿矾》:“緑礬、 晉 地、 河 内、 西安 、 沙州 皆出之,狀如焰消。其中揀出深青瑩浄者,即爲青礬。煅過變赤,則爲絳礬。入圬墁及漆匠家多用之。”

[90] Jinzhou is in Shanxi.

[91] Zhengjia is one kind of illness that the patient has a hard tumor in the stomach. If the hard tumor does not move and the aching place is fixed, it is called zheng. If the hard tumor forms and disappears and the aching place is not fixed, it is called jia.

【癥瘕】腹中结块的病。坚硬不移动,痛有定处为“癥”;聚散无常,痛无定处为“瘕”。 晋  葛洪 《抱朴子·用刑》:“夫癥瘕不除,而不修 越人 之術者,難圖 老  彭 之壽也。” 明  刘基 《听蛙》诗:“烏鳶逐響蛇聽音,寧顧入腹生癥瘕。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·果二·山楂》:“﹝實﹞,化飲食,消肉積癥瘕。”《医宗金鉴·妇科心法要诀·症瘕积聚痞瘀血血蛊总括》:“癥積不動有定處,瘕聚推移無定形。”注:“癥者,徵也,言有形可徵也;瘕者,假也,言假物成形也。”

Xuan  has three meanings. 1. Xuan is one kind of illness. The patient has a hard tumor in the stomach.

  1. xuan means one kind of illness, in which the lymph gland in the groin is swollen.
  2. Xuan is also written as眩, which means dizziness in head.

痃1.中医学病症名。指腹中癖块。《医宗金鉴·妇科心法要诀·带下门》:“臍旁左右一筋疼,突起如弦痃證名。”注:“妇人臍之兩旁,有筋突起疼痛,大者如臂,小者如指,狀類弓弦者,名曰痃。”2.横痃。腹股沟淋巴结肿大的一种病,也叫便毒。3.用同“ 眩 ”。头晕。《太平广记》卷四八引 唐  李复言 《续玄怪录·李绅》:“﹝ 李紳 ﹞少時與二友同止 華陰 西山舍。一夕,林叟有賽神者來邀,適有頭痃之疾,不往。”

Pi is one kind of illness, the hard tumor in the area confined by the ribs.

癖.中医指两胁间的积块。《灵枢经·水胀》:“寒氣客于腸外,與衛氣相搏,氣不得榮,因有所繫,癖而内著,惡氣乃起。” 隋  巢元方 《诸病源候论·癖病诸候·癖食不消》:“此由飲水積聚,聚於膀胱,遇冷熱相搏,因而作癖。” 唐  王焘 《外台秘要·疗癖方》:“三焦痞隔,則腸胃不能宣行,因飲水漿,便令停止不散,聚而成癖。癖者,謂僻側於兩脅之間,有時而痛是也。”

[92] Poxiao is a kind of medicine. In Bencao gangmu, Li Shizhen explains that, since it dissolves in water and it can dissolve many things, it is called “disappear” (xiao). It is found in alkaline land and its shape is like powdered salt. Skins such as cow skins and horse skins should be tanned with it. So it is commonly called salt xiao or skin xiao. Boil it and contain it in a basin. Then it will be congealed under the liquid. The rough and plain is called plain xiao. Those having awns are called awn xiao. Those in shape of teeth are called horse-teeth xiao.

【朴消】亦作“ 朴硝 ”。药名。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·金石五·朴消》:“此物(皮消)見水即消,又能消化諸物,故謂之消。生於鹽鹵之地,狀似末鹽,凡牛馬諸皮須此治熟,故今俗有鹽消、皮消之稱。煎煉入盆,凝結在下,粗朴者爲朴消,在上有芒者爲芒消,有牙者爲馬牙消。”消,今多作“硝”。此物用于硝皮革,医药上用作泻药或利尿药。通称“皮硝”。

[93] This is weird. This explanation for fuju 㕮咀 is provided by the Chinese editor.  We cannot find the term  in dictionaries.

[94]Gaoben, a kind of fragrant grass. It is a perennial herb. It has pinnate leaves. it blossoms in the summer and the flowers are white. The fruits has sharp edges. The root is purple and can be used for medical purposes.

Gaoben is similar to ligusticum; or it is also called chuanxiong when it is found in Sichuan).

In Huainanzi, it is said that, the root is like liguisticum or conioselinum “compared to gaoben, …they are similar.” [In other words, it is some sort of Apiaceous root.]

【藁本】香草名。多年生草本。叶呈羽状,夏开白花,果实有锐棱,根紫色,可入药。《管子·地员》:“五臭疇生,蓮與蘼蕪、藁本、白芷。”《淮南子·氾论训》:“夫亂人者,若芎藭之與藁本也,蛇牀之與麋蕪也,此皆相似也。”

The editor explains that gaoben is also called xixiong西芎or fuxiong抚芎. But I can find neither of them in the dictionaries.

[95] gejie蛤蚧 is also rendered as蛤解. It is a kind of reptile. It is like wall lizard (bihu壁虎) but larger. It has purple and grey spots on its back. Its stomach is grey and white with pink spots. It lives in rocks, tree holes, or on the wall. It captures insects and small birds. When it is dried, it can be used as a medicine. It has the function of strengthening. It cures weakness and tiredness /phthisis (xulao虚劳), coughing, asthma. It is also called larger wall lizard (dabihu大壁虎).

【蛤蚧】亦作“ 蛤解 ”。爬行动物。形似壁虎而大。背部紫灰色,有红色斑点;尾部暗灰色,有七条环带斑纹;腹部灰白色,散有粉红色斑点。栖于山岩间、树洞内或墙壁上,捕食昆虫、小鸟等。干燥体入药,有强壮作用,主治虚劳咳嗽、气喘等症。也称大壁虎。《方言》第八:“ 桂林 之中守宫大者而能鳴,謂之蛤解。” 郭璞 注:“似蛇醫而短身,有鱗采, 江 東人呼爲蛤蚧。” 唐  刘恂 《岭表录异》卷下:“蛤蚧,首如蝦蟇,背有細鱗如蠶子,土黄色,身短尾長,多巢於樹中。 端州 古牆内有巢于廳署城樓間者,暮則鳴,自呼蛤蚧……里人採之,鬻于市爲藥,能治肺疾。醫人云:藥力在尾,不具者無功。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·鳞一·蛤蚧》﹝集解﹞引 李珣 曰:“生 廣南 水中,夜即居於榕樹上,雌雄相隨,投一獲二。” 清  吴炽昌 《客窗闲话初集·双缢庙》:“遽爾雙璧同組,立絞鴛鴦之頸;循環合體,牢牽蛤蚧之身。”

[96] Should qingpijiu be a typo? Should it be qingyanjiu?

[97]Hai’rcha is a kind of medicine tea. It is also called wudieni乌爹泥 or wuleini乌垒泥. It can reduce the fever in the upper midriff (qing shangge re清上膈热). It dissolves the phlegm and promote the production of saliva. It terminates bleeding and removes rheumatism/wind-damp (qushi去湿). It promotes the growth of muscles and kills pains. It cures all kinds of pyocutaneous diseases (chuangyang疮疡). An author from the Ming mentioned that hai’rcha is one kind of medicine commonly used by doctors. Because it is commonly used to cure children’s sores and tumefaction (chuang疮), it is called children’s tea.

【孩兒茶】药茶名。又名乌爹泥、乌垒泥。能清上膈热,化痰生津,止血去湿,生肌定痛,疗一切疮疡。明  谢肇淛 《五杂俎·物部三》:“藥中有孩兒茶,醫者盡用之……俗因治小兒諸瘡,故名孩兒茶也。”

Sprout tea (yacha芽茶) means the most tender tea leaves or sprouts.

[98] Although I cannot find any definition for piannao片腦, I suspect that it is borneol camphor (bingpian冰片), which is also called bingnao冰腦. Besides, there is longnao龙脑 (also called瑞腦) , which is similar to bingpian.

【冰腦】中药名,即冰片。 宋  周密 《齐东野语·经验方》:“以之(熊膽)治目幛翳,極驗。每以少許浄水略調開,盡去筋膜塵土,入冰臘一二片,或淚癢,則加生薑粉些少,時以銀筯點之,絶奇。”

【瑞腦】香料名。即龙脑。

[99] Hezi is also called helile诃梨勒. It grows in India, Burma, South China. Its fruits can be used as a medicine.

【訶子】即诃梨勒。植物名。常绿乔木。产 印度 、 缅甸 以及我国的南部,果实可入药。

[100] Qiushi, or Prepared Salt, is a kind of cinnabar. Li Shizhen mentioned that, according to Huainanzi, Prepared Salt is white and hard. At Li Shizhen’s time, people used philtrum (renzhongbai人中白) to make a kind of cinnabar, which was also white and called qiushi because it came from what was left from the qi of essence. When it is refined, it was called Autumn Ice (qiubing秋冰), because it looked like salt obtained from sea water. Some alchemists also made fake qiushi by baking in an oven. People should be careful about this.

【秋石】丹药名。 唐  白居易 《思旧》诗:“ 微之 鍊秋石,未老身溘然。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·人·秋石》:“ 淮南子 丹成,號曰秋石,言其色白質堅也。近人以人中白煉成,白質,亦名秋石,言其亦出于精氣之餘也。再加升打,其精致者謂之秋冰,此蓋倣海水煎鹽之義,方士亦以鹽入爐火煅成。僞者宜辨之。”

renzhongbai人中白 is kind of medicine. It is also called renliaobai 人尿白or liaobaijian尿白碱. It is a solid stuff obtained after human urine is naturally settled and congealed. It reduces fever and detoxicates. It reduces blood stasis and terminates bleeding. In the past, people usually used the grey and white deposit in a urinal to make it.

【人中白】中药名。又称人尿白、尿白碱。为人尿自然沉结的固体物。清热解毒,祛瘀止血。旧时多用尿具内的灰白色沉淀物。《唐本草》作“溺白垽”。 宋  洪迈 《夷坚志再补·人中白》:“人中白者,漩盆内積起白垢也,亦秋石之類。” 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·人部·溺白垽》:“人中白。滓淀爲垽,此乃人溺澄下白垽也。”

[101] bichengqie毕澄茄 is also called chengqie澄茄. It is a kind of Chinese medicine. Li Shizhen mentioned that, it grows in countries oversea. It is called “tender pepper” (nen hujiao嫩胡椒).

【澄茄】中药名。即毕澄茄。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·果四·毕澄茄》﹝集解﹞引 顾微 曰:“澄茄生諸海國,乃嫩胡椒也。”

[102] Area around Beijing.

[103] Wumei烏梅 is a kind of mei that has been smoked. It is blackish or brown. It can be used as a medicine. In Qimin yaoshu, Jia Sixie mentioned that pick the plums when they are green. Put them in a bamboo basket and smoke them on the stove or hearth till dried. Then they can be used. [Wu mei are still common but are now made by pickling.]

【烏梅】经过熏制的梅子,黑褐色,可入药。北魏  贾思勰 《齐民要术·种梅杏》:“作烏梅法:亦以梅子核初成時摘取,籠盛,於突上薰之令乾,即成矣。”参阅 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·果一·梅》。

[104] Naozi is also called longnao龍腦/龍瑙. It is a kind of spice. When it is oxygenated by nitric acid, it turns into camphor. It can be used for cardiac or freshener.

【龍腦】亦作“ 龍瑙 ”。即龙脑香。用硝酸氧化时,变化为樟脑。医药上用做强心剂和清凉剂。

[105] I think that this is a place name, though I do not know where it is.

[106]  I cannot find any definition for fencao粉草. Seen from this material, it is a kind of liquorice. Starchy liquorice?

[107] fushi服食 means taking cinnabars, particularly for Daoist practitioners.

[108] The author.

[109] 【雄黄】矿物名。也称鸡冠石。橘黄色,有光泽。可制造烟火、染料等。中医用作解毒杀虫药。

Xionghuang is a kind of mineral. It is also called jiguanshi鸡冠石. It is orange and shiny. It can be used to make fireworks and dyes. In Chinese medicine, it can be used to detoxify and repel snakes.

[110] The editor’s note: the root of tiankui can be used for medical purposes. It is also called tiankuizi天葵子. The root has alkaloid生物碱, coumarins香豆精类, hydroxybenzene ingredients酚性成分. It reduces fever, detoxifies, subside a swelling, and be diuretic. It is also called qiannianlaoshushi千年老鼠屎,jinhaozishi金耗子屎, tianquzi天去子, sanxuezhu散血珠.

[111] The editor’s note: didan is a kind of Meloidae芫青科insect. It should be caught in the summer or autumn. Boil it and dry it in the sun before using it for medical purposes. It can detoxify and has the function of bruise trimming. When external use, it also cures bad tumefactions, rhinopolypus鼻息肉. It can also be used as an internal medicine and it can cure scrofula (luoli瘰癧). It is also called yuanqing蚖青, qinghong青虹, qingmao青蟊, and dulong杜龙.

【瘰癧】病名。即淋巴腺结核。俗称疬子颈,多发生在颈部,有时也发生在腋窝部。《灵枢经·寒热》:“ 黄帝 問于 岐伯 曰:‘寒熱瘰癧在於頸腋者,皆何氣使生?’ 岐伯 曰:‘此皆鼠瘻寒熱之毒氣也,留於脈而不去者也。’”《医宗金鉴·外科心法要诀·瘰疬》“小瘰大癧三陽經,項前頸後側旁生,痰濕氣筋名雖異,總由恚忿鬱熱成”注:“此証小者爲瘰,大者爲癧……若連綿如貫珠者,即爲瘰癧。”

Lingshujing: the Yellow Emperor asked Qibo, “which qi causes the cold and scrofula on the neck and under the armpit?” Qibo answered, “these are poisonous qi of the Mouse Disease*. When they stay in the pulse and do not go away, [they will cause a scrofula.]”

*the Mouse Disease is scrofula. Contemporaries thought that it could be cured by eating raccoon dogs狸. Since raccoon dogs eat mice, the disease is called Mouse Disease. 汉  王充 《论衡·福虚》:“狸之性食鼠,人有鼠病,吞狸自愈。物類相勝,方藥相使也。”

Yizongjinjian: “small luo 瘰and large li癧 are caused from the Three Yang Pulses (sanyangjing三陽經)*. They grow in front of and behind the neck and on the side. It is caused by different reasons, such as phlegmatic hygrosis/phlegm-damp (tanshi痰濕) and qijin氣筋. No matter what the reason is, it is fundamentally caused by vexation, irritation, and heat accumulation/heat retention (huifen yure恚忿鬱熱).” Note by the author: “the small disease is called luo and the large disease is called li…if it is continuous and like a string of pearls, it is called luoli.”

*Sanyang is taiyang太阳, shaoyang少阳, and yangming阳明.

[112] Wuchang or the “impermanent” ghost is supposed to take a person’s soul to the nether world after he died.

[113] Liuzhu is also used to refer to producing cinnabar.

【流珠】炼出丹丸。 晋  葛洪 《神仙传·刘安》:“一人能煎泥成金,凝鉛爲銀,水鍊入石,飛騰流珠。” 北周  庾信 《谢赵王赉米启》:“非丹竈而流珠,異 荆臺 而炊玉。”

[114]

Baicaoshuang means the blackish ashes in the stove and chimney. Li Shizhen said, “[baicaoshuang] is the blackish ashes in the stove and chimney. Since it is light and thin, it is called ‘frost’.”

【百草霜】灶额及烟炉中的墨烟。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·土·百草霜》:“此乃竈額及煙爐中墨烟也。其質輕細,故謂之霜。”

[115] I cannot find any description of this Yangcheng pot. From what is said after it, it is a kind of container that can contain water above and set on fire below.

[116] Fengbi, numbness caused by the wind, or migratory arthralgia, is a kind of disease caused by the wind and coldness and damp. Its symptoms include aches and numbness in joints. Lingshujing: “if the symptom can be seen, it is called fengbing, or the wind disease. If the symptom cannot been seen, it is called bibing, or numb disease. If the patient has symptoms seen and unseen, the disease is called fengbibing, or wind-and-numbness disease.” The symptoms also include being unable to speak, unable to move legs or arms.

【風痹】亦作“ 風痺 ”。中医学指因风寒湿侵袭而引起的肢节疼痛或麻木的病症。《灵枢经·寿夭刚柔》:“病在陽者命曰風病,在陰者命曰痺病,陰陽俱病,命曰風痺病。”《宋书·隐逸传·周续之》:“ 續之 素患風痹,不復堪講,乃移病 鍾山 。” 宋  苏辙 《记病》诗:“侵尋作風痺,兩足幾蹣跚。” 清  赵翼 《将至台庄忽两臂顿患风痺》诗:“陸程正擬上征鞍,忽中風痺兩手攣。”

[117] Qingchengshan is the famous mountain associated with Daoism and located in Sichuan.

[118] I suspect that “day” is a typo and it should be rendered “month” here.

[119] Xixian is a kind of medical herb. It is an annual herb. The whole plant can be used. It cures the rheumatism (wind and damp风湿), strengthens tendons and bones. Li Shizhen mentioned that, “in Chu, people call pig as xi and call grasses smelling spicy as xian. This herb smells like a pig and tastes as stinging as a xian grass. Therefore ,it is called xixian.”

【豨薟】药草名。一年生草本植物。中医以全草入药,有祛风湿、强筋骨等作用。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草四·豨薟》:“韻書: 楚 人呼豬爲豨,呼草之氣味辛毒爲薟。此草氣臭如豬而味薟螫,故謂之豨薟。”

[120] Fengqi is a kind of disease. It was mentioned in the Record of the Historian, the Northern History, and Yuandianzhang.

【風氣】病名。《史记·扁鹊仓公列传》:“所以知 齊王 太后病者,臣 意 診其脈,切其太陰之口,溼然風氣也。”《北史·阳元景传》:“﹝ 陽元景 ﹞後以風氣彌留,不堪近侍,出除 青州  高陽 内史,卒於郡。”《元典章·刑部十六·违枉》:“令人邀請 肥鄉縣 復檢官吏捏合屍狀,定驗作因風氣病身死。”

[121] I suspect that Chui is a typo for Guai. Zhang Guaiya张乖崖 is an official administrating Sichuan in the Northern Song.

[122] The best cinnabar is produced in Chenzhou (now Yuanling沅陵, Hunan). So it is also called Chensha.

[123] In Daoism, Sanshi are three gods residing in human body. They are also be called sanshishen三尸神. They would periodically report the errors and wrongs done by the person to the heavenly god. In the Tang biji Youyang zazu: “the three corpses have three audiences every day. The upper corpse is called qinggu, who attacks the eyes; the middle corpse is called baigu, who attacks the internal organs; the lower corpse is called xuegu, who attacks the stomach.”

【三尸】道家称在人体内作祟的神有三,叫“三尸”或“三尸神”,每于庚申日向天帝呈奏人的过恶。唐  段成式 《酉阳杂俎·玉格》:“三尸一日三朝:上尸 青姑 ,伐人眼;中尸 白姑 ,伐人五臟;下尸血姑,伐人胃命。”

[124] jiuchong is used to refer to every kind of corpse worms having bad impacts on human body. jiu, means nine internal organs. In the Jin, Ge Hong mentioned that the Three Corpses and Nine Worms make destroys. In the Song Daoist book, Yunji qiqian, it is said that: “a human being is born with the Three Corpses and Nine Worms. When a man is born, his body has lodged in his mother’s matrix and absorbed five grains and the essence qi. Therefore, he has corpses and worms in his stomach. they are the great harm towards human beings…in a human body, there are many kinds of Three corpses and Nine Worms.”

【九蟲】道教语。泛指在人身中作祟的种种尸虫。九,九脏。 晋  葛洪 《抱朴子·金丹》:“三尸九蟲,皆即消壞。”《云笈七籤》卷八三:“人身並有三尸九蟲。人之生也,皆寄形於父母胞胎五穀精氣,是以人腹中盡有尸蟲,爲人之大害……身中三尸九蟲種類群多。”

[125] Liujia is the name of a god, who is under the order of the heavenly god. Daoist priests can request them to repel ghosts or protect by sending talismans. In the Song History, it is mentioned that, “liujia is the emissary of heaven.  He makes wind and hail. He orders ghosts and spirits.”

【六甲】道教神名,供天帝驱使的阳神;道士可用符箓召请以祈禳驱鬼。《宋史·律历志四》:“六甲,天之使,行風雹,筴鬼神。”

[126] Cangshu is perennial herb. In the autumn it blossoms with white or pink flowers. The young sprouts are edible. The root is thick and can be used as a medicine. Li Shizhen mentioned that, “cangshu is also called shanji山薊, which can be found everywhere in the mountains…its root is like old ginger root, greenish and blackish. The pulp is white with cream.”

【蒼术】多年生草本植物,秋天开白色或淡红色的花,嫩苗可以吃,根肥大,可入药。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草一·术》:“蒼术,山薊也,處處山中有之……根如老薑之狀,蒼黑色,肉白有油膏。”

[127] I do not know what it is. Probably river water that flows for one thousand li?

[128]Yuanzhi is perennial herb. The stalk is thin. It has alternate leaves in line shape. It has racemes of greenish and white flowers. It has egg-like capsule. The root can be used as a medicine. It can calm the nerves (lit. “calm the spirit [within]”; anshen安神) and remove the phlegm. It is also called xiaocao小草. Li Shizhen mentioned that, “taking this herb can enhance the wisdom and strengthen the mind (yizhi qiangzhi益智强志). So it is called yuanzhi, or make the mind go further.”

【遠志】多年生草本植物。茎细,叶子互生,线形,总状花序,花绿白色,蒴果卵圆形。根入药,有安神、化痰的功效。又名小草。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草一·远志》:“此草服之能益智强志,故有遠志之稱。”

[129] Wulao has two meanings: one, when a person uses his eyes too much, or lies, sits, stands, or walks for too long, he will be overwhelmed and sick. The illnesses caused by these reasons are called wulao. In Suwen素问, it is said that, “using eyes too much harms the blood, lying for too long harms the qi, sitting for too long harms the flesh, standing for too long harms the bones, and walking for too long harms the tendons. These are harms done by five kinds of strains/laboriousness.” Two, wulao means the strain caused by the mind (zhilao志劳), by thinking (silao思劳), by the heart (xinlao心劳), by sorrow (youlao忧劳), and by tiredness (pilao疲勞). This explanation comes from Yunji qiqian云笈七籤.

【五勞】1.中医学名词。指久视、久卧、久坐、久立、久行五种过劳致病因素。《素问·宣明五气篇》:“久視傷血,久卧傷氣,久坐傷肉,久立傷骨,久行傷筋,是謂五勞所傷。” 2.中医学名词。指志劳、思劳、心劳、忧劳和疲劳。《云笈七籤》卷三二:“《明医论》云:疾之所起自生五勞……五勞者,一曰志勞,二曰思勞,三曰心勞,四曰憂勞,五曰疲勞。”

Qishang has three meanings. Two of them come from the same book, Zhubing Yuanhou lun诸病源候论, composed by Chao Yuanfang巢元方 in the Sui. One, being too full harms the spleen, being too angry harms the liver, lifting overly heavy objects and sitting on a wet floor harms the kidney, drinking when extremely cold harms the lung, worrying and missing people harms the heart, wind and rain and heat and cold harm the body (xing形), being too angry or scared without restraint harms the mind (zhi志). Two, qishang could also mean seven kinds of diseases related to the reproductive system: coldness in private parts (yinhan陰寒), impotence/withered yin (yinwei陰萎), strangury or urinary spasm (liji裏急), semen drizzling (jinglianlian精連連), semen sparse, and private parts wet (jingshao yinxiashi精少陰下濕), semen clear (jingqing精清), frequent urination and impotence ( xiaobian kushu小便苦數, linshi buji臨事不濟). Jinguiyaolue金匮要略provides a third explanation: “the harm caused by eating, by worries, by drinking, by residence, by hunger, by labor, and by the qi in pulses and blood.”

【七傷】中医学名词。 隋  巢元方 《诸病源候论》以大饱伤脾,大怒气逆伤肝,强力举重、久坐湿地伤肾,形寒饮冷伤肺,忧愁思虑伤心,风雨寒暑伤形,大怒恐惧不节伤志为七伤。同书又指生殖系的七种疾病:“七傷者,一曰陰寒,二曰陰萎,三曰裏急,四曰精連連,五曰精少陰下濕,六曰精清,七曰小便苦數、臨事不濟。” 喻嘉言 则以《金匮要略》之食伤、忧伤、饮伤、房屋伤、饥伤、劳伤、经络荣卫气伤为七伤。

[130] Fengji could be three kinds of diseases: one, paralysis (fengbi风痹); two, mental diseases (fengbing疯病); three, leprosy (mafengbing麻风病).

【風疾】1.指风痹、半身不遂等症。《後汉书·袁安传》:“ 封觀 者,有志節,當舉孝廉,以兄名位未顯,恥先受之,遂稱風疾,喑不能言。” 唐  韩愈 《顺宗实录一》:“上自二十年九月得風疾,因不能言,使四面求醫藥。” 元  关汉卿 《单刀会》第二折:“若有 關公 ,貧道風疾舉發,去不的!”

2.疯病。神经错乱、精神失常。 汉  应劭 《风俗通·过誉·司空颍川韩稜》:“位過招殃,靈督其舋,風疾恍忽,有加無瘳。” 明  冯梦龙 《古今谭概·儇弄·王中父》:“ 王介 ,字 中父 ,性輕率,每語言無倫,人謂其有風疾。”

3.麻风病。《三国志平话》卷上:“忽患癩疾,有髮皆落,遍身膿血不止,熏觸父母……取浄水一盞,呪了,嚥在腹中,風疾即愈,毛髮皮膚復舊。”

[131] Previously it is rendered as 羊城礶. It can be a boiler and a stove at the same time.

[132] The Yellow Path is the path that the Sun goes in the sky when the observer is on the Earth. It is a hypothetic circle on the celestial sphere, which is the projection of the Earth’s orbit on the celestial sphere. The Yellow Path and the Red Path/equator (chidao赤道) intersect at the vernal equinox (chunfendian春分点) and the autumnal equinox (qiufendian秋分点) in the north hemisphere.

【黄道】地球一年绕太阳转一周,我们从地球上看成太阳一年在天空中移动一圈,太阳这样移动的路线叫做黄道。它是天球上假设的一个大圆圈,即地球轨道在天球上的投影。黄道和天球赤道相交于北半球的春分点和秋分点。《汉书·天文志》:“日有中道,月有九行。中道者,黄道,一曰光道。” 宋  沈括 《梦溪笔谈·象数二》:“日之所由,謂之黄道。”

The auspicious day of the Yellow Path relates to the gods. The gods of the Six Stars (liuchen六辰)—the Green Dragon (qinglong青龙), the Luminous Hall (mingtang明堂), the Golden Cabinet (jinkui金匮), the Heavenly Virtue, the Jade Hall (yutang玉堂), and the Controller of Destinies (siming司命)—are auspicious deities. When the six gods are on duty for the day, one can do anything on the day and does not have to worry about whether it is auspicious or not. This day is called the auspicious day of the Yellow Path.

【黄道吉日】旧时迷信星命之说,谓青龙、明堂、金匮、天德、玉堂、司命等六辰是吉神,六辰值日之时,诸事皆宜,不避凶忌,称为“黄道吉日”。泛指宜于办事的好日子。

[133] Qinjiao is a kind of herb. The root can be used as a medicine, which cures the rheumatism (fengshi风湿). Since the best ones grow in the area of the ancient Qin state (now Gansu and Shaanxi), it is called qinjiao. Li Shizhen mentioned that, “Qinjiao is found in Qin area. Since its roots are entangled (jiu or jiao), it is called qinjiao.”

秦艽,草名。其根可作中药,治风湿,以产于古 秦国 地区(今 甘肃省  泾川县 、 陕西省  鄜县 一带)为最佳,故名。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·草三·秦艽》:“秦艽出 秦中 ,以根作羅紋交糾者佳,故名秦艽、秦糺。”

[134] I do not know what jingxie means.

[135] Dushi means renouncing this world and becoming a transcendent.

【度世】犹出世。谓超脱尘世为仙。

[136] The Academica Sinica text does not have this phrase. It appears in the Sikuquanshu text.

[137] Chishizhi is a kind of Chinese medicine. It is a kind of sand and earth having silicic acid and iron. it is pinkish. Its nature is warm. It tastes sweet and bitter. Its functions include hemostasia and antidiarrhea.

【赤石脂】中药名。砂石中硅酸类的含铁陶土,多呈粉红色。性温,味甘涩,功能止血、止泻。参阅 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·石三·五色石脂》。

[138] See the attached picture of huangniu.

[139] I cannot find mingruxiang in the dictionaries. But ming probably means transparent or bright, as in mingsha, or bright cinnabar.

[140] Siqi has two meanings. First, it means the qi of the four seasons, or the warm qi, the hot qi, the cool qi, and the cold qi. Second, it means the glad qi, the angry qi, the happy qi, and the sorrowful qi, which are correspondent to the qi of the four seasons. The famous scholar proclaiming the Correspondence Theory in the Han dynasty, Dong Zhongshu, mentioned that, “the glad qi is warm and thus is correspondent to the spring. The angry qi is pure and thus is correspondent to the autumn. The happy qi is extreme yang and thus is correspondent to the summer. The sorrowful qi is extreme yin and thus is correspondent to the winter. Both heaven and human beings have the four qi.”

【四氣】1.指春、夏、秋、冬四时的温、热、冷、寒之气。《礼记·乐记》:“奮至德之光,動四氣之和,以著萬物之理。” 孔颖达 疏:“動四氣之和,謂感動四時之氣,序之和平,使陰陽順序也。” 2. 汉 儒附会天人相应之说,以喜怒乐哀应四时为四气。 汉  董仲舒 《春秋繁露·王道通三》:“喜氣爲暖而當春,怒氣爲清而當秋,樂氣爲太陽而當夏,哀氣爲太陰而當冬。四氣者,天與人所同有也。”

[141] Rong means flourishing, having a good color, or being nourished. It is particularly used to describe the circulation of blood in Chinese medical theories.

[142] I do not know what yuancang means. It has cang, or internal organ.

[143] I do not think this makes sense, but I have checked both the Sikuquanshu version and the Academic Sinica version, the texts are the same.

[144] The academic sinica version is rendered as 沐俗至心, which cannot be explained. Now I adopt the sikuquanshu text.

[145] Huodu has four meanings. 1. The grievous toxin in certain medicine. Particularly cinnabar that has been recently made and taken out of the stove are thought to have huodu. Sometimes, people place newly made cinnabar in well water to remove the huodu.

  1. hot toxin, which incurs inflammation. Possibly this is intended here, since none of the ingredients is poisonous and there is no danger of CO or hot weather in this case.
  2. carbon monoxide poisoning caused by incomplete burning.
  3. extremely hot weather.

【火毒】1.指药物酷烈的毒性。《宋书·刘亮传》:“ 亮 在 梁州 ,忽服食修道,欲致長生。迎 武當山 道士 孫道胤 ,令合仙藥;至 益州 , 泰豫 元年藥始成,而未出火毒……﹝ 亮 ﹞取井華水服,至食鼓後,中間便絶。”《旧唐书·宪宗纪下》:“上服方士 柳泌 金丹藥,起居舍人 裴潾 上表切諫,以‘金石含酷烈之性,加燒鍊則火毒難制。若金丹已成,且令方士自服一年,觀其效用,則進御可也。’”2.即热毒,中医指导致人体外科痈疡等病症的一种因素。《宋史·刘遇传》:“﹝ 遇 ﹞晨興方對客,足有炙瘡痛,其醫謂:‘火毒未去,故痛不止。’ 遇 即解衣,取刀割瘡至骨,曰:‘火毒去矣。’”3.指烈火燃烧中因氧气稀少而产生的一氧化碳的毒性。《东周列国志》第三九回:“ 僖負覊 率家人救火,觸烟而倒,比及救起,已中火毒,不省人事。”4.形容酷热。

[146] The Academic Sinica version is jinsuijian 金髓煎. The Sikuquanshu version is 金水煎.

[147] Jiju is a disease in which the patient has a tumor in the abdomen. In Nanjing难经, it is mentioned that, “ji (what cumulates) is the yin qi. During the first outbreak, it appears in a specific location and the ache do not separate from the location…ju (what gathers) is the yang qi. During its first outbreak, it does not have any root [specific origin point]; [the ache] does not stay at one location…” Ge Hong mentioned in Baopuzi that, “when one eats, jiju forms. When one drinks, the phlegm disease forms.”

【積聚】中医指腹内结块的病症。《难经·五十五难》:“積者陰氣也,其始發有常處,其痛不離其部,上下有所終始,左右有所窮處;聚者陽氣也,其始發無根本,上下無所留止,其痛無常處謂之聚,故以是别知積聚也。”晋  葛洪 《抱朴子·极言》:“凡食過則結積聚,飲過則成痰癖。”

[148] I cannot find the term in the dictionaries.

[149] Diyu is a kind of medical herb, a kind of burnet. The root can be used. It is mildly cold. Its functions include cool the blood (liangxue凉血) and hemostasia. It cures hematochezia (bianxue便血), bloody diarrhoea (xueli血痢), gynecological diseases (daixia带下) and endometrorrhagia (xuebeng血崩). Relatives are used in the western world for similar conditions.

【地榆】药用植物。中医以根入药,性微寒,功能凉血、止血。主治便血、血痢和妇女带下、血崩等。

Daixia has two meanings. Literally, it means what is below the waist. According to Chinese medical theories, the dai pulse (daimai带脉) is like a belt circling the waist. Whatever below the dai pulse is called “daixia”. Therefore gynecological conditions and diseases are called daixia.

  1. the disease in which the vagina of the affected woman has sticky liquid. Since the colors of the liquid differ, there are white dai/leucorrhea (baidai白带), red dai (chidai赤带), red and white dai, yellow dai, green dai, black dai and five color dai. They are usually caused by infections, cervical erosion, cervicitis, or pelvic inflammation.

【帶下】1.古代称妇科疾病。中医学以为带脉环绕人体腰部一周,犹如腰带。凡带脉以下,名曰“帶下”,故妇科病统称之为“帶下”。2.特指妇女阴道中流出黏腻液体的病症。因颜色不同,而有白带、赤带、赤白带、黄带、青带、黑带、五色带之别。多由阴道炎、宫颈糜烂、宫颈炎或盆腔炎引起。

[150] Fangcunbi is a kind of measuring vessel. It usually is used to measure medicines. Its head is a square, one cun by each side.

[151] The best baishu白術 grows in Yuqian, Zhejiang provine.

[152] Gan Shi is a magician (fangshi方士) during the Wei (220-265).

[153] Xinshui has two meanings: 1. Water newly taken from a river or a well; 2. Water in the spring.

[154] Shangsi is a festival. During the pre-Han period, it is the si day in the first ten days of the third month. After the Han Dynasty, it is the third day of the third month. On this day, people place liquor containers in sinuous streams and let then float with the flow. They also have banquets and spring outings.

【上巳】旧时节日名。 汉 以前以农历三月上旬巳日为“上巳”; 魏  晋 以后,定为三月三日,不必取巳日。《後汉书·礼仪志上》:“是月上巳,官民皆絜於東流水上,曰洗濯祓除去宿垢疢爲大絜。”《宋书·礼志二》引《韩诗》:“ 鄭國 之俗,三月上巳,之 溱洧 兩水之上,招魂續魄。秉蘭草,拂不祥。” 唐  席元明 《三月三日宴王明府山亭》诗:“日惟上巳,時亨 有巢 。” 宋  吴自牧 《梦粱录·三月》:“三月三日上巳之辰,曲水流觴故事,起於 晉 時。 唐 朝賜宴 曲江 ,傾都褉飲踏青,亦是此意。”但也有仍取巳日者。 元  白樸 《墙头马上》第一折:“今日乃三月初八日,上巳節令, 洛陽 王孫士女,傾城翫賞。”

[155] I suspect the character ru is corrupted. It should mean one will not feel hungry or thirsty.

[156] I do not know how the word dan彈 makes sense here. I suspect it is dan蛋.

[157] Jiuqiao means the nine holes of the ears, eyes, mouth, nose, urethra, and anal.

【九竅】指耳、目、口、鼻及尿道、肛门的九个孔道。

[158] Toufeng has two meanings: 1. Headache. 2. Tumefaction on the head or loss of hair.

【頭風】1.头痛。中医学病症名。《云笈七籤》卷三二:“勿以濕髻卧,使人患頭風、眩悶、髮秃、面腫、齒痛、耳聾。”《二十年目睹之怪现状》第二七回:“只見他頭上紥了一條黑帕,説是頭風痛得厲害。” 2.指头疮、发脱之类。 金  董解元 《西厢记诸宫调》卷七:“頭風即是有,頭巾兒蔚帖。” 凌景埏 校注:“這裏指頭瘡、秃頭之類。”

[159] Shanzhui should mean the symptoms of shanqi疝氣. Shanqi is a kind of hernia in the groin. It is caused by the small intestine falls into the scrotum through the weak spot in the abdomen muscles. The symptoms are: the groin rises up and the scrotum is enlarged. The patient has sharp aches sometimes. It is also called xiaochang chuanqi小肠串气.

【疝氣】通常指腹股沟部的疝。因小肠通过腹股沟区的腹壁肌肉弱点坠入阴囊内而引起,症状是腹股沟凸起或阴囊肿大,时有剧痛。也称小肠串气。

[160] Xuehai has four meanings in Chinese medical theories. 1. It is one of the four seas and it is the place that all the blood flows to. In Lingshujing灵枢经, it is said that, “the human being has the marrow sea (suihai) 髓海, the blood sea, the qi sea (qihai氣海), and the water and grain sea (shuigu zhi hai水穀之海). The four things are correspondent to the four seas.”

【血海】1.中医学名词。四海之一,指人身血液汇聚之处。《灵枢经·海论》:“人有髓海,有血海,有氣海,有水穀之海,凡此四者,以應四海也。”

  1. it means the chong pulse (chongmai). In Suwen素问, it is said that, “when the ren pulse任脈 is open and the taichong pulse太冲脈 is thriving, the menstrual blood arrives on time and thus she can be pregnant.” Wang Bing王冰in the Tang dynasty makes a note, “the chong pulse is the blood sea and the ren pulse is in charge of the embryo. When the two pulses help each other, the person can be pregnant.”

2.中医学名词。或谓奇经脉中的冲脉。《素问·上古天真论》“任脈通,太冲脈盛,月事以時下,故有子” 唐  王冰 注:“冲爲血海,任主胞胎,二者相資,故能有子。”

It means the liver. In Suwen素问, it is said that, “when a person lies down, his blood returns to the liver.” Wang Bing王冰in the Tang dynasty makes a note, “the liver contains the blood. The heart makes the blood move. When the person moves, the blood moves in the pulses. When the person stops moving, the blood returns to the liver. Why? The liver is in charge of the blood sea.”

3.中医学名词。或谓肝脏。《素问·五藏生成论》“故人卧血歸于肝” 唐  王冰 注:“肝藏血,心行之,人動則血運于諸經,人静則血歸于肝藏。何者?肝主血海故也。”

It means an aperture (jingxue经穴). It is located in the inner side of the thigh and one cun from the pit behind the patella. In Yizongjinjian医宗金鉴, it is said that “the blood sea is located in the inner side above the patella.”

4.中医学名词。经穴名。位于大腿内侧,离膑骨一寸处的陷窝中。《医宗金鉴·刺灸心法要诀·脾经分寸歌》:“血海膝臏上内廉。”

[161] Yangqishi is one kind of mineral. It is one kind of hornblende. It is green, celadon, or white. It is radiant. It is also called yangqishi羊起石. It tastes salty, mildly warm, and nonpoisonous. It can be made into a medicine. It can be used as invigorator and astringent. Li Shizhen mentioned in Bencao gangmu that, “yangqishi is found in Mt. Qizhoushan , Langye, Mt. Yunshan, and Mt. Yangqishan.”

【陽起石】矿石名。角闪石的一种。柱状或纤维状结晶,绿色、灰绿色或白色,有光泽。亦称羊起石。味咸,微温,无毒。可入药,中医用做强壮剂和收敛剂。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·石四·阳起石》﹝集解﹞引《别录》:“陽起石生 齊州山 山谷及 琅琊 或 雲山 、 陽起山 。”

[162] Chaonao is the same as zhangnao樟脑.

[163] Anxi should mean anxixiang (Styrax spp.). The leaves are in the shape of an egg. The blossom is red. When the resin is dried, it is red-brown and half transparent. It can be made into a spice. The colophony can be made into a spice, anxixiang.

【安息香】落叶乔木,叶子卵形,开红花,产于 印度尼西亚 、 越南 等地。树脂干燥后呈红棕色半透明状,可制成香料。以其树脂为主要原料加工做成的香,也称安息香。

[164] Ii suspect that here the authors means the medicine can cause diarrhea and thus the phlegm associated with the fire factor is released.

[165] Here it means meat.

[166] Shierjingmai means the three yin pulses and three yang pulses in the hands and feet.

【十二經脈】中医谓手、足各有三阴三阳六经脉,表里配合,成为十二经脉。

[167] I do not know whether shuiyunshenchu is a person or a shop.

[168] Bajiqian is a kind of evergreen shrub. It is also called sanmancao三蔓草 or budiaocao不凋草. It grows in the mountain. The leaves are like tea leaves. The root and stalk can be used as medicine. Its nature is mildly warm. It tastes spicy and sweet. Its effects include nourishing the yang of the kidney and strengthening the tendons and bones. It primarily cures the weakness in the kidney and the lassitude in loin and legs.

【巴戟天】常绿灌木名。又名三蔓草,不凋草。生山中,叶似茶。根茎可作中药。性微温,味辛甘,功能补肾阳,壮筋骨。主治肾虚、腰膝酸软等。

[169] Liugui is the tender branches of the cinnamon. See Bencaogangmu.

【柳桂】牡桂(肉桂)的嫩枝。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·木一·牡桂》:“其最薄者爲桂枝,枝之嫩小者爲柳桂。”

[170] Fupenzi is a shrub. It has alternate palm-shaped leaves. The flower is white and the fruit is polymeric drupelets in egg shape. When it is ripe, it is red. The fruit can be used as a medicine. It is also called fupenzi. It nourishes the liver and kidney and strengthens the essence.

【覆盆子】有刺落叶灌木。叶互生,掌状5深。花白色,果实为聚合的小核果,卵球形,熟时红色。中医以果实入药,亦称覆盆子,有补肝肾、固精的作用。

[171] Chen is the fifth of the twelve earthly branches. The chen hours are between 7 and 9 o’clock. The heavenly branches and earthly branches are also used to calculate the date.

[172] Jinye has two meanings. 1. Any liquid inside of human body, including blood, slaver, tears, sweats, and so on. Normally it means slaver. 2. Water or liquid.

【津液】1.中医对人体内液体的总称,包括血液、唾液、泪液、汗液等。通常专指唾液。2.水滴;液汁。

[173] Sangjisheng is a kind of evergreen small shrub. It usually parasitizes Theaceae山茶科 and cupuliferous山毛榉科 plants. The leaves are coriaceous and in egg shape. It blossoms in the summer and autumn. The flowers are amaranth. The berry is round. There is also Loranthus yadoriki (maoye sangjisheng毛叶桑寄生), which is also called sangshang jisheng桑上寄生. Its branches, leaves, and flowers have brown hairs. The stalks and leaves can be used as a medicine, which is called guangjisheng广寄生. They can cure rheumatism and aches in the waist and on back.

【桑寄生】桑寄生科。常绿小灌木,常寄生于山茶科和山毛榉科等植物上。叶革质,卵形至长椭圆状卵形。夏秋开花,紫红色。浆果椭球形。另有毛叶桑寄生,也称桑上寄生。枝、叶、花均被褐色毛。中医以茎叶入药,叫广寄生,能治风湿痛、腰背痠痛等。

[174]Zhushi has two meanings. 1. The fruits that bamboo grows. It is also called zhumi竹米. In Bencaogangmu, Li Shizhen mentioned that, “zhushi is found in Lantian. In Jiangdong, [the bamboo] blossoms but does not have fruit. The bamboo can grow fruits like wheat and they can be eaten as staple food.”

【竹實】1.竹子所结的子实,形如小麦。也称竹米。明  李时珍 《本草纲目·木四·竹实》﹝发明﹞引 陶弘景 曰:“竹實出 藍田 。 江 東乃有花而無實,頃來斑斑有實,狀如小麥,可爲飯食。”

  1. it is a kind of fungus growing on the bamboo roots. It is also called zhurou竹肉 or zhugu竹菰. In the Tang biji Youyangzazu, Duan Chengshi mentioned that, “there is zhumi in Jianghuai area. It grows on the bamboo joints. It is like a small ball and tastes like white chicken (baiji白雞).” In Bencaogangmu, Li Shizhen mentioned that, “ in Bencao本草, Chen Cangqi mentioned that, ‘zhourou is also called zhushi, growing on the branches of bitter bamboo (kuzhu苦竹). It is as large as an egg and like meat. It has strong toxicity. It should be boiled with ash liquid for twice. After boiling it, it can be eaten as normal vegetables. If it has not been fully cooked, it will thrust the throat and make the person bleed and the nails break off.’ This is similar to what Chen Cheng said about zhushi. I am afraid that they are the same. But the one growing on bitter bamboo is poisonous and it is different from zhumi. Zhugu grows on rotten bamboo roots. It is like agaric and it is red.”

2.即竹肉。亦称“ 竹菰 ”。生在朽竹根节上的菌类。唐  段成式 《酉阳杂俎·草篇》:“ 江  淮 有竹肉,生竹節上,如彈丸,味如白雞。”  明  李时珍 《本草纲目·木四·竹实》:“ 陳藏器 《本草》云:‘竹肉,一名竹實,生苦竹枝上。大如雞子,似肉臠,有大毒,須以灰汁煮二度,煉訖乃依常菜茹食,煉不熟則戟人喉出血,手爪盡脱也。’此説與 陳承 所説竹實相似,恐即一物,但苦竹上者有毒爾,與竹米之竹實不同。……此即竹菰也。生朽竹根節上。狀如木耳,紅色。”

[175]Difu is also called saozhoucai掃帚菜. It is a kind of annual herb. The stalk ramifies into several branches. The leaves are linear and lanceolate. It has small yellowgreen flowers. The stalks can be used to make a broom. The fruit is called difuzi, which is oblate and has wings. It can be used as a medicine.

【地膚】通称“掃帚菜”。一年生草本植物,茎多分枝,叶线状披针形,开黄绿色小花,茎可做扫帚。果实叫地肤子,扁圆形,有翅,可入中药。

[176] Cheqian is a perennial herb. It has ovate-oblong leaves. it blossoms in the summer and the flowers are pea green. The fruits are fusiform. The leaves and the seeds can be used as medicine. It is diuretic, kills cough, and cures diarrhea.

【車前】植物名。车前科。多年生草本。叶子长卵形,夏天开花,淡绿色,果实纺锤形。叶子和种子可以入药,有利尿、镇咳、止泻等作用。

[177] Wangxiang is a constellation terminology. The Five Elements (wuxing五行) is matched to the four seasons. For each season, the Five Elements are described as thriving (wang旺), supportive(xiang相), resting (xiu休), imprisoned (qiu囚), and dead (si死). For example, in the spring, the wood is thriving, the fire is supportive, the water is resting, the metal is imprisoned, and the earth is dead. For the Eight Characters (bazi八字, which are the year, month, day, and hour of the person’s birth, recorded by the heavenly and earthly branches) of a person, if the heavenly branch of the date is correspondent to the thriving or supportive earthly branch of the month, his birth is fortunate. If the heavenly branch of the date is correspondent to the imprisoned or dead earthly branch of the month, his birth is not fortunate. The Qing scholar Zhai Hao翟灏 explained in Tongsubian通俗编, “in Lunheng論衡, it is said that ‘the spring and the summer are resting and imprisoned, while the autumn and the winter are thriving and supportive. It is not that one can make it. It is because the way of heaven is natural.’ I think that, according to the Yin-Yang philosophers, the Five Elements are thriving vicissitudinarily in the four seasons. One should act when the qi is thriving and supportive. For example, in the third month in the spring, the wood is thriving, the fire is supportive, the earth is dead, the metal is imprisoned, and the water is resting. In the third month of the summer, the fire is thriving, the earth is supportive, the metal is dead, the water is imprisoned, and the wood is resting. Therefore, it is commonly said that it will be thriving and supportive if one acts at the right time. It will be resting and imprisoned if he acts at the wrong time.”

【旺相】命理术语。星命家以五行配四季,每季中五行之盛衰以旺、相、休、囚、死表示,如春季是木旺、火相、水休、金囚、土死。凡人之八字中的日干逢旺相的月支为得时,逢囚、死的月支为失时,如日干为木,逢春为旺,逢冬为相,皆属得时。清  翟灏 《通俗编·祝诵》:“旺相……《論衡·禄命篇》:‘春夏休囚,秋冬旺相,非能爲之也,天道自然。’按,陰陽家書,五行遞旺于四時,凡動作宜乘旺相之氣,如春三月則木旺、火相、土死、金囚、水休;夏三月則火旺、土相、金死、水囚、木休。故俗語以凡得時爲旺相,失時爲休囚也。”

[178] The author.

[179] See the attached photo.

[180] Shiyan has two meanings. 1. A kind of rock looking like a sparrow. In Bencaogangmu, Li Shizhen mentioned that, “there are two kinds of shiyan. One is this, which is a kind of rock. Its shape is like a sparrow and has patterns on it. The round and larger ones are male, while the long and smaller ones are female.”

【石燕】1.似燕之石。明  李时珍 《本草纲目·石三·石燕》:“石燕有二,一種是此,乃石類也。狀類燕而有文,圓大者爲雄,長小者爲雌。”

  1. shiyan is a kind of bird like a bat. It lives in stone caves and tree pits. In Bencaogangmu, Li Shizhen mentioned that, “shiyan is like a bat. Its mouth is square. It drinks the water on the stalactites.”

2.鸟名。似蝙蝠。产于石窟树穴中。 明  李时珍 《本草纲目·禽二·石燕》﹝集解﹞引 萧炳 曰:“石燕似蝙蝠,口方,食石乳汁。”

[181] Zhongwan has two meanings. 1. The middle part of the stomach. In Nanjing难经, it is said that, “the Middle Burner is located in the middle of the stomach. It is neither up nor down.”

【中脘】1.谓胃的中部。《难经·荣卫三焦》:“中焦者,在胃中脘,不上不下。”

  1. Zhongwan is also an acupuncture point. It belongs to the Ren pulse. It is located one cun below the shangwan and four cun above the navel. It is located between the Screening-the-Heart Bone an d the navel.

2.穴位名。属任脉经,在上脘下一寸,脐上四寸。居心蔽骨与脐之中央。腑病多治此穴。

[182] Danzhong has two meanings. 1. The place in the middle of the thorax and where the arcula cordis is located. In Suwen素问, it is said that, “danzhong is the office of the officials, where the happiness come from.” Wang Bing makes a note that, “danzhong is located between the two nipples. It is the sea of the qi.”

【膻中】1.中医名词。指胸腔中央心包所在处。《素问·灵兰秘典论》:“膻中者,臣使之官,喜樂出焉。” 王冰 注:“膻中者,在胸下兩乳之間,爲氣之海。”

  1. Danzhong is also an acupuncture point.

2.针灸穴位名。

[183] Niwan is a Daoist term. It is the name of the god of the brain. In Daoism, the human body is a small cosmos. Gods reside in every part of the body. The God of the brain is Jinggen, whose alias is Niwan.

道教语。脑神的别名。道教以人体为小天地,各部分皆赋以神名,称脑神为 精根 ,字 泥丸 。

[184] Xingqi is a Daoist term. It means one set of techniques of nourishing the life, including inhaling and exhaling.

【行氣】1.道教语。指呼吸吐纳等养生方法的内修功夫。

  1. xingqi also means the transportation of the vital qi (jingqi精气).

2.中医指输送精气。

[185] I suspect it is an acupuncture point.

[186] Guqi means the stomach qi. See Suwen and Yizongjinjian.

【谷氣】中医名词。指胃气。《素问·阴阳应象大论》:“谷氣通於脾,雨氣通於腎。”《医宗金鉴·张仲景<伤寒论·太阳病下>》:“谷氣下流。”注:“谷氣者,即胃氣也。”

[187] Tiangen has three meanings. 1. It is a constellation, the third one among the seven constellations in the east. It includes four stars.

【天根】1.星名。即氐宿。东方七宿的第三宿,凡四星。

  1. it means the nature.

2.自然之禀赋、根性。

3.it means the heel.

3.星相术士谓人之足后跟。

[188] Gushen is a Daoist term. Originally gu and shen is used separately, while later they are usually used together. It is said in Laozi that, “if one gets a spirit (shen神), he will be miraculous. If he gets a valley (spirit; gu谷), he will be full.” It is also said that, “the grain and spirit do not die.” There are three different interpretations about what gushen means in Laozi.  Cf. Arthur Waley’s translation, “the Valley Spirit never dies.”

【谷神】古代道家用语。谷和神本分用。后多并称。《老子》:“神得一以靈,谷得一以盈。”又:“谷神不死。”诸家解释歧异,主要有三说:

  1. gu means valley and shen means a mysterious and shapeless thing. Gushen means the Dao, which is empty, shapeless, changing, and never dying.

(1)谷,山谷;神,一种渺茫恍惚无形之物。谷神即指空虚无形而变化莫测、永恒不灭的“道”。

  1. gu means grain and thus it also has the meaning of raising and nourishing. Gushen means the god of fertility, or the Dao. Gao Heng notes, “the Dao can raise everything in heaven and earth. It is called gushen. That Gushen never dies means that gushen will exist for ever.”

(2)谷,通“ 穀 ”,义为生养。谷神谓生养之神,亦即“道”。“道能生天地養萬物,故曰谷神。不死言其長在也。”说见 高亨 《老子正诂》卷上。

  1. gu means grain and thus it has the meaning of caring. Shen means the Gods of the Five Internal Organs. Heshanggong notes, “if one can take care of the gods, he will not die. The gods mean the Gods of the Five Internal Organs. ” therefore, gushen means the techniques of taking care of one’s body.

(3)谷,通“ 穀 ”,义为保养。神,指五脏神。《老子》“谷神不死” 河上公 注:“人能養神則不死,神謂五藏之神也。”引申指导引养生之术。

[189] Wuding is the five ancient ritual vessels containing ram, pork, carved meat, fish, and dried meat respectively. See Yili.

【五鼎】1.古代行祭礼时,大夫用五个鼎,分别盛羊、豕、膚(切肉)、鱼、腊五种供品。见《仪礼·少牢馈食礼》。

[190] Qiongsu is a kind of ancient liquor that the transcendents drink.

[191] Sun Simiao.

[192] Guzheng is a kind of sickness in Chinese medical history. It is a syndrome in which  yin is weak and the patient is tired. In Zhubing yuanhou lun诸病源候论, Chao Yuanfang巢元方said, “there are five kinds of zheng diseases. one of them is guzheng, whose root is located in the kidney. The patient feel the body cold in the morning and feel hot in the evening.”

【骨蒸】中医学病症名。为阴虚劳瘵的一种症状。 隋  巢元方 《诸病源候论·虚劳病诸候下》:“夫蒸病有五,一曰骨蒸,其根在腎,旦起體凉,日晚即熱。”

[193] Sanyan are three kinds of animals that Daoist practitioners should not eat. They are wild goose (yan雁), dog, and mullet (wuyu乌鱼). See the photo.

【三厭】道教谓三种不忍食的动物,即雁、狗、乌鱼。

[194] Liuchu are horse, cow, sheep/goat, chicken, pig, and dog.

Yuan Mei and His Suiyuan Shidian Food Book

August 23rd, 2015

Suiyuan Shidan:

 

The Garden of Accord Food Book

 

Yuan Mei

 

Translated by Beilei Pu

Edited by E. N. Anderson

And Jerry Schmidt (intro only, so far)

 

Riverside, CA

Version of June 2015

 

 

Introductory Note

 

Yuan Mei (1716-1797) was known as a champion of women’s education, a versatile and brilliant poet and writer, and a foodie par excellence.  He earned a jinshi degree, roughly equivalent to a Ph.D. (though demanding much more memorization), at 23, a striking accomplishment.  He duly received high office.  In 1748, however, he retired, to live on family income and devote his life to writing, teaching, and eating.  Born and raised in the area of Hangzhou and living his life in the Yangzi delta, he had access to the most sophisticated food culture in China, and indeed in the world at the time.

 

Yuan participated in an intense, talented world.  The literary and artistic scene in the Yangzi delta was an open, tolerant, peaceful one.  Yuan’s adult life coincided with the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1636-1696), an era of peace and prosperity.  Trade and commerce flourished.  Unusual in Chinese history was the respect for women, at least among the intellectual and literary circles in which Yuan moved.  He may well have known Cao Xueqin, whose great novel Hong Lou Meng idealized the brilliant but fated girls with whom Cao grew up.  He was a friend of Zheng Xie, whose poems speak movingly of women of all ages and in all walks of life.  The wider context—footbinding, Neo-Confucian morality, and all—was terribly harsh on women, but Yuan and many others tried to give them the fairest chance possible.

 

Perhaps the best short insight into Yuan’s complex and fascinating character is one of his later poems:

Seventy, and still planting trees…

Don’t laugh at me, my friends.

Of course I know I’m going to die.

I also know I’m not dead yet.

(Tr. J. P. Seaton, 1997, p. 92).

One can easily imagine Yuan smiling happily and a bit ironically, as he watches his workmen plant a row of trees.  Perhaps he even took up a shovel himself (though at 70 he probably did not).  The combination of resigned realism, playful enjoyment of life and society, and deep probing into what life and death really mean, is pure Yuan Mei.

 

All of which merely sets the background for China’s most popular traditional food book.  Yuan’s birthday, March 25 in the western calendar, has been declared by the Chinese as International Chinese Food Day.

 

The title literally means “the Sui Garden Recipes.”  Shidan literally means “eating documents.”  Dan can also mean “single” or “simple,” and I strongly suspect it is a pun, since Yuan loved simple food.  Sui means “to follow, to be in accord.”  Jerry Schmidt, an expert on Yuan Mei, translates it “Harmony Garden” (Schmidt 2015).  Exactly what Yuan had in mind when he gave that name to his garden is somewhat unclear, but one can be sure he had all the meanings of the character in his thoughts somewhere.  He apparently worked on this food book till he died, with drafts circulating for many years (Waley 1956:195).

 

Yuan’s good humor and delight in writing about his friends and his good dinners rather steal the show in this book.  A true recipe book it is not.  The recipes herein are as vague and cursory as only traditional home recipes can be.  Often all pretense of a recipe is dropped, and Yuan simply reminisces about good food in good company.  It is beyond us to convert the recipes into usable form; they are simply too fragmentary.  The reader is thus turned loose to use his or her imagination.  It is hard to imagine, for example, that the stewed and red-cooked dishes were as completely spiceless as they are here; one assumes that Yuan would add star anise, white pepper, fennel, ginger and the like, according to taste and mood, as a modern Chinese cook would do.  We have silently added some necessary explanatory words, but any substantial explanation not in the text is marked by square brackets.

 

 

Translation notes

 

References to Yi Yin and Yi Ya are to legendary chefs of ancient China, who were supposed to be incomparable.  Yi Yin appears to be purely fictional. Yi Ya may have existed, but stories about him include some tall tales.

 

We have tried to provide scientific names for obscure itsems, checking against Shiu-ying Hu’s definitive encyclopedia, Food Plants of China (2005).

 

“Autumn oil” is a common term used herein for soy sauce.  It may indicate a special kind, though probably it just means the regular sauce made in the fall after the soybean harvest.  We leave it as “autumn oil” a few times for the effect, otherwise simply call it soy sauce.  However, there is probably more to Yuan’s soy sauces than we understand, and probably a soy sauce expert needs to look at this book (see Huang 2000—but, alas, H. T. Huang is no longer with us).

 

“Liquor” here translates jiu, actually meaning any alcoholic liquid. Unfortunately, an old literary tradition in English translates jiu as “wine,” causing endless confusion.  In Yuan Mei’s book, jiu normally refers to a still (noncarbonated) ale made from rice or millet, but in Qing times there were many other jiu, ranging from true wine (from grapes) to a very wide variety of distilled liquors.  Yuan does refer to these occasionally; unless otherwise noted, though, “liquor” was a still ale.  There were, and are, countless forms and local versions of this, and until recently people often brewed their own; older cookbooks all have recipes for doing this, and sometimes for distilling as well.  We cannot fight usage all the way.  For instance, we retain “winecup” for the small cups used for drinking jiu. 

 

 

Measures

 

A jin, “catty” in English, was historically 1 1/3 lb or about 600 gr.  A liang or “catty ounce” is 1/16 of this, about 38 gr.  A qian is a tenth of a liang.  A fen is a tenth of a qian.  A liquor cup is a very small amount; traditional Chinese liquor cups hold only one or two ounces.

 

The standard measure of time in the old Chinese kitchen was an incense stick.  It takes about a half hour for an ordinary incense stick to burn down.  Two sticks means an hour.

 

 

References

 

Giles, Herbert A.  1923.  Gems of Chinese Literature.  Vol. II, Prose.  Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh.

 

Hu Shiu-ying.  2005.  Food Plants of China.  Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.

 

Huang, H. T.  2000.  Science and Civilisation in China.  Vol. 6:  Biology and Biological Technology.  Part V:  Fermentations and Food Science.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

 

Seaton, J. P.  1997.  I Don’t Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei.  Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press

 

Waley, Arthur.  1956.  Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet.  New York: Grove Press.

 

Our edition of Yuan Mei was edited by Chen Weiming and published in Beijing in 2010 by Chinese Culture Publishing House, reprinted 2012.

 

Part 1: Introductory Basic Knowledge

 

In all things one needs to know the essentials.  Thus, in cooking we need to know basic skills.

All things in the world have their inherent characteristics, just as people have different natural qualities. If one is really stupid, even Confucius’ and  Mencius ‘ teachings can do him no good.  And if the food ingredients are intrinsically not good, even if Yi Ya cooked them, they would still not taste good.

Turning to the main points: pork with thin skin, not rancid or stinking, is the best.  For chicken, it is best to select a castrated rooster less than a year old, not an old or overly young one.  Crucian carp with flat bodies  and white bellies are the best; if they have black back ridges, they will have hard bones, which look bad in a dish, diminishing appetite.  The best eels are from lakes and flowing streams; eels from a river have harder bones, looking like cluttered branches.   Ducks fed with natural grains produce white and juicy meat.  Tender bamboo shoots are found in good loam, and are small, fresh and delicious.  Hams can differ as much as sea and sky. Similarly, dried fish from Taizhou in Zhejiang can differ as much as ice and hot coals.  The same goes for other kinds of ingredients. As a general rule, in a meal, 60% of the credit should go to the chef, 40% to the persons doing the shopping.

 

 

Information on Condiments

 

The chef’s seasoning is like women’s use of clothing and jewelry. A woman of heavenly beauty,  good at make-up, but dressed in rags, even if as lovely as Xishi will not seem attractive. A truly skilled cook choosing sauce will choose soy sauce made in summer, and will always taste first to check if it is sweet.  Sesame oil is the type of oil to pick, and one needs to identify the source.  Liquor should be real fermented brew, with the lees filtered out.  For vinegar, use rice vinegar, not muddy but clean and mellow. Clear or thick sauce, oil from animal or vegetable sources, sweet or sour liquor,  old or new vinegar, must be used without the slightest mistakes in choice. Other items, such as onions, brown pepper, ginger, cinnamon, sugar, and salt, even if you do not use much, always try to choose top quality. Suzhou autumn oil sauce sold in the store comes in three grades with different qualities. Zhenjiang vinegar whose color is good, but is not sour enough, loses the important function of vinegar. The best vinegar is made in Banpu; vinegar from Pukou follows.

 

(Zhenjiang vinegar is still a top-quality item, but some is better than others; users of it today will know from experience exactly what Yuan means.)

 

 

Knowledge about Cleaning

 

Rules for cleaning food and raw materials:  For birds’ nestss, remove any remaining feathers.  To clean sea cucumbers, rinse off the dirt.  For shark fin, brush off the sand.  For deer tendon, get rid of  anything rank-smelling. Meat has tendons and bones—take these out so it will be succulent.  Duck has rank-smelling kidneys; cut these out to make it clean. As to fish, once the gall bladder is broken, the whole dish tastes bitter.  The slime of eel, if not washed off, makes the whole bowl smell fishy.  Use only the white stems of chives (take off the leaves) and the heart of a cabbage.  The Rites says: “For fish, take out the cheek bones; for sea turtle, cut off the anus,” indicating the cleaning methods for these raw materials. A proverb says: “If you want to eat good fish, first take out the white tendons.”  This has the same meaning.

 

(The white tendons are on both sides of a fish’s back, inside the body cavity, right and left of the backbone; they have to be removed to avoid nasty smells.)

 

 

Seasoning Information

 

The rules for seasoning foods are determined by the type of cuisine. There are foods cooked in water, others cooked in liquor, others in both liquor and water. There are dishes that use salt, others that use soy sauce, others that use both. Some food are very greasy, and need to be fried first; some foods smell very fishy, and must first be moistened with vinegar.  Some foods need to be cooked with crystal sugar to bring out the original flavor.  Some foods are best dry-scorched, which can make the food flavor more concentrated, as in stir-frying.  Some cooking is best done as soup, to get the flavors outside the food item and into the broth.  This method is commonly used for those foods that are limpid and refreshing, and that easily float on the surface of the dish.

 

 

Information about Matching Foods

 

The saying goes: “A woman needs a good match for a husband.”  The Rites also said: “A qualified person needs a good match.” For cooking methods, isn’t it the same?  To cook anything,  one must have ingredients that match. Light dishes should go with light ingredients; strong dishes should blend heavy ingredients.  Soft dishes should have soft ingredients.  Hard dishes need hard ingredients.  In this way, one can make the best dishes. Some ingredients can be cooked with either meat or vegetables, such as mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and wax gourd. Some ingredients can be cooked with  meat only, like onion, leek, fennel, and fresh garlic. Some can be cooked only with vegetables, such as celery, lilies, and sword bean. Often one sees someone put crab meat into a birds’ nests soup, or put lily in a chicken or pork dish. This match is like Su Jun and Tang Yao sitting in front of each other—highly absurd.  However, if meat and vegetable products are used wisely, they can also give a good effect: for example, fried meat with vegetable oil, and stir-fried vegetables with lard.

 

(Su Jun was a Jin Dynasty general who rebelled and briefly occupied the capital, saying “I would rather be on a hill looking at a prison than in a prison looking at the hill”; Tang Yao was an emperor in mythic times, in the days of Shun.)

 

 

Information on Cooking Single Ingredients

 

If food tastes too strong, it can only be used alone; it cannot be combined with other foods.  As the famous statesmen Li Jiang and Zhang Juzheng had to stand alone, in order to give full play to their talents, so foods such as eel, turtle, crab, fish, beef, and mutton and lamb, should be separate dishes.  They do not mix well with other materials. Why?  Since they have strong flavors, they are quite enough for a dish.  However,  there are shortcomings: they need five-spice, and cooking by skilled chefs, to bring the fragrant flavor out without bad smells. Therefore, when I see people in Nanjing liking turtle cooked with sea cucumber, or shark fins with crab meat, I cannot help but frown. Turtle, crab meat, and sea cucumber’s flavors can not mix well with shark fin and sea cucumber. Instead the tastes of shark fin and sea cucumber can ruin turtle and crab meat.

 

(Five-spice is a nonstandardized spice mix that can have anything from four to seven spices.  Standard ingredients include black pepper, cumin seeds, cinnamon, star anise, fennel seeds, and similar pungent warm flavorings.  It is still used with strong-flavored meats.  A modern diner would usually agree with Yuan Mei on the unlikely mixes noted in the last sentences.)

 

 

Cooking Temperature Information

 

Among cooking methods, the most important thing is to master the fire. Sometimes it must be a high fire, as in stir-frying, deep-frying, and similar things. Insufficient fire makes unpleasing dishes. Sometimes it must be slow, as in simmering, boiling, and the like. If the fire is too hot, these dishes look dry and dull. Some dishes need a military fire and then a civilian fire [a delightful metaphor for a fierce fire and then a gentle one], to keep the stock [from boiling away]. Impatience would make the dishes burnt on the outside but raw inside. For some dishes the longer you cook, the tenderer it will be, such as kidney, eggs, and the like. For some food, even with a short time of cooking, it would lose its tenderness, such as fresh fish, clams and the like. In cooking meat, if we fail to get it out of the pan in time, the color will change from red to black. In cooking fish, it is the same: fish meat will turn dry. While cooking, if you keep lifting the lid from the wok or pot, the dish will end up with less flavor but more foam. If you stop the fire and cook again, the oil and flavor will be lost. In Taoist alchemy, after nine rounds of cooking down, cinnabar becomes elixir. Confucians concentrate everything, avoiding excess and deficiency, and finding the center. When a chef knows fire and can correctly and carefully manage it, he has the Way of cooking. When the fish is put on the table, its color is as white as jade, and without dryness it keeps freshness and deliciousness.  If  the fish is white like powder, and its meat is loose, it  looks dead. A beautiful shining fresh fish, cooked till it seems long dead, is a really hateful thing for me.

 

 

Color and Odor Information

 

The eyes and nose are the mouth’s neighbors.  They are also the mouth’s mediators. When a dish is placed in front of the eyes and nose,  the color and smell can give different feelings. Sometimes the dish looks fresh like autumn clouds; sometimes brilliant like amber. The delicious odor greets you before chewing and tasting, and you notice something wonderful about the food. But to keep the color vivid, do not fry it with sugar; to keep the delicious freshness and fragrance, do not use flavorings. Using such complex methods destroys the food’s delicious taste.

 

 

Information on Timing

 

To invite guests to dinner, the host usually sends the invitation about three days ahead. That is a good amount of time to consider preparing a wide variety of dishes. However, if guests drop in suddenly, then it’s necessary to prepare a simple meal.  Or if the host is outside, away from home, the situation is similar.  Can you take the water of the Eastern Sea to put out a fire in the south? It is necessary to draw up an easy-to-cook list. Examples are frying chicken slices, frying tofu with dried shrimps, fish in wine lees, ham, and the like. To be a good cook, one must know how to make quick tasty dishes in such circumstances.

 

 

Various Cooking Information

 

Each food has its own unique flavor, and foods cannot be cooked all together. Sages teach students in accordance with their aptitude.  Gentlemen [junzi] cleave to human goodness.  Yet, now, I always see bad cooks put chicken, duck, pork and goose meat in one pot to cook. The result is that everyone gets the same tastes in dishes—no surprises or uniqueness. I think if the chickens, pigs, ducks, and geese had souls, in the city of the dead they would definitely complain of their grievances! A cook who is good at cooking must have extra pots, stoves, basins, and various pots and utensils, in order to highlight the unique flavor of the food. So each dish has its own characteristics.  If we can experience the uniqueness of each dish, our hearts will blossom.

 

 

Knowing Kitchen Utensils

 

The old saying has it:  Delicious foods need to be placed in beautiful utensils. This is quite right. However, Ming dynasty wares from the times of Xuande, Chenghua, Jiajing,and Wanli are extremely expensive, and people are worried about damaging them. Rather than taking the risk, people prefer Qing dynasty wares produced in  imperial kilns. These are also very delicate and beautiful. Whenever appropriate, use bowls with bowls, plates with plates, large with large, small with small, with appropriate colors. Varied furnishings for all kinds of food on the table make the food look attractive and striking. On the other hand, rigidly using ten bowls and eight plates [a dully conventional setting] on the table appears crude and stereotyped. Precious food should be placed in big utensils; ordinary food is suited to small utensils. Stir-fry dishes go in plates, and soups in bowls. Fry-cooking should be done in an iron pot, simmering and  stewing  food in sand pots.

 

(This last sentence has something to do with the presentation, but more with the actual technique of cooking, so it seems an odd fit with the previous sentences. “Sand pots” are coarse sand-tempered earthenware casserole pots, ideal for stewing because they distribute the heat well and develop a seasoned taste.  They could be seen in any old-time Chinese kitchen.)

 

 

Serving Order Information

 

Rules for serving order:  Salty dishes should be served first, then mild dishes. Rich cuisine should also be served first, then light dishes. Non-soupy dishes should go first, then the soup dishes. Under Heaven, cuisines have five flavors; one cannot generally use one region’s flavoring in another’s cuisine. Estimate when guests have eaten until they are almost full and feel tired and sleepy, then serve spicy dishes to stimulate their appetite. If the guests drink too much and their stomachs are tiring, serve with sweet and sour dishes to refresh them.

 

(The five regional flavors are classically defined as sour in the east, bitter in the south, sweet in the center, spicy in the west, and salty in the north.  The last two, at least, are quite accurate characterizations of food in those regions of China even today, and the east still produces the best vinegar.)

 

 

Information about the Seasons

 

In summer, days are long and hot.  If you slaughter livestock too soon, the meat will easily go bad. In winter, days are short and cold; if the cooking time is slightly shorter than normal, food will not be cooked thoroughly. It is best to eat beef and lamb in winter [they are hearty, high-calorie foods].  Summer is  not the right time. Dry cured food is fit  in summer; in winter it’s out of season. As to condiments, in summer use mustard and in winter use black or white pepper. [Pepper is hot; mustard feels cooler.] Marinated pickles are inexpensive food in winter, but eaten in summer they taste precious.  Bamboo shoots are also inexpensive food, but cook them in cool autumn days, and they will seem a first class dish. Some food eaten before its season will taste  more delicious, such as eating fresh shad in March [a bit before the main run starts]. Some food eaten after its season will taste better, such as eating  fresh taro in April. Some are better if eaten in season, such as radish, which goes hollow inside [if left too long], bamboo shoots which turn bitter [again if left too long], and saury fish, whose bones harden up after the season. So all things have their place in the four seasons.  Choose the best time to eat them to avoid losing the original tasty flavors.

 

 

Proportion Information

 

In a given dish, [if it is to feature an expensive ingredient,] the expensive material should take the main role, and inexpensive material should be used in less amount.  In frying and stir-frying, too much [in the pan] and too low fire result in tough meat. Therefore, to cook one dish, use no more than a half jin [about 300 grams] of pork, beef and lamb meat; for chicken or fish, no more than six liang. You may ask: Is this enough food?  I say: when you’re done, just cook more later. Some dishes need larger amount of material.  In cooking dishes like boiled streaky pork, if you cook less than 20 catties, it would be tasteless.  [There needs to be a huge amount to create a really concentrated, rich stock—but 20 jin is a bit much, and there may be some mistake here.]  Congee is the same; without a lot of rice [lit. a peck, but water quantity unspecified], the  porridge will not be thick and heavy. Also, water must be regulated: with too much water or too little rice, the porridge will taste weak.

 

 

Information on Cleanliness

 

A knife used to cut onions is not used to cut bamboo shoots. A pepper-stamping mortar cannot be used to stamp rice powder. When a dish smells like a rag, it is because the cloth is not clean. If dishes smell like a [dirty] cutting board, it is because the cutting board was not clean. “If a craftsman wants  to do a good job, he must first prepare his tools.” [Evidently a proverb.] A good cook should often sharpen his kitchen knives, change rags, scrape the cutting board, and wash his or her hands, and only then cook dishes. Smoking ashes, head sweat, flies and ants on the kitchen range, black coal in the pan, once they pollute the dishes, they ruin the carefully made goods.  If Xi Shi the beauty got dirty, everyone would cover his nose and quickly pass on by.  [Another more or less proverbial expression; Xi Shi was the traditional “beauty” of China, like Helen in ancient Greece.]

 

 

Information on Using Starch

 

Commonly people refer to bean starch as a binder, meaning something like the way ships are pulled by fiber ropes. From this name, we can understand the role of starch in cooking. In making meatballs, it is not easy to bind the meatball together; starch is needed to do this. In making soup, the soup cannot be too greasy. You need starch [in the meatball] to solve the problem. In sautéing meat, if the meat sticks to the pot, then it easily gets burnt. Starch [coating] protects the meat from getting burnt. This is the advantage of using bean starch in cooking.  For good cooks who understand how to use starch right, it is a great help. However, wrongly used starch only creates a mess, and leads to jokes [presumably unkind quips by diners].  The book Han Zhi Kao calls bran the mediator; the mediator should really refer to starch.

 

 

Information on How to Choose the Right Materials

 

Some rules for using materials: for a small stir-fry, use hindquarters meat.  To make meatballs, use “sandwich” meat. [“Sandwich” meat is meat has three lean layers and two fat layers evenly distributed; it is found just under the shoulder].  For simmering, use pork rib.  Make fried fish fillet with herring or Mandarin fish; make dried fish floss with grass carp and common carp. Make steamed chicken with chicken less than a year old, make stewed chicken with castrated rooster, and make chicken broth with old hen. Female chickens are fresh and juicy, male ducks are fat and meaty. With Brasenia schreberi [a succulent water plant], use tip parts with the young leaves; for celery and chives, use  the stems. These are some basic material selection methods which also apply [in general] to other selections.

 

 

Information about Uncertain Tastes

 

We want the dishes taste rich, but not greasy; or taste light, but not plain. It is really hard to fully understand and grasp the skill. Slight mistakes lead to poor cooking. When we say rich flavor, it means that the cook should extract the essence and reject the dross. If one pursues only richness and heaviness, why not just eat lard? To “taste fresh and light” refers to bringing out the prominent good flavor. If one seeks only weak and tasteless things, why  not just drink water?

 

 

Information on Fixing Mistakes

 

When master chefs cook dishes, they know how to use the right amount of seasonings, how to control fire intensity, and how to time the cooking. So the dishes come out perfect and no need more making up. However, I still have to talk about how to correct the mistakes when they happen. When seasoning, make it light rather than strong, because one may add salt but one cannot take it out [once it is in, and the same for other seasonings].. Cooking fish, it is better cook it too little rather than too long. If it needs more cooking time, one can still cook it longer; if it’s overdone, nothing can  make it tender again. The way to know the key points is observing carefully while cooking and cutting, watching the fire to understand it fully.

 

(Age-old advice, taught by every veteran cook to young learners. Always make your mistakes in the direction one can correct. One is reminded of the folktale of the ancient Greek sculptor’s advice “Make the nose too big and the eyes too small.”)

 

 

Knowing When to Keep Your Roots

 

Manchu cuisine focuses on simmering and stew cooking. Han cuisine focuses on soup and broth. Since childhood, they have learned to be good at their own styles of cuisine. Han dinners for Manchus and Manchu dinners for Han people are good ways to explore different styles of cuisine. Do not imitate Han Dan, who dropped his own walking style to copy all sorts of others. People nowadays forgot themselves often, tending to calculate how to please the visitors. Han invites Manchu, offers Manchu cuisine; Manchu invites Han, offers Han cuisine. The result is like “painting a gourd while looking at a gourd” [a Chinese saying, meaning to copy mechanically] or like “trying to draw a tiger but ending up with a dog” [another saying]. If a xiucai [roughly, an M.A.] goes to the examination [for the equivalent of a Ph.D.], and concentrates on  doing his own writing excellently, he will naturally get someone’s appreciation or career opportunity. If he just imitates a famous essay, or make an imitation of an examiner’s essay with only a little knowledge, it’s wasted effort.

 

(The Chinese second-highest and highest academic degrees required more memorization and cultural knowledge than their western equivalents, and were tested by formidably difficult written examinations; they did not require independent research but did require serious independent thought about real-world problems, contra some claims in western literature.)

 

 

Part 2  What Not to Do

 

As politicians, to get political gain, find it better to help people solve their problems than to get promotions through new projects regardless of existing problems, so with food:  one has understood half the art of cooking when one has gotten rid of the bad habits. This is why I write my “Not-to-do Lists.”

 

 

Don’t Add More Oil or Fat

 

Bad cooks like to prepare a pot of pork lard for adding a scoop on top of each dish before serving, thinking it’s the way to enhance the taste, even with a light dish like birds’ nestss. It totally ruins the original taste of the dish. If the diners don’t know, and swallow food without chewing, they may think that eating greasy food was good, but they will look like hungry ghosts reborn.

 

(“Hungry ghosts” are a Buddhist concept; greedy people and the like are apt to be reborn in the hell of hungry ghosts, where they will have vast appetites but vanishingly small mouthsHere, the greedy guests look like hungry ghosts reborn as humans and making up for lost time.)

 

 

Don’t Use the Same Cooking Tools All the Time

 

The disadvantages of this has been noted in the Cleanliness section of the “to-do lists” above.

 

 

Don’t Eat with Your Ears

 

What is an “Ear Banquet”?  It is a dinner provided in pursuit of fame. Wishing to serve something precious, so as to boast to the guests, is an ear banquet, not really [the serving of] a delicious dish. You should know that if tofu is done well, it’s better than  birds’ nests. And if you don’t cook sea cucumber [the text says “sea vegetable,” which Giles 1923:261 takes as an error for sea cucumber] right, it’s not as good as vegetables and bamboo shoots. I have said that fish, chicken, pork, and duck are the knights of the kitchen.  Each has its basic own flavor and cooking style. Sea cucumbers and  birds’ nests are like ordinary persons—no characteristics.  They can be cooked well only with the help of other food.  I have seen an official’s dinner, each bowl is as big as a big jar, containing four liang of water-cooked birds’ nest—no taste at all. The guests were trying to compliment him. I smiled and said: “we came here to eat birds’ nests, not to traffic in birds’ nests.” If the valuable item hasn’t been cooked well, although there’s large amount, it’s a waste. If he serves it only to boast how rich he is, why can’t he just put a hundred jewels in each bowl, or a quantity of gold? Then it doesn’t matter if it’s inedible.

 

(Birds’ nests, by themselves, are tasteless. Their virtues, other than the medicinal one of providing digestible protein and minerals, are that they provide a crunchy texture and are very good at absorbing other flavors.  They are good only if cooked in a very flavorful soup.  Sea cucumbers, also valued more for their medicinal protein and mineral value than for their flavor, are somewhat more flavorful, but do indeed need much supplementing to make them good.)

 

 

Don’t Eat with Your Eyes

 

What is an “eye meal”?  An eye meal is one in which there are too many dishes at a time. Now some people pursue the fame of the food; they cover the table with dishes and stacks of plates and bowls.  They eat with their eyes, not with their mouths. [Angl. “their eyes are bigger than their stomachs.”]  They don’t know that when famous writers and calligraphers write too much in a short time, there must be some failures; when famous poets write too many poems, there must be some bad lines. It is the same with a good chef. In one day, he can probably make four or five good dishes; that is about his limit. But to arrange a huge feast, even with others’ help, most likely will result in a mess. Because more people come to help, there are more different opinions. [“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”]  This can result in bad discipline during the cooking. I once went to a merchant’s house for dinner. They had three tables of dishes—desserts of sixteen types, total main course dishes of more than 40 types. The host felt proud of his treats, thinking it must have increased his face in front of the guests. However, after I got home, I needed to cook some congee to satisfy my hungry stomach. Due to my experience, I think this merchant’s dinner was less than successful—indeed, it was not very sophisticated! The Southern-dynasty writer Kong Linzhi (369-423) once said: “People nowadays have many dishes, but rather outside the mouth—it’s more for the eyes’ satisfaction.” In my words, too many dishes on one table create unsatisfying views as well as unsatisfying flavors.

 

 

Don’t Overcook the Food

 

Everything has its basic nature, and cannot be distorted to be something else. Let nature take its course. For a good thing like birds’ nests, why mash it down to make a ball?  A sea cucumber is a sea cucumber, why cook it down to a sauce? When watermelon is cut, it won’t stay fresh for long. Why make it into cakes?  When apples are too ripe, they are not crisp.  Why steam them to make dry fruit?  Other things like Autumn Vine cakes from Zun Sheng Ba Jian and Magnolia Cake made by Li Liweng are all pretentiously overcooked pieces. It’s like twisting osier branches to make cups—they lose their main features. It’s also like daily ethical behavior; one can benefit the household just by performing normal good virtue.  There is no need for strange practices.

 

Don’t Set Food Aside to Wait

When flavors are fresh, they should be taken out of the pot and tasted soon. If set it aside and eaten later, all the good flavor will be gone. It’s like clothes that have grown moldy—it doesn’t matter how expensive and shiny the fabric is, as long as the mold is on it, it smells bad and looks grey.  I know an impatient host; every time he invites friends for dinner, he always wants all the dishes to be served together. So his cook has to put all the dishes in steamers to keep it warm until the master rushes him to serve. With such a way of serving food, how can anyone keep the flavors in?  Good chefs cook every dish with hearts and thoughts, but those eaters who only know how to swallow without chewing, in a rush, don’t really appreciate the hard work of the chef. It’s like a person who has got the best fruit, such as a Mourning Pear.  They don’t eat it when fresh; instead they steam it to eat. When I was in the eastern part of Guangdong, I went to Governor Yang Lanpo’s house and had eel soup there.  It was so tasty that I asked how it was made. He answered: “I just killed the eel, cooked it and ate it right away without a pause.” Other kinds of dishes should be made and tasted the same way.

 

 

Don’t Waste, and Don’t Kill without Mercy

 

A violent person won’t appreciate others’ hard work, a wasteful person won’t make good use of materials. Chicken, fish, duck and goose, from head to tail, all have their special flavors. One should not take only a bit and then throw away the rest. I once saw a person cook a soft-shelled turtle; he only used the soft meaty edge of the shell and didn’t know the best part was the interior–the turtle meat. And there are people who eat only a fish belly, not knowing the best part is the fish’s back. In pickled eggs, the most delicious is the egg yolk, not the white. However, to toss all the egg whites, and eat only the yolks, would make the eater feel less interested in the eggs. I point it out not only because I treasure food in life, but also to bring up the point that we don’t need to over-trim in cooking food. If to do so would make a better dish, it may worth doing, but if to do so only results in wasting and poor taste, it’s better not to act this way. As for grilling live geese on charcoal for a goose web dish, or cutting live chickens open for livers, these are very cruel acts that should not be done by gentlemen (junzi). Why is this? If domestic animals are used for food, they have to be killed, but killing has to be kind, not merciless.

 

 

Don’t Abuse Alcohol

 

In judging a matter, only sober people can understand it.  Similarly, as to telling good food or bad food apart, only sober people can do it. Yi Yin [the legendary chef of ancient China] said: “The essence of flavor is hard to elaborate in words.” Even sober people can’t do it easily. How can noisy drinkers taste the flavor? I often see those who drink hard, eating while playing finger-guessing games.  Even if the food is very good, they cannot taste it; it’s like chewing on wood chips. They care only about the drink, not the food. In fact, if occasionally it’s necessary to drink, we should eat the food first, then drink and play. In this way, both drink and food are enjoyed.

 

 

No Hot Pot

 

In winter time, people like to eat hot pot with guests. During the hot pot season, however, loud talking and a noisy atmosphere really disgust me. Also, different food needs different cooking time and temperature and fire level.  These can’t be mixed up. Now all food is cooked in the hot pot. How can we get delicious flavors? Recently, people are using distilled alcohol as fuel instead of charcoal, thinking it’s a better way, but it’s still not the right way. As long as food has been cooked too long and too hot, it cannot maintain proper flavor. Someone might ask: “What about food that gets cold, is it still tasty?” I say: “Food that has been improperly cooked, with the cooking mistimed, can only taste awful when it’s cold.”

 

(The hot pot, firepot, huoguo, or—in Cantonese—tapinlou, is a pot with  a charcoal burner in the center, keeping the stock boiling.  In a proper hot pot, the diners hold thinly-sliced food in chopsticks and cook them in the stock to their taste.  Evidently Yuan Mei had to suffer hot pots in which all the food was thrown in at once and boiled to death—not the proper way.)

 

 

No Forcing Guests to Eat

 

To invite friends for dinner is a matter of good manners. It’s up to friends to decide which food they want to taste. Hosts should make their guests feel at home.  This is the polite way to treat the guests.  The host should not force guests to eat. I often notice the host taking all kinds of food with his chopsticks and piling it up in front of guests, making guests’ plates look ugly and greasy and disgusting. The host should know his guests have eyes and hands, and they are not children or hungry brides who are shy to take the food themselves. Why treat the guests in a vulgar-woman style that is extremely insulting? Lately, courtesans have come to love this ugly habit; they pick up food with chopsticks and stuff into customers’ mouths. The scene looks as terrible as a rape. In Chang’an, there’s a very hospitable person who can’t seem to manage to serve tasty food. One of his guests asked him:” Are you and I good friends?” He answered: “Of course!” Then the guest kneeled down, and  said: “If so, I have one request, and you must say yes before I get up.” The surprised host asked: “What can I do for you?” The guest said: “In future, if you want to invite friends for dinner, please don’t include me.” Everyone laughed.

 

 

Don’t Waste Good Fat

 

Fish, pork, chicken and duck all have lots of fat, but we wish to save the good fat in meat and turn it to good flavor, not waste it in cooking liquid.  In this way we can keep its natural essence. If the good fat was cooked into soup, it tastes less delicious than if it stays in the meat. For this [loss of fat], there are three reasons: first, if the fire is too high, the moisture leaks out and evaporates, and multiple times we must add water during the cooking  [leaching out still more fat]. Second, if the fire is shut down, later be turned on again, [the fat seeps out]. Third, if the cook is impatiently checking the food by opening the lid over and over during cooking, that will make the good fat leak out of the meat.

 

 

Don’t Fall into Stereotyping

 

Tang Dynasty poems are the best, so why don’t all masters choose Tang’s regulated-verse form?  [This form—eight-line poems with complex rhyme and tone systems—was the “signature style” of the great Tang poets.  Yuan himself was a master of it—but of many other forms too.]  Because it has become a cliché. If poetry is thus, so is cuisine. Nowadays, official cuisine forms include “sixteen plates”, “eight big bowls”, and  “four desserts” or “Man-Han [Manchu and Han Chinese] Banquets,” “eight snacks,” “ten main courses,” and so on. These cheap names are created by chefs and have become mere stereotypes that can be used for wedding ceremonies, welcoming superiors, and such reputation-related events. They are also coupled with chair covers, table cloths, fancy screens, and incense burner tables. But for casual dinners, as when one invites friends to drink and write poems, such things are unnecessary. All we need are different types of plates and bowls, and food displayed in order. This shows dignity. My household, when we celebrate birthday and wedding feasts, unfortunately has fallen into these stereotypes, because we hire chefs from outside. However, with my training, they will henceforth follow my directions and each feast will have its unique style.

 

 

Don’t Make Turbid Meals

 

Turbid and muddy doesn’t mean thick or thin. For soup, it means coming out not black or white, but like filthy water. For braising food, it means coming out not clear or rich, but like waste material poured out from a smelly dyevat.  In these cases, the color and taste are really hard to bear. The way to avoid this is to wash well the basic materials; know how to add seasonings; pay attention to control of the fire and the broth; control the sourness and saltiness so as not to make strange or dull sensations on the eaters’ tongues. Yuxin once mentioned in his work: “Flavorless, flavorless, like pure vapor;  muddled, muddled, vulgar at heart.” This is what “turbid” means.

 

 

Don’t Be Careless

 

Don’t be careless about anything, still less in cooking.  Cooks are persons from the lower classes. If for a day they are not duly rewarded or criticized, in that day they will be lazy and casual. Their cooking will be bad because of lack of timely attention.  If we eat that food anyway, then tomorrow they will cook even worse food. Continuing with this, the food becomes trash, their job not performed well.  I say that one needs to reward or criticize them strictly and at the time. A cook who has done well needs to be praised, with details of how his cooking is good.  A cook who has done a bad job needs to be told straightforwardly why it was a bad job and how he can correct it. When cooking, seasoning must be performed well, not too plain or too salty; cooking time must be enough but not overlong. Lazy cooks who don’t love their cooking, like eaters who don’t care about the food, are problems for one who is dining and does care. Studying thoroughly and thinking through details are the keys to success in a scholar. Similarly, guiding in culinary theory and learning from each other are the duties of teachers. For cooking and diet, shouldn’t it be the same?

 

 

Part 3. Seafood

 

In the original list of the “eight precious dishes,” there were no seafoods included. Nowadays, people like to add seafood to the precious foods, so I follow the trend and have written a section on seafood.

 

 

Birds’ nests

Birds’ nests make a very expensive food  material which is not used in a casual meal. When cooking it, use two liang in a bowl, soaked with boiled natural spring water , and then pick the dark foreign substances out. Cook with fresh chicken soup, best ham soup, or fresh mushroom soup together until it turns to a white-jade color; then it’s ready. Birds’ nests are mild and fresh food material that cannot be cooked with greasy food.  They are also very smooth and cannot be cooked with other food contains bones or any hard subjects. Nowadays, people cook birds’ nests with sliced pork and chicken. In my opinion, this is not an appropriate way to eat it because it’s more like eating pork and chicken instead of birds’ nests. Some people wants to have a taste of the birds’ nests. They cook a little of it with a bowl of noodles, so little that after a moment the eaters have only noodles left.  This is another inappropriate way. It seems to be like a beggar pretending he’s rich, but only appearing poor. If there’s not much birds’ nest material, it is all right to cook it with mushroom slices, bamboo slices or tender pheasant slices. Once, at the Yang Ming government house in eastern Guangdong, I had a top-quality winter melon and birds’ nests dish. It tasted mild and fresh, smooth and tender, cooked with enough chicken broth and mushroom broth only. Birds’ nests are the color of jade, not pure white. Those who smash it into balls or dough are bad cooks.

 

(Birds’ nests are the nests of swiftlets, Collocalia spp., the best being from Collocalia esculenta.  Long harvested sustainably, they are now becoming extinct, because modern economies have no place for sustainable management.  Yuan’s instructions are all perfect, and still the rules for proper presentation.)

 

 

The Three Ways of Cooking Sea Cucumber

 

Sea cucumber is actually free of taste.  It smells fishy and has lots of sand inside. Cooking it well is difficult. It’s best to cook it with strong-flavored food. Do not make it into a mild soup. The way to prepare it, first, pick out the small spines, then soak it to wash off sand and mud, and next boil with meat soup three times over.  Finally, stew it with chicken broth and meat soup till it’s tender. It also can be combined with black mushrooms and black fungus. Because they are all black, they match the color of the sea cucumber. Usually it should be made a day before the meal, so it will be tender, juicy and smooth enough. I once observed how the household of the investigating official of Qian make sea cucumber. In summer time, they drizzled chicken soup and mustard on cooked sea cucumber slices. It turned out a very good dish. Or they would cut the sea cucumber into small cubes, stew it with bamboo, black mushroom pieces, and chicken broth. At the Officer of Jiang’s house, they use tofu skin, chicken legs and mushroom to cook with sea cucumber. It’s also a very successful dish.

 

(Sea cucumber, eaten more for health than taste, actually has a slight seafood flavor.  It is still cooked as described here.)

 

 

Two Ways of Making Shark Fin

 

Shark fin is really hard to cook to tenderness.  It has to be cooked for two days; by then it will probably be tender. There are two ways to make it: One way is to use the best ham and chicken broth, add fresh bamboo shoots and a qian of crystal sugar, then slow-cook it on a small fire; or combine broken shark fins with thin sliced turnip slices and thick chicken broth and cook it slowly on a small fire. This way the eaters wouldn’t be able to tell turnips and shark fins apart. When using the ham option, one should make it with less soup; with the turnip option, make it with more soup. Melting the shark fins into other food materials is the best general way to cook it. If sea cucumber pokes one’s nose tip or if shark fin sticks out of the plate because it’s still hard, the whole dish then becomes a joke. In the Investigator Wu’s household, they only use the top part of the shark fins.  This is another option to make the dish well. Turnip slices must be boiled in hot water fast twice to get rid of the muddy flavor. Once I was at Guo Geng Li’s place eating a shark fin dish. It was the best I ever had, but sadly I didn’t get to find out how they cooked it.

 

(Shark fin is now fading away, because the sharks are overfished; many chefs now refuse to cook it, since the fishery is now unsustainable.  Like the previous two items, it was more a medicinal food than a good-tasting item in itself. The medicinal value was as a “supplementing” or “strengthening” food—a dietary supplement.  We now know this value is due to its easily digestible protein and high mineral content. This made it very valuable in China’s malnourished past, especially to older persons.)

 

 

Abalone

 

The best way to make abalone is to stir-fry thin abalone slices. At Zhongcheng Yang’s  house, they slice the abalone, and cook it with chicken broth and tofu.  This dish, named “ Abalone Tofu,” was then dressed with special rice liquor flavored oil. At Governor Zhuang’s, big abalones are slowly cooked with a whole duck, a very special dish. Abalone is hard to make tender enough to chew easily. It has to be cooked for three days.

 

(The last figure refers to dried abalone, though even fresh abalone takes a good deal of cooking.  A zhongcheng is a vice-manager of important national security matters.)

 

 

Dried Clams

 

Clams are best for making meat soup and are famous for their fresh taste. Simply pick out the insides and cook with liquor.

 

 

Haiyan

 

Haiyan, a tiny fish from Lingbo, tastes like small shrimps. It is best used by cooking in steamed scrambled eggs. It makes a good snack.

 

 

Squid Meatballs

 

Squid meatballs are incredibly tasty but most difficult to make. The squid has to be boiled with river water to wash off the sand and get rid of the fishy smell. Then cook it with chicken broth and fresh mushrooms till tender. Military Officer Gong Yunrou’s squid meatballs are the best of all.

(These are traditionally made from the squid’s nidamental gland, a large glandular structure involved in producing eggs.  It is high in protein and has a mild smell—a very valuable sea food.)

 

 

Dried River Scallops

 

Dried river scallop are from Lingbo. The way of cooking is similar to cooking clams and mussels. The delicious part is the tiny meat part [the adductor muscle] attached to the shells. This being the case, when getting the scallops, people often throw away more than what they get.

 

(Scallops are not river animals, but for some reason are called jiang yao zhu, “river dried scallops.”)

 

 

Oyster Yellows [a standard term for oysters]

 

Oysters live on rocks. Their shells stick to the rocks, which makes it hard to pry the oysters off. Open the shells, take the meat, and make thick soup, the same way as for clams and mussels. Oysters have another name, “ghost eyes.” They can be found in Leqing and Fenghua in Zhejiang province.

 

 

Part 4.  River Fish

 

Guo Pu’s “River Discourses” mentioned numerous types of river fish. I choose the common kinds to talk about here, to make a River Fish section.

 

 

Two Ways of Making Saury

 

Saury can be pickled in honey liquor, soaked in light sauce and then placed on plate for steaming, as for herrings. For the best flavor, there is no need to add any water.  If  you want to take out the bones, just fillet the fish and pick [any remaining] bones out with tweezers. Cook it in ham soup, chicken broth or bamboo shoots soup; these are the tastiest. Nanjing people don’t like the bones, so they roast it with oil first, then fry.  [This would make the bones so carbonized that they would be edible along with the fish.]  There is an old saying: “Don’t flatten a humpbacked person’s back, or he will die.” The same is true of saury. Cut the back multiple times to smash the bones, then fry it to golden color, sprinkled with seasoning; this is the method from Tao Datai’s house in Wufu town. This way it’s hard to feel the saury bones when eating.

 

(The Chinese name literally means “knife fish,” a name which includes saury and some similarly thin-bodied sea fish.  Saury is a mackerel-like fish of particularly fine flavor.  Knife fish are bony, hence the advice. Presumably one wants to have the saury die, and get deboned too.)

 

 

Shad

 

You can stew shad with honey liquor, as with saury, and it is very good. Or it can be slightly fried, adding clear sauce and fermented rice liquor.  This is also a good method. But don’t cut it into pieces and cook it in chicken soup. And don’t take only the belly part and throw away the back, because the flavor of shad is in the [meat along the] backbone.

 

(Northwest Coast people in Canada sometimes have “feasts of salmon backbones,” which sounds awful until you learn that the salmon too has some of its finest meat in the backstrip.)

 

 

Sturgeon

 

Yin Jishan said he knew how to cook the best sturgeon dish. But his sturgeon dish was overdone and tasted too strong. At Tang’s house in Suzhou, I had stir-fried sturgeon slices that were very delicious. His method is to oil-fry the sturgeon slices first, then boil the slices with a bit of liquor and soy sauce for 30 seconds.  Then, last, he adds some water to boil the whole dish with spices, pieces of black sauce pickled cucumber, ginger, and green onions. Another method is to boil the fish in water for 10 seconds, then cut out the big bones, cut the meat part into small cubes including the cartilage of the head. Boil some chicken broth, put in the fish head cartilage, and cook it till it’s almost done, then add liquor and soy sauce, and then the fish cubes. Cook it until the meat part is 80% done. Then add liquor and autumn oil [probably a type of soy sauce made in the fall]. Then take the fish meat, slowly stew it for the last 20% of cooking with green onion, brown pepper, chives and a big glass of ginger juice for the last step.

 

(Sturgeon is a rather tough, meaty fish that needs stronger flavoring than the preceding delicate fish.  It has a great deal of cartilage that is good but needs long cooking.)

 

 

Yellow Fish

 

Yellow fish is cut into small cubes, pickled in sauce and liquor for about an hour, then hung to dry, then fried until golden. Add a teacup of Jin Hua salt black beans, a bowl of sweet liquor, and a small cup of autumn oil [see above] to cook on high heat. When the dish juice looks a bit dry and red, then add sugar , black-sauce-pickled cucumber, and ginger to cook for a minute. Then it is done. This dish smells and tastes really good. Another way to cook it is to get rid of the bones, mash the meat, then cook in a soup with chicken broth. One can also add a bit of sweet bean sauce and corn starch to thicken the texture. Yellow fish is best cooked in strong-flavored dishes, because of its rich and strong essence.

 

(“Yellow fish” is a term widely used for any yellowish fish, but it very possibly means yellowfin tuna here.  The cooking directions are right.  They are certainly wrong for yellow croaker, another fish often called “yellow fish.”)

 

 

Grouper

 

Grouper is the tenderest fish of all. Peel off the skin, take out the intestines, and use only the liver and meat. Cook it with chicken broth over a low flame, adding three parts liquor, two parts water, and one part soy sauce. When it is about done, add a big bowl of ginger juice and a few green onions to remove the fishy smell.

 

(Grouper remains an extremely popular fish, often still cooked more or less as in this recipe.  There are literally countless species in the seas off China—no one has finalized a taxonomy of all of them.)

 

 

Imitation Crab

 

Boil two yellow fish [presumably still tuna] until done. Remove all the bones. Scramble four uncooked pickled eggs.  Then first fry the fish meat on high, then add chicken broth to boiling, and then stir in scrambled egg fluid slowly. Add black mushrooms, onion, and ginger juice and liquor to cook. When served, people can add vinegar to taste.

 

(Again, the recipe makes yellowfin tuna the logical candidate for the yellow fish here.)

 

 

Part 5 Ritual Livestock- Pigs

 

Pigs are used in so many circumstances that they can be called Majority Leaders. Since our ancestors used the whole pigs as gifts for courtesy [including sacrifice to gods and ancestors], I named this part Ritual Livestock.

 

 

Two Ways to Cook a Pig’s Head

 

Pick a five-jin pig’s head, and wash it thoroughly.  Prepare three jin of sweet liquor for cooking. For a seven or eight jin  head, then prepare five jin of sweet liquor. Then, first boil the head with the liquor, add in 30 roots of green onions and three qian star anise, and boil for about 10 minutes. Then add in a big cup of soy sauce (“autumn oil”) and a liang of sugar. Continue cooking the head till fully done. Check the flavor; if it is too mild, add more soy sauce. Then add boiling water.  Remember to cover the pig’s head one inch deep.  Press it down with a heavy object. Cook it for about an hour on high, then turn to a civilian fire [or literary fire, i.e. a gentle fire.  Recall from above: this is the opposite of a “military” fire].  Continue cooking till not much juice left and the head is soft and tender. Remove the lid when the head is cooked, or the juicy taste will dissipate in the oil. Another way to cook it is to use a bucket,  split across the middle by a copper filter. Wash well a pig’s head; marinate it with spices.  Fill the bucket to just below the copper filter.  Put the head on the filter and cook it on low till done. The greasy material will drop to the bottom.  The rest is the best dish.

 

(Pig’s head remains a popular delicacy.)

 

 

Four Ways to Cook Trotters [pigs’ feet]

 

Take a trotter without the nails. Boil it to tender in clear water, then discard the greasy liquid. Take one jin of good liquor, a half glass of flavored liquor, a qian of orange peel, and four or five jujubes [“Chinese dates”]. Cook them together with the tender trotter until it falls apart. Before serving, take out the orange peel and jujubes. Then add green onion, brown pepper and liquor. This is one way to cook it. Another way is stew the trotter in dried-shrimp stock with liquor and soy sauce. Another way is boil the trotter well first, the fry the skin in vegetable oil to a crackling, then add seasonings and brown sugar to slow-cook it. There are rural people who like to peel the skin before eating.  This is called “removing the blanket.”  Another way is to use two combined pots. Put the trotter, liquor and soy sauce in the inner pot, add water in the outer pot, steam the pots for two hours. This is called Immortal Spirits’ Meat [shen xian rou]. Official Observer Qian’s house makes very fine Immortal Spirits’ Meat.

 

 

Pig Foot and Pig Sinew

 

Use only pig foot, get rid of the larger bones, cook it in chicken broth. It can be paired with pig sinew.  They are a perfect match. If there is a good leg part [attached], it can be added in.

 

 

Two Ways to Cook Pig Stomach

 

Cooking the stomach is not difficult. The only concern in cooking it is to wash well the stomach to get rid of the smells. This requires some type of process. The normal way is to rinse off the dirty mucus, then boil it in hot water till the surface hardens, then put it in cold water, then shave off the hard surface (including dirty material) with a knife. When the outer part is cleaned, cut open the stomach, cut off the grease on the stomach wall, and rub it with vinegar and salt to rid of the smells, and then rinse the wall till smooth. Now it is finally cleaned and ready to cook in any way. The northern style is to deep-fry the stomach till crisp. The southern style is commonly to boil it till tender, then slice it and eat it with dipping sauce. When boiling the stomach, don’t add salt because the meat will shrink. But if you add in liquor, the meat’s shape will recover and become crisp and tender.

 

 

Two Ways to Cook Pig Lung

 

Washing the lungs is very difficult. First rinse and clean the lung tubes till there is no more blood, then cut off the coating. Hang it upside down and beat it, then pull off the veins. Considerable skill is necessary to complete the job. After cleaning, boil in water and liquor for one day and one night. The lung will shrink to the size of a white hibiscus. It will float on the surface. Add seasonings and eat. It tastes juicy and soft. Officer Tang Xiya once held a small dinner party. Each guest had four slices in his bowl. This required four lungs. Recently, people are lacking in cooking skills, and usually just cut lungs to small pieces and stew these with chicken broth. If using pheasant broth, this dish has a milder and fresher taste. Cooking lungs with good ham is also possible.

 

(The reader will get the correct idea that lungs—“lights” in old-time culinary English—are not the choicest part of the animal.  The Mongolian equivalent of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” is “today’s lungs are better than tomorrow’s fat.”)

 

 

Pig Kidneys

 

Pig kidney slices are hard to cook well. If overcooked, they taste dull and dry. If tender, eaters might think the slices are not well done. So it is better to stew it, then eat it with a salt and brown pepper dip or other spices. Use your hands to separate the kidney; do not use a knife to cut it. If cooked a whole day, it becomes soft as mud. It also should be cooked alone, not with other things, because its smells would ruin the whole flavor [of a mixed dish]. The kidney becomes hard after stewing for 45 minutes but gets tender after stewing for a day.

 

(Modern Chinese eaters tend to prefer pork kidney slices cooked for a very brief time. Long cooking as described by Yuan would be very rare now.)

 

 

Pork Loin

 

Pork loin is good quality and tender meat. Lots of people don’t know how to cook it. Once I had pork loin at Yangzhou Governor Xie Wenshan’s house; it tasted really good. They sliced the meat, coated it with starch-powder batter, then put it in shrimp broth and cooked it with black mushroom and seaweed, immediately removing it from the fire when cooked.

 

 

Boiled Pork Slices

 

For making boiled pork slices, it’s best to use one’s own home-raised pig. Kill and clean the pig, then boil  it in a big pan to cook till 80% done.  Then leave it in the pan with the stock for another two hours. Get it out and cut off the muscle meat, then thinly slice this. When serving it, it tastes best when it’s not too hot or too cold. This is a northern style. Southern styles seem always less good than northern. Also it won’t taste good if  you use purchased pork parts instead of the whole pig. That’s why when “cold knights” need to invite guests for dinner, they prefer to serve birds’ nests instead of boiled pork slices. To make boiled pork slices requires a lot of pork. The right way to slice it is to use a small sharp knife and to cut pieces which have fat and lean parts evenly mixed. The best pork-slice dish is the Manchu people’s “Tiao Shen Pork.”

 

(“Cold knights” is an expression from the Northern and Southern Dynasties, a cheerfully ironic way to refer to less-than-affluent students and such.  Compare the Spanish nickname “poor knights” for French bread—a dish that looks noble but costs almost nothing. The point here is that an entertainer with slender means will be more prone to serve very expensive foods that can be served in limited quantity rather than a food that demands investing in a whole pig. The Tiao Shen is a ritual dance used by people to get blessings from the gods, and the pork is the offering, made with the whole pig for ritual ceremonies.)

 

 

Red Braised Meat

 

To make Red Braised Meat, it needs sweet sauce or soy sauce. Some use neither. One can cook a jin of pork with three qian of salt and stew it in pure liquor or water till the liquid is boiled dry. All three methods can make the meat color look like red amber. This dish cannot use sugar to add color. In cooking Red Braised Meat, if you remove from the pan too early, the meat looks yellowish.  If you remove it just in time, it’s red.  If you remove it too late, it turns to purple and the lean part gets really dry. While cooking, if you frequently lift the lid, the fat [actually the aroma] will leak away, and it holds the flavor of the dish. We often cut the meat to 1 or 1.5 inches cubes, and cook them until there are no more sharp corners and the lean meat melts in mouth.  This is the best. The most important thing to cook this dish is timing. As the old saying goes: “high fire for cooking congee, low fire for cooking meat.”

 

 

White Braised Meat

 

For white braised meat, choose a jin of meat, boil it in water till 80% done, then set the soup aside.  To the meat, add a half jin of  liquor and two qian of salt, and stew for two hours on low. Then add half of the soup back in, and keep on stewing until all liquid is gone and meat is tender. At this time add in green onion, brown pepper, black fungus, chives and similar vegetables to cook on high for a minute.  Then turn the fire low and cook until done.  Another way: to a jin of meat, add one qian sugar, a half jin of liquor, a jin of water and half a tea cup of clear sauce. First cook the meat and the liquor on high for about two minutes, then add in a qian of dried fennel and enough water for cooking, then cook until meat gets tender. This is also a pretty good way.

 

(This is almost a usable recipe; Yuan must have cared a lot about this dish.)

 

 

Deep Fried Marbled Meat

 

Cut streaky meat into cubes, cut off the membranes, then marinate in liquor and soy sauce for preparation. Deep fry the pork cubes in vegetable oil to make it crisp outside and tender inside. When serving, add green onions, garlic and a bit of vinegar.

 

 

Dry Pot Steamed Meat

 

First, cut the meat into cubes, place it in a small ceramic container, sprinkle on sweet liquor and soy sauce [“autumn oil”]. Then put the container in a bigger ceramic container, sealed. Then place it in a wok on low fire, and cook it without any water for about two hours. The actual amounts of soy sauce and liquor depend on the meat. Usually one keeps the liquid just above the surface of the meat.

 

 

Steamed  Meat in Ceramic Covered Bowl on Stove

 

Instead of using a wok, just place the bowl on the stove.

 

 

Steamed Meat in Porcelain Jar

 

Same method as above.  The only difference: seal the jar well and use rice husk as fuel and cook it on low heat.

 

 

Skinless Ground Meat Pie

 

Take skinless pork and cut it up. Use three eggs, both whites and yellows, for each jin of meat. Scramble the eggs and mix well in meat, adding in half a liquor cup of soy sauce and green onion pieces. Mix well. Use one lard net [the mesentery, or the net-shaped fatty tissue wrapped around pig muscles] to wrap the meat mixture. Then fry the meat pie in about four liang of vegetable oil till the two sides turn golden. Then take it out and strain the oil. Next, use one teacup of good liquor and one half liquor cup of clear sauce and pour it over the meat pie, and cook it sealed in the wok. When done, slice the meat pie, and add chives, black mushrooms, and bamboo shoot pieces on top.

 

 

Sun-bathed Dry Meat

 

Slice lean meat thinly and sun it until dry. Stir-fry  it with salt-preserved turnips.

 

 

Ham and Fresh Pork Stew

 

Cut the ham into cubes, put it in cold water. Boil for 30 seconds, then strain the water. Cut the pork, put it in cold water, and boil for 20 seconds.  Strain the water. Place ham and pork in clean water, add in four liang of liquor, green onion, chili pepper, bamboo shoots and shiitake to stew on low heat.

 

 

Air-dried Fish and Pork Stew

 

The method is as same as the ham and fresh pork stew. One only needs to cook the pork first until 80% done, then add in air-dried fish. If one waits, it gets cold, and is then called “fish pork stew jelly.” This is a Shaoxing-style dish. If the fish is too old, don’t use it at all.

 

 

Steamed Rice Pork

 

Use pork slices that are half lean and half fat. Stir-fry broken rice grains to a yellow color. Then mix them with sweet flour paste and steam,  remembering to place Chinese cabbage underneath. When done, the cabbage is as tasty as the meat. Because there is no water added, the method of cooking saves all the flavors. This dish is Jiangxi style.

 

 

Smoky Stewed Pork

 

First stew the pork with soy sauce and liquor, then smoke the whole ingredients over a sawdust fire for a while—not too long. When the meat gets half dry, it tastes extremely tender and juicy. Officer Wu Xiaogu’s Smoky Stew Pork is acclaimed as one of the best.

 

 

Hibiscus Meat

 

Take a jin of lean pork slices.  Marinate in mild sauce, then air-dry the meat for about two hours. Use 40 big shrimps, and 2 liang of lard. Cut the shrimps to size of dice. Place one shrimp on one slice of meat, beat it flat, then boil the slices in water and screen them out [take them out with a wire-mesh ladle]. Heat a half jin of vegetable oil, set the meat in the wire-mesh ladle, then deep fry until done. Screen the fried meat. For making sauce, use a half liquor cup of soy sauce, a cup of liquor, a teacup of chicken broth, and boil it all. Then pour the sauce on the meat, adding steamed rice flour [presumably as starch powder to thicken the sauce so it coats the meat], green onion, and some brown pepper, mix it, then serve.

 

 

Litchi Pork

 

Cut the meat to the size of dominoes. Boil it in water for 20 to 30 seconds [lit. “turns,” gun, i.e. of boiling water rolling over], then strain. Using a half jin of vegetable oil, deep fry the meat until it is done. Screen it, then immediately cool it in cold water to make it shrink, then screen it out once again. Last, put the meat in the pan, add a half jin of liquor, a small cup of mild sauce, and a half jin of water.  Stew it until tender and soft.

 

 

Pork with Eight Treasures

 

Use one jin of pork, a piece that is half lean and half fat. Boil for 10 to 20 seconds [lit. “turns”], screen it, then slice it to the shape of willow leaves. Prepare two liang of small clams, two liang of eagle-claw tea sprouts [named from the shape], one liang of black mushrooms, two liang of jellyfish, four walnuts, four liang of bamboo shoots, two liang of good ham, one liang of sesame oil.  Put meat, soy sauce and the liquor in the pan to stew for five minutes, then add the rest of the ingredients, except the jellyfish, which should be added last.

 

 

Daylily Pork Stew

 

Use young daylily buds, add salt to pickle, then air dry for future cooking.

 

(The stew recipe is obviously missing here. No doubt the buds were to be stewed in casserole with pork, as they still are.)

 

 

Stir-fried Pork Shreds

 

Prepare a piece of meat by getting rid of membranes, skin and bones, then slice it very finely. Marinate with mild sauce and liquor, while heating some vegetable oil in the wok. When the smoke turns from white to light gray, put in the meat and stir-fry it constantly, meanwhile add in pea starch, a bit of vinegar, a bit of sugar, white stems of green onion, chives, and similar spices. It is best to use one jin of meat and a high fire, adding no water. Another way to cook this dish is: after stir-frying the meat in oil, add sauce and liquor to stew until the color of meat changes to red, turn off the fire, add chives, and serve.

 

(The chives are presumably to be mixed in for very quick cooking, but perhaps they were chopped as garnish on top.)

 

 

Stir-fried  Pork Slices

 

Use half fat and half lean pork slices. Marinate in mild sauce. Stir-fry in a pan over a high fire.  When it makes a crackling sound, add in some sauce, a little water, green onion, cucumber slices, bamboo shoots, chives, and the like.

 

(Cooking by ear is common in Chinese kitchens; the change in sound when a piece of meat is properly stir-fried is hard to describe but useful to learn.)

 

 

Eight Treasure Meatballs

 

Mince half fat and half lean meat. Add pine nuts, black mushrooms, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, gourds, ginger, and things of this sort. Mix them all with starch powder and shape to pingpong ball size. Put the meatballs on a plate, add some sweet liquor and soy sauce, then steam. When eaten, they taste juicy and crisp. Jia Zhihua once said: “To make meatballs, it is best to mince it by slicing, not to chop it with force.”  This is the right way to proceed.

 

 

Hollow Meatballs

 

Slice the meat to mince it. Marinate with seasonings. Use solid lard as filling to wrap in the meatballs. Steam the meatballs; the lard melts inside, making hollow meatballs. People of Zhenjiang are good at this cooking method.

 

(Evidently any seasoning will do, since the recipe is for a trick, not a particular taste.)

 

 

Braised Pork Steak

 

Boil the pork thoroughly, with the skin. Then broil it in sesame oil in the pan. Cut it into cubes and eat with salt or light sauce.

 

 

Soy Sauce Pork

 

Marinate the pork for a bit, then brush salty flour paste on it. Or just marinate it in soy sauce, then air dry.

 

(This and the following recipes are for preparing pork in various ways for cooking; they do not detail how to cook it.  They appear to be ways of readying the meat for a red-cooking recipe or something similar.)

 

 

Rice Dreg Pork

 

Marinate the pork with sauce first for a short time, then add in rice dregs to marinate longer.

 

 

Salt-marinated Pork

 

Use salt to scrub and rub the pork, salt it for three days; then it is ready to cook.

The three styles of preparing for the pork mentioned above are only suitable to eat in winter, not for summer.

 

(They are all rich and heating—ideal for a cold winter day, but overwhelming in summer.)

 

 

Mr. Yin Wenduan’s Air-dried Pork

 

Slaughter a pig; cut it in eight pieces. Saute the salt first in the pan. Rub four qianof salt on each piece.  Rub this in everywhere. Then hang the pieces in an airy and shady place. If maggots appear, use sesame oil to rub [on the meat—but it would not work well].  In summer, when cooking, the air dried pork should be soaked in water for a whole night, then boil it in water. The water amount is enough when it just covers the surface of the pork. When the pork is boiled, slice it with sharp knife, and do not follow the muscle lines; slicing it should cross the lines. Yin’s house makes the best air dried pork, suitable for tribute to the Emperor. Today, even Xuzhou’s air dried pork is not as good as Yin’s, though we are not sure why.

 

 

Household Style Pork

 

Hangzhou’s hometown pork has different levels of quality, divided into first class, second class, and third class. In general, when the pork tastes mild but very delicious, and the lean part is not tough, it is the first class pork. When cured for a long time, the hometown pork becomes good ham.

 

 

Bamboo Shoots and Ham Stew

 

Cut bamboo shoots and ham to cubes, then stew them together on low heat. After stewing out most of the ham’s salty flavor, add in crystal sugar to continue stewing till the ham collapses. Officer Assistant Xi Wushan said: After the ham is cooked, if it is saved for the next day, one must keep the original broth. The next day, rewarming the ham in the broth is the best way to keep the tasty flavor. If the broth is not saved, and the ham is rewarmed without the broth, the meat will turn dry and the flavor will be gone.

 

 

Roasted Piglet

 

Prepare a piglet of about six or seven jin. Take off the hair, and clean internally. Set it on a large fork, and roast it over a charcoal fire. It should be turned while roasting, till its color turns deep gold. While roasting, spread butter from cream on its skin several times till it is fully cooked. When serving, the meat tasting crumbly and flavorful is the best; crisp is moderate; hard is the lowest quality. Manchu people sometimes steam the piglet with liquor and soy sauce, and this method of cooking is one that my good friend Long Wen has mastered.

 

(The first method sounds rather like Cantonese cha siu—literally “fork-roasted,” because it used to be roasted hanging on forks in an oven—but Cantonese use oil and flavorings, not butter.)

 

 

Barbecue Pork Roast

 

It takes patience to barbecue pork. First roast the inside in order to cook the fat in the skin. This way makes sure the skin part gets roasted crumbly with a rich flavor. If one roasts the outside first, the fat will melt down in the fire and the skin taste rough and burned, with poor flavor. The same rules apply to barbecuing piglets.

 

(This recipe is evidently for a whole pig, of the sort found at large temple sacrifices.)

 

 

Ribs

 

To make ribs, use half fat and half lean ribs. Take out the spinal cord, and replace the space with chopped leek. Brush vinegar and soy sauce on the ribs, then place in the oven. While they are in the oven, make sure the ribs are moist by brushing on vinegar and sauce multiple times.

 

 

Luo-Suo Pork

 

It is cooked the same way as chicken shreds. Save the whole sheet of skin, but chop the pork finely and then cook it with seasoning. Chef  Lie is good at making this dish.

 

 

Three Types of Meat Dishes Cooked in Duanzhou

 

One is Luo-Suo Pork. One is water-boiled plain pork mixed with sesame seeds and salt. The last one is stewed pork slices mixed with mild sauce. These three pork dishes are good on home-style food menus. In Duanzhou, Chef Nie and  Chef Li are good at cooking them. I sent Yang Er there specially, to learn them.

 

 

Yang’s Meatballs

 

Yang Ming Fu’s kitchen makes special meatballs which are as big as teacups, but taste very fine and delicate. The soup is especially delicious. I think they prepare the meat by getting rid of tendon and veins, then chopping it very fine, using half fat and half lean, and last mixing in starch powder.

 

 

Dried Day Lily and Ham Stew

 

Take a good ham, peel off the skin, cut off the fat and save the lean meat. First stew the skin with chicken broth until soft and tender, then add the lean ham and stew until soft and tender.  Take day lily buds, cut into pieces two inches long. Then add honey, fermented glutinous rice and water, to stew with ham and skin for another half day. The dish tastes sweet and juicy. The day lily and ham are both tender and soft, but the day lily still has its shape. The soup is delicious. The recipe is from a Daoist in Chaotian Palace.

 

 

Honey Ham

 

Choose the best ham, cut into big cubes with the skin, stew it in honey liquor until very soft and falling apart.  This is the best. As for grades of ham, there are various qualities.  Even though they are all from Jinhua, Lanxi and Yiwu, most of them are not very good. Some are really bad, so poor that they can’t be used for making salted meat. Only Wang San Fang’s ham store sells the best ham.  It costs four coins per jin. I had this kind of ham once at  Yin Wenduan’s house. It smelled good even when I was still outside the house. Since then I have never had such good ham again.

 

 

Part 6 Livestock-Cattle, Sheep and Deer

 

Cattle, sheep and deer: these three kinds of livestock are not common food in Southern families’ household menus. But it is important to know the way of cooking them. So I wrote this chapter.

 

 

Beef

 

The way to purchase good beef: first go to the butcher’s to pick out leg meat. This part is neither too fat nor too lean. When you get home, scrape off the skin, then cook the meat in 3/5 liquor and 2/5 water till soft. Then add in soy sauce to continue cook until the meat absorbs all the juice. Beef has a unique flavor, so it is best to cook it alone. Don’t combine it with other food.

 

 

Beef Tongue

 

Beef tongue is among the best of foods. Peel the skin and membrane, then slice it, then cook with beef. It can be salted, then air dried for a year. Thus prepared, the tongue tastes like first-grade ham.

 

 

Sheep Head

 

Sheep’s head has much hair. It must be cleaned well. If you can’t clean it off [by ordinary scraping], then burn the hair off. Then wash it well and cut it open. Cook it in water until the meat separates from the bones. If there is old skin around the mouth, make sure it also has been washed clean. For eyes, keep only the vitreous fraction, cut them to halves, take off the dark skin, then chop the rest finely. Use an old hen for making broth, add in black mushrooms, bamboo shoots, four liang sweet liquor, and a cup of soy sauce. If you prefer spicy flavors, add 12 white peppercorns and 12 one-inch-long pieces of green onion. If prefer sour flavor, then add in a cup of good rice vinegar to the cooking liquid.

 

 

Lamb Trotters

 

Stewing lamb trotters is done the same way as cooking pigs’ trotters, except that there are red and white methods. Normally, cook it in mild soy sauce—that is, red-cooking. Stewing it with salt is white-cooking. It’s best to combine with Chinese yams.

 

(The text has “sheep” instead of  “lamb,” but for this and the next recipe a young animal would be used.)

 

 

Lamb Soup

 

Slice the cooked lamb meat into the size of small dice. Stew it in chicken broth with bamboo shoots, black mushroom and Chinese yam.

 

Sheep Belly Soup

Clean the sheep belly, cook till quite soft, slice thinly. Stew the sliced belly in the original broth.  One can add pepper and vinegar. This is a northern-style method.  The southern style of cooking the soup is not as good as the northern.  The best lamb pot stew was made by officer Qian Yusha. I wanted to learn the recipe from him.

 

Red-Stewed Lamb

Same as red-stewed pork. Add  a pricked walnut [presumably green] to get rid of the smell.  This is a very traditional method.

 

Stir-Fried Lamb Shreds

Same as stir-fried pork shreds.  They can be coated it with starch powder. The thinner the lamb shreds, the better. Stir in green onion shreds when serving.

 

Lamb Roast

Use big lamb chunks, about five or seven jin. Set the lamb on big pitchforks and roast over the fire. It tastes so good that it even made the Song Emperor Renzong crave it at midnight [in a well-known story].

 

Whole Lamb Feast

There are 72 ways [i.e., “many”; a traditional figure] to make a whole lamb feast, but only 17 or 18 ways are good. It requires very high cooking skills. Ordinary cooks can never manage the skills. For this dish, the lamb parts need to be cooked in different ways, separately. Even though it is all lamb in bowls and plates, the flavors need to be different to have a successful feast.

 

Deer Meat

Deer meat is very rare. It tastes more tender and more flavorful than roebuck. It can be roasted or stewed.

 

Two Ways of Cooking  Deer Sinew

Deer sinew is hard to cook to the soft point. It must be prepared three days ahead by beating and boiling it repeatedly, in order to extract the smelly liquid. Until the sinew is swelled,  it is not ready to cook. Add meat broth first, then chicken broth for stewing, then add in soy sauce, wine and a bit of starch to make a thicker white soup. Serve in plates. If stew with ham, bamboo shoots and black mushrooms, the soup will be red.  There will then be no need to add starch.  Serve it in the bowl. For white soup, one can sprinkle a bit of Chinese brown pepper on it.

(More a medicinal item—a nutraceutical—than a gourmet dish.)

 

Roebuck Meat

Cook roebuck meat as in cooking beef and deer meat. It can be made into dry jerky. Roebuck meat is not as delicate as deer meat, but is finer and smoother.

 

Masked Palm Civet (Paguma Larvata)

It’s hard to find fresh civet meat. Cured meat can be steamed with honey wine, then sliced to serve. Or soak it in water that has been used for washing uncooked rice. The rice water can soak away the salty dirty residue on meat. When eating the meat, it tastes juicy and tender.

(Palm civet, a mongoose-like animal, is said to be excellent eating, but is, alas, too good for its own good, and is now almost extinct from overhunting.)

 

Imitation Milk

Scramble egg whites with honey and fermented rice, beat the mixture really well, then steam it. This imitation milk is smooth and delicate. If cooked on a high fire, it tastes overdone. Too much egg white also makes the fake milk taste too old.

 

Deer Tail

Yin Wen Duan Gong ranked deer tails as the first among dishes. For people living in the southern part of China, deer tails are rare [they come largely from China’s far north]. When shipped from Beijing, the tails do not stay fresh. I once got a very big tail. I wrapped it in vegetable leaves to steam.  It made an amazing dish. The best part of tail is the fattest part.

 

Part 7 Birds

Chicken is very much used in many dishes, and should get the highest credit. It is like the case of a person with a good heart who does good things without others’ knowledge: he should get the full credit. So I write chicken dishes ahead of other birds.  This chapter is called Bird Dishes.

 

White Chicken Slices

Fat chicken slices should be just as the flavor of Taigeng.  [This was an ancient ritual meat broth; it had no seasonings, only the original meat juice flavor.]  And also of Xuanjiu [an ancient ritual water, later referred to as a mild liquor]. It is best when in the countryside, staying in an inn and having no time for complicated dishes. White chicken slices are the easiest. When cooking, do not add too much water.

 

Dried Chicken Floss [i.e., finely cut meat]

Take one fat chicken, use the two legs, pick out the tendons and bones. Chop the meat part, but do not hurt the skin. Add egg white, cornstarch, and pine seeds, then chop the chicken leg meat into cubes. If there is not enough chicken leg meat, one can add chicken breast, cut similarly into cubes. Fry in aromatic oil (sesame oil) till it has golden color, take it out and place it in a bowl. Add a half jin of hundred flowers wine, a big cup of soy sauce, and one metal spoon of chicken fat. Then add winter bamboo shoots, black mushrooms, ginger, green onion, and similar flavorings to taste, and cover it with chicken bones and chicken skin.  Add a big bowl of water to steam in the bamboo steamer. When done, remove the bones and skin.

 

Bomb Chicken

Chop the small chick into cubes, soaked it in soy sauce and wine. When you feel like eating it, fry one chicken cube in hot oil for a very few seconds, pick it up, repeat the action three times, then put it on a dish, spray it with vinegar, wine, starch, and chopped green onion.

(Try this and you will understand the name!)

 

Chicken Congee

Take one fat hen; use the breast. Peel the skin and scrape the meat with a knife, or with a planing tool. Only scrape or shred, do not chop. If one chops the chicken breast, the flavor will be lost. Then use the rest of the hen to make broth.  Cook it with the shredded chicken breast. When almost done, take some fine ground rice, ham crumbles, and pine seeds.  Mash them together.  Then add in the congee. When serving, sprinkle some chopped green onion and ginger.  Pour some chicken fat on top. Screen the dregs, or not, [as desired]. This congee is best for the old people. Normally, if the chicken was chopped when preparing, then screen the dregs out; if it was scraped, then there is no need to screen the dregs.

 

Caramel-Colored Chicken

Wash one fat hen well.  Boil the whole chicken in a pot. Add four liang lard and four fennel seeds.  Cook till it is 80% done. Then fry it till golden color.  Cook it again in the original broth.  Add soy sauce, wine and unchopped green onions.  Cook till no more liquid remains in the pot, and pick the chicken out. When serving, slice it, and pour the original broth on top, or eat with dipping sauce. This is Yang Zhongchen’s cooking method.  Brother Fan Fu’s house has another good way to cook it.

 

Beaten Chicken

Beat the whole chicken, then cook it with soy sauce and wine. Nanjing Governor Gao Nanchang’s house cooks the best wrecked chicken.

(The whole raw chicken was beaten with a wooden stick to break the bones inside, but the chicken stays as a whole piece. This would allow the essence and flavor of the bones to get into the meat.  This can also be translated “wrecked chicken,” reminding one of the Spanish “wrecked dessert,” bread or sweet potato chunked and cooked in sugar syrup till it looks like a mess but tastes wonderful.)

 

Stir-fry Chicken Slices

Use chicken breast, peel the skin off, slice thin. Mix with bean powder, sesame oil and soy sauce, scramble with starch and egg white. When about to stir-fry, add some soy sauce, cucumber, ginger and green onion bits. It must be cooked on a big fire. Each serving can be no more than four liang, for cooking thoroughly in a short time.

 

Steamed Chicken

Use a whole young chicken [presumably something like the “game hen” of today].  Place it on a plate, add soy sauce, sweet wine, black mushrooms, bamboo shoots on top of the chicken, then steam it on rice cooker.

 

Braised Chicken with Soy Sauce

Take a whole raw chicken.  Marinate it in mild soy sauce for a whole night, then air-dry the chicken. It is a winter dish.

 

Diced  Chicken

Use chicken breast.  Cut into small cubes.  Fry these in hot oil. Add autumn oil and wine, then remove it from the frying pan.  Add some diced water chestnut, bamboo shoots and black mushrooms—for the juice, the black the best.

 

Chicken Meatballs

Chop the chicken breast into fine paste.  Shape it into chicken meatballs, each about the size of a Chinese liquor cup [an ounce or two].  They taste tender and juicy like shrimp meatballs. Yangzhou Grand Master Zang Ba’s house makes the best. Their method is to use pork lard, turnip and starch to knead the meatballs; no fillings.

 

Mushroom Simmered Chicken

Take four liang of mushrooms.  Soak off the sand and dirt in hot water.  Then rinse under cold water, brush with a toothbrush, then rinse with cold water four times. Fry the mushroom in two liang of vegetable oil.  Spray on some liquor . Chop the chicken, place it in the pot, boil it, get rid of froth, put in some sweet wine and mild soy sauce. Stew it until 80% done. Then put in the mushrooms. Keep stewing for the other 20% of the time.  Add in bamboo, green onion, and pepper to serve. No further water is needed.  Add in crystal sugar, three qian.

 

Pear Stir-Fried Chicken

Use young chicken breast.  Slice it, heat up 3 liang pork lard, put in the chicken slices.  Stir-fry 3 or 4 seconds .  Add in one tablespoon of sesame oil.  Then add in one teaspoon of each of the following: starch, salt, ginger juice, Chinese pepper powder. Then add in pear slices and black mushroom cubes. Stir-fry together 3 or 4 seconds.  Serve on a five-inch plate.

 

Imitation Wild Chicken [or pheasant] Wrap

Chop a chicken breast finely, crack one egg in.  Add mild soy sauce to marinate. Divide a lard net [caul, or equivalent] into parts, wrap the chicken meat in, then deep fry in the hot oil. Add mild soy sauce and wine for seasoning.  Stir in black mushroom and black fungus [i.e., black shiitake and black wood-ear].  To serve, add a little sugar.

 

Chinese Cabbage Stir-Fried with Chicken

Cut the chicken into cubes.  Stir-fry until half done.  Add wine and continue stirfrying 20 to 30 seconds, then add soy sauce to stir fry another 20 to 30 seconds, then add water to boil. Cut the cabbage into cubes. Put in when the chicken is almost 70% done. Cook the whole dish till done, add in sugar, green onions, fennel. The cabbage should be cooked first [before adding the other items] and each chicken needs about four liang of oil.

 

Chestnuts Fried with Chicken

Chop the chicken into cubes.  Fry in two liang of vegetable oil.  Add in a bowl of wine, a small cup of soy sauce, and a bowl of water.  Stew it on a small fire till 70% done. The chestnuts need to be fully cooked before being added to the dish.  Toss some bamboo shoots to cook. When the dish is done, sprinkle a little sugar to enhance the flavor.

 

Broiling Eight Pieces

Take one tender chicken.  Chop into eight pieces. Deep-fry these in hot oil.  Strain the oil.  Add a cup of  mild sauce and a half jin of wine.  Cook until done.  Serve immediately. Do not add water.  Use a high fire.

 

Pearl Meatballs

Cut fully cooked chicken breast into the size of yellow beans; mix with mild soy sauce and wine, then roll in dry flour. Stir-fry in oil in a pan. Use vegetable oil.

 

Astragalus-Steamed Chicken for Curing Tuberculosis

Prepare a  young chicken which has not laid eggs.  Do not get water on it. Clean out the inside and stuff in one liang of astragalus. Place the chicken on chopsticks in a steaming pot.  Seal the pot. When it is done, take out the chicken.  The soup is thick and delicious. It is good for people who has poor health.

[The chicken is held above the steaming water by the chopsticks.  The drippings of the chicken would mix with the water to make a very pure, concentrated broth.  This is considered especially digestible and medicinal, today as in the 18th century.  Astragalus is a medicinal herb of very dubious value for TB.]

 

Braised Chicken

Take one whole chicken.  Stuff with 30 spears of green onion.  Add two qian of fennel powder. Use one jin of wine and one and half cup of soy sauce.  Cook for an hour. Then add in one jin of water, and two liang lard.  Stew it together. When chicken is cooked, get rid of the lard. The water needs to be boiled before adding. When there is a bowlful of thick juice left, take out the chicken. The chicken can be torn apart by hand or thinly sliced by a knife, and served with the original juice.

 

Jiang Chicken

For one whole chicken, use four qian of salt, one tablespoon of soy sauce, a half teacup of old liquor, three big slices of ginger.  Put all the ingredients in a casserole. Steam the casserole until the chicken falls apart.  Pick the bones out.  Do not add water. This is Yushi Officer Jiang’s family cooking method.

(A characteristic part of the Tang Dynasty’s bureaucratic system, the Qing Dynasty’s renewed Yushi system was a typical aspect of Chinese imperial supervision institutions.)

 

Tang Chicken

Take one chicken, weighing two or three jin. If choosing a two-jin chicken, use one bowl of liquor, three bowls of water; if choosing a three-jin bird, allow additional liquor and water. First, cut the chicken into pieces.  Use two liang of vegetable oil to fry the chicken until well done. Add wine, cook for 20 seconds, then add water and cook for about 5 minutes. Add a winecup [1-2 oz.] of soy sauce.  When about to serve, add one qian of sugar. This is a recipe from Tang Jianhan.

(Possibly in the style of the Tang Dynasty?)

 

Chicken Liver

Quickly stir-fry chicken liver with liquor and vinegar.  This is the best to preserve the tenderness.

 

Chicken Blood

Solidify the chicken blood, cut it to long pieces, add some chicken broth, mild sauce, vinegar and starch to make soup.This is a superior dish for old people.

(“Solidify” with a coagulant, normally one of the ones used to make tofu.  The blood becomes a cake much like tofu and tasting rather similar.)

 

Shredded Chicken

Shred cooked chicken.  Add with some soy sauce, mustard-green tips, and vinegar to make a salad. This is a Hangzhou dish. One can add bamboo shoots and celery. To stir-fry the shredded chicken, use bamboo shoots slices, soy sauce and wine. This is also very good. For making chicken salad, use cooked meat; for stir-frying shredded chicken, use raw meat.

 

Rice-Dreg Chicken

The way to cook rice-dreg chicken is the same as the method for cooking rice-dreg pork.

 

Chicken Kidneys

Slightly boil 30 chicken kidneys in water.  Peel the coating, then add chicken broth and seasoning to stew. They taste extremely tender and juicy.

(This certainly shows the amount of labor a Chinese cook was willing to put in.  Chicken kidneys are about the size of split peas.)

 

Chicken Eggs

Crack eggs in a bowl, scramble with bamboo chopsticks for a thousand times [hyperbolic!].  Then steam till very tender. Eggs taste dull when cooked for a short time; cooked for a long time,they taste tenderer.  [An odd comment, at least by modern standards.]  When cooked with tea, control the cooking time around two sticks of incense.  [To burn one stick of incense takes about a half hour; here the text says two sticks of incense time, thus about one hour.  This was, even within living memory, a very common way of telling time, especially in the kitchen.]  To cook 100 eggs, use one liang of salt; to cook 50 eggs, use 5 qian of salt. Or use soy sauce to stew eggs. Other methods could be either frying or stir-frying. Steaming eggs with chopped Eurasian Siskin [a small bird] also tastes good.

(This is a rather chaotically mixed account.  The first part refers to Chinese omelet or frittata; then attention shifts to tea-cooked eggs, hardboiled for a very long time in tea and soy sauce; then attention shifts again to a whole set of suggestions.)

 

Wild Chicken [or pheasant] Cooked Five Ways

Slice off the breast part of a casseroled chicken.  Leave the skin on. Marinate in mild soy sauce, wrap it in a lard net [caul, mesentery, or equivalent], then place it to roast in an iron pan [tie lian, an ancient pot-like cooker.  A lian can be made of metal like iron or copper, porcelain or clay. Here the text specifies an iron lian.]. The chicken breast could be wrapped in a square shape or a roll shape. This is one way. One can also slice the chicken breast, stir-fry it with seasoning; this is another way. Or one can cut the chicken breast to small cubes to stir-fry, or stew the whole wild chicken the same way as a domestic chicken. Or pour hot oil over the chicken breast to cook it well done, then shred it, add in wine, soy sauce, vinegar and celery to make a salad. Or slice the chicken, put it in a hot-pot, eat immediately when it is done; however, this way of eating wild chicken has the disadvantage that if one wants to eat tender chicken, it lacks flavor, but if one wants the flavor, it tastes dull.

[“Wild chicken” can refer to any wild gallinaceous bird, including pheasants and the like as well as actual wild chickens.  All of these once were, but no longer are, common in China.]

 

Red-cooked Chicken

To make red pot-roasted chicken, wash the chicken well.  For every jin of chicken, marinate with twelve liang of good wine, two qian plus five fen of salt, four qian of crystal sugar, a few cinnamon bits, all put in a casserole.  Then stew on a mild charcoal fire. If the wine is almost gone, but the chicken is still not well cooked, then add one teacup of water per one jin of chicken.

 

Mushroom Chicken Stew

One jin of chicken, one jin of sweet wine, three qian of salt, four qian of crystal sugar.  Use fresh mushrooms without any mold on them. Use a mild fire.  Two sticks of incense cooking time is appropriate. Do not add water, stew the chicken to 80% done, then add mushrooms.

 

Pigeon

Stewing pigeons with good ham is the best. Stewing without the ham is also good.

(As this recipe, or lack of a recipe, implies, a well-raised Chinese pigeon is so good and so delicate that least is best.  Unlike the French, the Chinese use the adult bird, not the young squab.)

 

Pigeon Eggs

The way to cook pigeon eggs is the same as cooking chicken kidneys. Or one can fry the pigeon eggs, adding a bit of vinegar.

 

Wild Duck

Slice the wild duck into thick slices.  Marinate with soy sauce. Bind each slice of duck meat between two slices of snow peach and fry. Fu Daotai’s family cook  made the best wild duck dish, but the recipe has vanished. The duck can be made by the method for steaming domestic duck.

(Daotai was an official position, the highest in the Qing Dynasty city government hierarchy.)

 

Steamed Duck

Take one raw fat duck without bones. Stuff with one winecup of sticky rice, some ham cubes, kohlrabi cubes, black mushrooms, bamboo shoots, soy sauce, wine, sesame oil, and green onion.  Put these all in the duck.  Place it in a plate.  Soak in chicken broth, then steam the whole dish till done.This is the recipe from Taishou Wei in Zhengding. [Zhengding is a city in Hebei province.]

 

Duck All Confused

Use a fat duck.  Boil in water till 80% done. Pick out the bones after it cools down.  Cut into random, natural-looking pieces instead of  regular round or square shapes. Put the meat back into the original broth to continue stewing, add 3 qian of salt, half jin of wine, then mash some Chinese yam into the dish to make soup. When the soup is almost cooked, add in ginger crumbs, black mushrooms and green onion. If want to make thick soup, add some starch in it. One can use taro to replace Chinese yam; it tastes good as well.

[The name of this dish is truly odd.  Possibly hutu, “confused and foolish,” is used here in the etymologically original sense of “paste-daubed.”  More likely it means “duck all mixed up.”  Such is Chinese.  One dictionary happily suggested “schlemiel” as a translation for hutu.  Chinese yam is not a sweet potato; it is a rather firm root, medicinal, flavorful.  White potatoes will do for a substitute, or if you can find a West African market, West African yams are more like the Chinese ones.]

 

Braised Duck

Do not use water, use wine to cook the duck. Take out the bones. Serve with seasonings. This is the recipe from Officer Yang Gong’s house in Guangdong.

 

Duck Breast

Use fat duck, cut into big pieces, use a half jin of wine, one cup of soy sauce, bamboo shoots, black mushrooms, and green onion to braise, cook it until the juice is absorbed. It is then ready to serve.

 

Roast Duck

Use a young duck, place it on a big fork and roast it. The cook from Officer Feng’s family makes the best roast duck.

(About as minimal a recipe as Yuan ever gives us.  Presumably this is the modern fork-roasted duck, marinated in a variety of wonderful dips and then hung on a fork in an old-fashioned Chinese oven—or, more likely, today, over a barbecue fire.)

 

Deep Braised Duck

Stuff green onions inside the duck.  Close the cap [of the pot] neatly to braise. Xu’s duck store in Shui Xi Men makes the best deep braised ducks. Ordinary families can not manage the skills. The braised ducks have yellow and black colors [depending on the sauce]; the yellow ones are better.

 

Dry Steamed Ducks

Hangzhou merchant He Xing Ju’s house made dry steamed ducks with this recipe.  Use a fat duck, wash it well and cut into eight pieces.  Add sweet wine and soy sauce. Cover the duck.  Seal it in a porcelain jar. Then put the jar in a dry wok to cook. Use mild charcoal.  Do not use water. When served, the duck tastes soft as clay. The cooking time is best held to two sticks of incense [i.e. the time it takes to burn a stick and then another—about an hour].

 

Wild Duck Meatballs

Chop duck breasts finely, add some lard and starch to make meatballs, cook the meatballs in chicken broth. Or cook in the original duck broth; this is also very good. Kong Qin’s house in Taixin makes the best wild duck meatballs.

 

Xu Duck

Pick a very large fresh duck.  Use 12 liang of Hundred Flower jiu; one liang and two qian of raw salt; one bowl of boiled water.  Use the water to dissolve the raw salt, then get rid of the foreign substances [insoluble residue in the salt]. Then add seven bowls of water, and four chunky slices of fresh ginger weighing about one liang [each, apparently]. Put them all in a big ceramic pot, covered.  Seal the pot with strong paper. Then put the pot in a big bamboo basket brazier. Choose 15 big charcoal pieces which cost two wen each. Cover the basket brazier well with a bag to avoid the heat getting out. Start cooking in the early morning breakfast time and cook till evening. If not cooked long enough, the flavor is not good. When the charcoals are all burned out, do not replace the pot, and do not open it too early. After the duck is cut open, wash it well with water, then dry it with a clean cotton cloth.  Then place the duck in the pot.

(“Xu” remains unidentified.  This recipe seems confused; the last sentence may belong before the sentence starting with “Seal…”)

 

Sparrow Stew

Use 50 sparrows, stew with mild sauce and sweet wine. When cooked, pick out the feet, leave the chests and head meat.  Put in a plate with broth.  It is very fresh and delicious. This method can be used when cooking other kinds of birds. But fresh sparrows are hard to find. Xue Shengbai often suggests that others not eat pet birds, because he thinks the wild birds are more delicious and easy to digest.

 

Quail and Siskin Stew

Quails from Liuhe [a district in Jiangsu Province] are the best. They have some which cook down well.  For the siskins, stew with Suzhou seasoning sauce and honey wine till really tender, then add seasonings to cook, just as with sparrows. Suzhou Inspector Shen’s Quail and Siskin stew was made so well even the bones are soft as clay. I have no idea how they make the dish. The same household also makes delicious stir-fry fish fillets. Their cooking skill is so perfect that they could be ranked on top in Suzhou province.

 

Yunlin Goose

Ni Zan’s Yuan Dynasty cookbook Yunlin Collection recounted the method of cooking goose. Take one whole goose, clean it well, wash and rub it inside with three qian of salt, then stuff in a small bundle of green onions. To the outside of the goose, apply honey and wine. In a pot, place a big bowl of wine and a big bowl of water for steaming the goose, the goose can not touch the water. Hold it up by bamboo chopsticks. Two bundles of cogongrass as fuel in the stove.  Burn it all up slowly. Wait till the pot cools down, open the lid, turn the goose over, place back the lid fully to steam again, burn another bundle of cogongrass until burnt up. Let the grass burn naturally, do not prick or stir it. Seal the lid with cotton paper.  If the paper is too dry and gets cracks, wet it with water. When the cooking is done, the goose is tender as clay, the broth is very delicious as well. Use the same method to cook ducks will get the same taste. Every bundle of cogongrass weighs one jin and eight liang. When rubbing with salt, it could be mixed with onions, grind pepper and wine. The Yunlin Collection recorded many dishes. Only this method is very good.  After being tried, the rest just seemed so-so.

(Ni Zan, a.k.a. Yunlin (Cloud Forest, his studio’s name), was a famous artist of the Yuan Dynasty.  In his book, this recipe follows one for barbecued pork, and says to follow that recipe except as otherwise specified.  Yuan successfully and accurately fuses the two recipes here.)

 

Roast Goose

Hangzhou Roast goose always gets bad reviews, because it doesn’t get cooked long enough and looks half raw. It’s better to let the family cooks make this dish!

(One of Yuan’s non-recipes!)

 

Part 8  Aquatic Animals with Scales

Every fish should have scales, only herrings don’t. I think fish should be considered as a category with scales. So I write “aquatic animals with scales.”

(Herrings do have scales, but very small ones that can be ignored in eating.  Oddly, Yuan missed catfish, some of which truly lack scales.  Could he, just possibly, have meant “catfish” and miswritten “herring?”)

 

White Amur Bream

Take live white bream, add wine and soy sauce to steam. It’s best when steamed to the color of jade [white—not the green that English readers think of as “jade color”]. If the fish turns to a duller white color, the meat will taste overcooked and odd. When steaming, one must place the lid right. Do not let the steam water fall on the fish. When it’s about to serve, add some black mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Or it can be fried with liquor; use liquor, not water.  This is called Imitation White Bream.  [Presumably because the real thing is the steamed form.]

 

Carp

First, one needs to be good at choosing the best carp. Choose the ones that are somewhat flattened and have a white color. The meat is fresh, crisp and loose. When one picks out the bones after cooking [carp are extremely bony], the meat will naturally fall off of the bones. The ones with a black back and round body have meat that is stiff and rough and contains lots of bones. It’s a bad type carp.  Do not eat it. If steaming [the bettrer kind of carp], do it the same way as for steaming White Bream; this is the best.  Frying is also a good way.  Taking the meat to make soup is good too. Tong Zhou people are very good at stewing carp; the head and tail both are crisp.  This is called “ Crunchy Fish.”  It’s best for children to eat. However, it still is not as good-tasting as steamed carp. Long Chi in Liuhe produces this kind of fish; the bigger they are the tenderer they are, which is amazing. When steaming, use wine, not water, add a bit of sugar to bring out the essence of the dish. Consider the size of fish when adding soy sauce and wine.

(The white carp is evidently the true carp, Cyprinus carpio.  Possibly Yuan means to include other whiter species too.  The black-backed rounder one is clearly a different species, possibly the mud carp or noble carp, or perhaps both of these lumped together.)

 

White Fish

White fish has very fine meat. Steam it with pickled herrings; this is the best. Or lightly pickle it in winter, add liquor to marinate for two days; this is good also. I catch fresh white fish from the river, and steam it with liquor.  It tastes amazingly delicious. Marinating the fish is the best, but not too long or meat turns hard and flavorless.

(“White fish” could be anything.  Often it means the culter, Culter brevicauda, but locally it can apply to any fish that is whitish.  In Heilongjiang, for instance, the “Heilongzhang white fish” is the Ussuri cisco.  The ciscoes are a group within the English-language “whitefish” category.  In Guangzhou, it can mean the white croaker, Pseudosciaenia crocea.  In China, the term “white fish” is even used as a term for silverfish, a primitive insect.  We have no idea which bai yu Yuan was catching.)

 

 

Ji Fish (Mandarin Fish)

 

Mandarin fish does not have many bones.  It is best filleted and stir-fried. For stir-frying, the thinner the fillets, the better. Marinate in soy sauce first, then mix it with starch and egg white for batter, then add in seasonings. Use vegetable oil.

 

(The Mandarin fish or Chinese perch, Siniperca chuatsi, is a white-fleshed spiny fish.  Egg batter is considered an Iberian invention; the Portuguese must have brought it to China, if it is not an independent invention there.)

 

 

Dark Sleeper (Odontoburis obscura)

 

In Hangzhou, people rank dark sleeper one of the best fish, but in Jinglin, it is a low ranked form, and is considered a “tiger head snake,” really amusing.  [A “tiger headed snake” is a metaphor that refer something looks funny and amusing.] This type of fish has very tender meat.  It can be stir-fried, stewed, or steamed. Add pickled shepherd’s purse to make soup; this is extremely tasty.

 

(A highly regarded large goby.)

 

 

Fish Floss

 

Steam mackerels, or grass carp.  Take the meat when cooked, fry it in oil in a wok till it turns golden, add some salt, green onion, pepper, melon, ginger. Sealed in a bottle in winter time, it can stay fresh for a month.

 

(The vegetables would probably be slivered like the fish.)

 

 

Fish meatballs

 

Use white fish, or mackerel.  Cut into halves, nail to a board, and scrape off the meat with a knife, leave the bone on the board.  Chop the meat finely, mix it with bean powder and lard by hand.  Add in a little salt water, but not mild soy sauce.  Add some green onion, and ginger juice, to fishballs.  When the fishballs are made, place them in boiling water till they are fully cooked, then take them out and put in cold water to keep fresh. When serving, boil the fishballs with chicken broth and seaweed.

 

(This remains a common, simple soup in China.)

 

 

Fish Fillets

 

Use mackerels or Mandarin fish fillets.  Marinate with soy sauce.  Mix [i.e., cover] with some starch and egg white [batter].  Quickly fry in really hot oil.  Place it on a small plate and sprinkle green onion, pepper, melon and ginger. Fillets should not exceed six liang.  Too much is not good for cooking thoroughly [the outside would be overcooked before the inside finished cooking].

 

 

Asian Carp with Tofu

 

Fry a large Asian carp till fully cooked.  Add tofu, soy sauce, water, green onion and wine to boil it.  When the soup color turns somewhat red, it is ready for serving.  The fish head is the most delicious part. This is Hangzhou cuisine. Match the amount of soy sauce with the size of the fish.

 

 

Braised Mandarin Fish with Wine-based Sauce

 

Cut a large, fresh Mandarin fish into large pieces, and deep-fry.  Add soy sauce, vinegar, wine and other ingredients, and cook in broth—the more the better. When fish is done, quickly take it out. This dish was best cooked by Hangzhou Wu Liu Ju [a restaurant]. However, their dish is not as good as before, because of bad sauce. It truly is a shame. Song Sister-in-law’s Fish Congee is also not as good as its fame. Meng Liang Lu is not very trustworthy either.

The fish should not be too large, too large makes it hard to absorb the flavor. Not to small either, small fish has too many bones.

 

(Note by Beilei Pu: I am not sure why Yuanmei mentioned Meng Liang Lu here.  It is a Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1280) famous book “Meng Liang Lu” (1274) by Wu Zimu, which details social life in Lingan (now Hangzhou).  Apparently Yuan Mei is saying that even a famous book can be wrong about fish. The same appears to be the case for the Song Sister-in-Law’s fish congee.)

 

 

Whitebait

 

Whitebait, when freshly caught out of water, is called “icy fresh.” It can be slow-cooked with chicken broth or ham soup. Or fry it, which tastes even more tender. Dried Whitebait needs to soak in water to soften it, first.  Then fry it with sauce, which is also a good dish.

 

 

Taizhou Dried Fish  (Tai Xiang)

 

Tai Xiang can be of various qualities.  The best is from Taizhou Song Men [a small town]  It is tender, fresh and fat. Take the meat off when raw.  This is a snack dish; there is no need to cook it. When stewing with fresh meat, it must be added in after the meat is thoroughly cooked. Otherwise, Xiang will be overcooked, melt, and disappear. After the dish is cooked, it can be frozen, to become Xiang jelly; this is the method by Shaoxing residents.

 

 

Fermented Glutinous Rice with Xiang

 

In winter, use a big carp, marinated and air dried.  Put it in fermented glutinous rice in a pot, sealed.  Leave till summer time, then eat it.  For this, do not use soy sauce. It will produce too spicy a flavor.

 

 

Shrimp Eggs and Ilisha Herring

 

In summer, pick white and clean ilisha xiang [dried ilisha herring].  Soak it in water for a day, to get rid of the salty flavor. Dry it under the sun, then fry it in oil in a wok. When one side is fried to yellow color, take it out, add a layer of shrimp eggs on the other side, place it on a plate, add some sugar, and steam for one stick of incense. The dog days of summer are the best time to eat this dish.

 

 

Preserved Fish

Take a live black carp.  Discard the head and tail.  Cut it into small cubes, and marinate it with salt thoroughly.  Then let it air-dry. Fry it in oil in a wok, add some seasonings to absorb the juice, then add sesame seeds to stir and serve. This is a Suzhou method.

 

 

Homestyle Fried Fish

 

To make homestyle fried fish takes patience. Wash the fish well, cut into cubes and marinate in salt, press flat. Then put in oil to fry till both sides turn yellow. Add more wine and some soy sauce to slowly stew.  Then cook till all the juice is taken in, making the seasonings’ flavor absorbed in the fish. But this is a way to cook unfresh fish.  For fresh fish, just take it out of wok as soon as the fish is cooked.

 

 

Huang Gu Fish

 

Yuezhou [now Yueyang, in Hunan province] produces small fish, about two to three inches long.  Send for some that have been sun-dried. Peel the skin, add wine to season, put it on top of rice to steam.  It gives a most delicious flavor.  This is called Huang Gu Fish.

 

 

Part 9  Aquatic animals without scales

 

Fish without scales smell twice as bad as with scales.  They must be cooked in a special way. Use ginger, cinnamon to cover the fish smell.  Thus I have written this section “aquatic animals with scales.”

 

 

Eel Soup

 

Eels should not be cooked without bones. Eels smell quite fishy.  If you cook them in an easy way, the natural flavor of eels will be lost. As in cooking herring, one should not remove the scales. [Ordinary eels do not have scales; eel-like fish are evidently intended.]  To mildly stew river eel, choose one eel, wash off the slime, chop it into one-inch pieces, put in a sand pot, and stew it in wine till the meat softens down.  Before serving, add soy sauce.  For eel soup, stir in some winter pickled fresh shepherd’s purse, and lots of green onions, ginger, etc., to get rid of the fishy smell. In Changshu [a county-level city in Jiangsu] Bibu [an official government position in ancient China] Gu family dry-stew eel with starch powder and Chinese yam.  This is also a very good method.  Or one can add seasonings and steam the eel in a plate, without water. Fensi [an official government position in ancient China] Jia Zhihua family makes the best steamed eel, using four parts soy sauce to six parts wine mixture to cover the eel when steaming. When it is done, take it off the fire immediately; the skin will shrink if you are too late.

 

 

Stewed Eels in Brown Sauce

Stew the eels with wine and water till tender and soft.  Use sweet soybean sauce instead soy sauce.  Cook the dish till the juice is absorbed, then add fennel and spices to finish the dish. There are three problems to avoid: first, if the skin shrinks, it is not crisp; second. if the meat collapses [softens and shrinks too much], it is hard to eat with chopsticks; third, if one puts in fermented soy bean too early, the eel will not taste tender in the mouth.  TheZhu Fengsi family in Yangzhou makes the best. In general, stewed eels in brown sauce tastes best when the juice and flavor are absorbed by the eels.

 

Deep-Fried Eels

 

Choose big eels, chop off the heads and tails, then cut pieces one inch long. Fry thoroughly in sesame oil.  Take it out; then pick fresh tips of garland chrysanthemum, and fry them in the same oil till done. Layer the eel on top of the fried garland chrysanthemum, add seasoning, stew for the time it takes to burn one stick of incense. The amount of garland chrysanthemum should be half the amount of eel.

 

 

Fried Soft-shelled Turtle

 

Take the bones out of soft-shelled turtle, fry it in sesame oil on a big fire, add in a cup of soy sauce, and a cup of chicken broth. This is the recipe of Taishou Wei’s family in Zhengding [a county in southwestern Hebei].

 

 

Fried Soft-shelled Turtle with Soy Sauce

 

Boil the turtle until half done, get rid of the bones, fry it in oil on a big fire, add some soy sauce, water, green onion, and pepper to cook till all the juice is taken in by the turtle. Remove from the wok. This is Hangzhou style.

 

 

Soft-shell Turtle with Bones

 

Pick one about half a jin in size.  Chop it in four pieces.  Add three liang of lard.  Fry it in a wok till it turns a golden color.  Add some water, soy sauce, and wine to stew; first use a military fire [a strong, fierce fire], then a small fire.  When it is 80% done, add garlic. When serving, sprinkle some green onion, ginger and sugar. Small ones are better than big ones. The ones called “babyfoot soft-shell turtle” are the fresh tender type.

 

 

Soft-shell Turtle with Raw Salt

 

Chop in four pieces.  Deep-fry it in oil in a wok.  For every one jin of turtle use four liang of wine, three qian of fennel, one and a half qian of salt. Stew it till half done, then add in two liang of lard.  Then chop the turtle to the size of small tofu cubes. Add garlic, bamboo shoots. When done, add some green onion and black pepper.  If use soy sauce, then no salt. This is the recipe from Tang Hanjin’s family in Suzhou. A large soft-shell turtle tastes old, a small turtle tastes fishy, so you should choose middle size ones.

 

 

Soft-shell Turtle with Soup

 

Boil the turtle first, then pick out the bones to get the meat. Use two bowls of a mix of chicken broth, soy sauce and wine.  Stew the turtle in this until the juice reduces to the amount of one bowl.  Then remove from the wok.  Sprinkle some green onion, pepper, and ginger crumbs. Wu Zhuyu’s house makes the best. Use a little of starch can thicken the soup.

 

 

Whole Shell Soft Turtle

 

In Shandong, Chanjiang [a Ming military title] Yang’s house cooks turtle thus:  They cut off the head and tail, and use only body meat and a circle of soft meat from the shell. Stew it with seasonings till done, then cover by putting the whole shell back on. When hosting a banquet, in front of every guest, a whole shell soft turtle dish will be served. Guests first see it will feel a little surprised, worrying that the turtle may move! Sadly, the full recipe has not been recorded.

 

 

Ricefield Eel Soup

 

Boil eels till half done, pick out the bones and thinly slice the flesh. Add liquor and soy sauce to stew.  Use some starch, dried daylily buds, winter melon, and a few whole green onions to make the soup. Nanjing’s chefs often roast eels on dry charcoal; this is really hard to understand.

 

(Ricefield eels are common eels caught in ricefields—usually small.  They are delicate eating, and would be dried up and de-flavored by hot charcoal roasting.)

 

 

Stir-fried Ricefield Eels

 

Prepare thin-sliced eel to stir-fry. Let it get burnt a little.  It is just like the way to stir-fry chicken.  There is no need to add water.

 

(Presumably this just means thin fillets are simply stir-fried in oil.)

 

 

Inch-long Ricefield Eel

 

Cut the ricefield eel to one inch long pieces, stew it the same way as cooking sea eels. Or oil fry it first to make it hard, then cook with winter melon, fresh bamboo shoots and black mushrooms.  Use less soy sauce, but more ginger juice.

 

 

Shrimp Balls

 

To make shrimp balls is the same as making fish balls. Stew shrimp balls in chicken broth, or just fry and then add water. Be careful to mash the shrimps, but not too fine, otherwise they lose the original flavor. The same happens to fish balls too.

You can also simply shell the shrimps, then stir-fry with seaweed.  This is also good.

 

 

Shrimp Cake

 

Smash the shrimps, shape into rounds,  then fry.  This is called shrimp cake.

 

(Modern cooks would add chopped water chestnuts or similar vegetables, and one suspects this was done in Yuan Mei’s time too.  Another fragmentary recipe.)

 

 

Drunken Shrimps

 

Fry the shrimps with liquor till they turn yellow, then remove from pan. Add some mild sauce, and rice vinegar.  Stew till done, then place in a bowl, covered. When serving, put the shrimps on a plate.  Even the shells taste crisp.

 

(Modern recipes under this name generally marinate the shrimp in jiu.)

 

 

Stir-fried Shrimps

 

The way to stir-fry shrimps is the same as that for stir-frying fish.  One can add Chinese chives. Or add marinated shepherd’s purse from the winter [i.e., pickled in or for winter] to replace the chives. Some people beat the tails to flatten, then stir-fry; this is also a creative cooking way.

 

 

Crabs

Crabs need to be eaten alone.  Don’t pair with other foods. The best is to boil in lightly salted water, till fully cooked.  Peel, then eat. Steaming can keep all the flavors but would taste very light.

 

 

Crab Congee

 

Shell the crabs.  To make congee, it is best to use the original broth to stew.  Don’t add chicken broth; it is better to cook the crabs alone. I have seen bad cooks add duck tongues or shark fins or sea cucumber, which not only covers the crab’s original delicious flavors but also add more fishy taste.  This is the worst ever!

 

(Amen.  Using expensive but incompatible items just to show off wealth is indeed fatal to crab dishes.)

 

 

Stir-fry Crab Powder

 

To make crab powder, it is best to use fresh shelled crabs and stir-fry them when fresh. After two hours, the crab will get dry and be flavorless.

 

 

Steamed Sshelled Crabs

 

Shell the crabs, detach the meat and ovaries, then put these back in the shell.  Put five or six eggs on top to steam. When serving, it looks like a whole crab but without legs. This is more creative than Stir-fry Crab Powder.

Yang Lan Po, mayor of Mingfu, has a method to cook crab with pumpkin, a very amazing dish.

 

 

Clam

 

Use clam meats.  Stir-frying them with chives is the best. Or one can make soup. Remove from the cooker in time, otherwise clams turn dry.

 

(True, but trust Yuan Mei to leave the exact time to your judgment—correct, since clams differ a lot in how long they take to cook, but not very helpful!)

 

 

Cockles

 

There are three ways to eat cockles. One can use hot water to spray till the cockles are half done, then take off the shells, add liquor and soy sauce to marinate them; they are then “drunken cockles.”  Or one can boil in chicken broth and make soup, without the shells.  Or, take off the shells first, then use the meat to make congee. However, remove the dish from cooker in time.  If late, the meat will turn dry. Cockles are from Fenghua city [at least that’s where Yuan got them]. The quality is better than quahog and other clams.

 

 

Quahog (hard clam)

 

First, slice pork belly, stew it with spices till really tender. Wash quahogs well, stir-fry with sesame oil, then stew with the pork belly and the juice. The more soy sauce, the more flavor.

They can also be cooked with tofu. The quahogs are delivered from Yangzhou [quite far from where Yuan was living when he wrote], and can easily spoil, so one can shell them to get the meat part, then place it in pork lard to deliver it to faraway places. Or one can sun dry the quahog, which is also good.  If you cook the quahog in chicken broth, it tastes much better than razor clam. Or you can mash the quahog, and make it to pancake as in making shrimp pancake.  It tastes pretty good with seasonings.

 

 

Cheng Ze Gong ‘s Dried Razor Clam [Cheng Zegong was a merchant]

Cheng Zegong’s dried razor clam:  He soaked the clams in cold water for a day, then boiled them in hot water for two days, changing the water five times during the two days. One inch of dried razor clam will expand to two inches, looking like fresh razor clams.  He would then stew the clams in chicken broth. Yangzhou people tried to copy this recipe of the dried razor clams, but it was still not as good as Cheng’s.

 

(Those clams were evidently dried to truly rock-like hardness—as they often are today.)

 

 

Fresh Razor Clams

 

The ways to cook [fresh] razor clams is the same as cooking quahog. It’s also good to stir-fry them alone. He Chenchao’s family cooks very good tofu with razor clam soup, and no one can compare to it.

 

 

Water Chicken (Frogs)

 

Get rid of the frogs’ torso; keep only the legs. First fry the legs in oil, then add soy sauce, sweet wine, melon and ginger, then remove from the wok. Or get the frog meat to stir-fry.  The flavor is the same as chicken.

 

(“Tastes like chicken” is the classic line in English, but the Chinese use it too; frogs do indeed taste like chicken, and are universally called “field chickens” or “water chickens” in China.)

 

 

Smoked Eggs

 

Stew the eggs with spices till done, slightly smoke the eggs, then slice to put on plate.  This makes a good side dish.

 

 

Tea Eggs

 

For one hundred eggs, use one liang of salt, and unrefined tea.  Boil for about two sticks of incense time. For fifty eggs, then use five qian of salt, adjust the amount of salt by numbers of eggs.  This can be an appetizer.

 

(These two recipes are ancestral to the modern “tea eggs,” long boiled in the shell in tea with spices or in soy sauce with star anise and often other flavorings.)

 

 

Part 10  A Variety of Vegetable Dishes

 

Dishes are divided to meat dishes and vegetable dishes, as clothes are divided into outdoor and indoor wear.  Rich families prefer eating more vegetable dishes than meat, so I write the Variety of Vegetables dishes.

 

(An interesting observation about the rich; not true in China today!  However, even now, many gourmets would prefer a perfect dish of fresh, tender pea shoots, or fine mushrooms, to an ordinary meat dish.)

 

 

Jiang Shilang’s Tofu

 

Take 120 large dried shrimps.  If you do not have dried big shrimps, use three hundred small ones. First soak the dried shrimps in hot water for one hour, then add a small cup of soy sauce, boil one more time, add a small amount of sugar, boil again.

Then slice the tofu skin off on two sides.  Cut every piece of tofu to 16 small slices.  Air-dry these. Use pork lard in the wok.  Heat it till light smoke starts to rise.  Then place the tofu in it, sprinkling a bit of salt. Then turn the tofu slices over.  Use one glass of good sweet wine, and Use thin green onions, cut to half inch long, one hundred and twenty lengths.  Add to the dish, then slowly remove from the wok.

 

(Recipe rearranged for comprehensibility.  This tofu is obviously the kind sold in a cured form, with a hard skin to preserve it.)

 

 

Yang Zhongcheng’s Tofu

 

Use soft tofu.  Boil to get rid of the soybean smel.  Add chicken broth and cook with abalone slices till boiling.  Then add some rice wine dregs and black mushrooms.  Then remove from the wok.  The chicken broth should be thick and the abalone slices should be thin.

 

 

Zhang Kai’s Tofu

Crush dried shrimps, mix with tofu.  Put oil in the wok, stir-fry with spices without any liquid.

 

 

Qing Yuan’s Tofu

 

Soak one teacup of salted black beans in water, stir-fry with tofu, then remove from wok.

 

 

Lotus Bean Curd

 

Use uncongealed tofu, soak in three changes of well water to get rid of the bean smell, then boil the tofu in chicken broth.  After removing from the fire, add seaweed and shrimp.

 

 

Wang Taishou’s Eight Treasures Tofu

 

Use soft tofu, crush it, add some crumbs of  black mushroom, common mushrooms, pinenut kernel, sunflower seeds, chicken meat, and ham, into thick chicken broth.  Boil, then remove from wok. One can use uncongealed tofu as well. Use a spoon instead of chopsticks. Taishou Meng Ting said: this recipe is from Emperor Kangxi to Shangshu Xu Jiang An. When Shangshu got the recipe, the Royal Kitchen charged him one thousand liang Yinzi (silver).  Taishoul Meng Ting got the recipe because his grandfather was Teacher Lou Chun, a student of Shangshu.

 

 

Cheng Li Wang’s Tofu

 

In the 23rd year of Qian Long’s rule, I was with Jin the City Gate Keeper, visiting Cheng Liwan’s family fromYangzhou.  We ate fried tofu, and it was the best ever. The tofu’s two sides are yellow and dry, without any soy sauce.  They have a fresh flavor like quahog, but there was no quahog or other things. The next day, I told Cha (another City Gate Keeper), and he said: “I can make the same dish.  I invite you to taste.”  Soon, Hang Dongpu and I went to Cha’s for dinner. When it was time to eat, we found out the dish was made with chicken and sparrow’s brain, not real tofu.  It was very rich and greasy. The cost of the dish is also ten times more than Cheng’s tofu, but the taste is not comparable at all.  Unfortunately, I had to go home quickly to attend my little sister’s funeral, and didn’t have time to ask Cheng for recipe. And Mrs. Cheng died after a year.  I have been regretting it all since then. Now all I have is the name of the dish.  Whenever there is a chance, I will go look for that recipe.

 

 

Frozen Tofu

 

Freeze the tofu for a whole night, cut into cubes.  Boil them to get rid of the bean smell. Add chicken broth, ham broth and meat broth, and stew. When serving, pick out the chicken, ham and similar things, leaving only the black mushrooms and winter bamboo shoots. If you stew the tofu too long, it becomes limp, and the surface will look like a beehive, just as  in uncooked frozen tofu.   For stir-frying, use soft tofu; for stewing, use firm tofu.   Jia Zhihua the fensi (a government title) cooks tofu with “winter” mushrooms, even in summer, and they still use the frozen tofu recipe; it is really good. Do not add in meat broth, or the dish tastes greasy.

 

 

Shrimp Oil Tofu

Use old shrimp oil instead of mild sauce to stir-fry tofu. You must fry it till it turns yellow. The wok needs to be hot.  Add pork lard, green onion and pepper.

 

 

Chrysanthemum Greens

 

Use the tips of the greens.  Fry in oil, then add some chicken broth and boil.  Last, add a hundred matsutake [and cook briefly] before removing from the wok.

 

(Chrysanthemum coronarium, a relative of florists’ chrysanthemum, with spicy-flavored greens; a popular food.  Usually called tung hao cai, but an alternative name peng hao cai is used here.)

 

 

Bracken

 

With bracken, do not try to save and get the most out of it. One must get rid of all the old leaves and stems.  Save only the tender leaves and the straight root [rhizome]. Wash well.  Stew till tender, then add chicken broth and stew [a bit] longer. Buy the short and soft bracken pieces, which are fat and tender.

 

(The old tough parts can be somewhat toxic.)

 

 

Hair vegetable (Nostoc flabelliforme or N. sphaeroides, an alga growing on rocks after summer rains in northwest China; excellent eating)

 

Carefully pick and wash.  Boil it until half way done, add chicken broth and ham broth, and stew. When serving, one should only see the hair vegetable, not the chicken and ham; then it’s best. For this dish, Tao Fangbo makes the best.

 

 

Morels

 

Morels are from Hubei province. The way of cooking it is same as for hair vegetable.

 

 

Rock Alga [green algae growing on rocks in rivers]

Cook rock alga in the same way as hair vegetable.  In summer time, use sesame oil, vinegar and soy sauce to mix, which is also good.

 

 

Pearl Vegetable

 

The way to cook moneywort is the same as cooking bracken. It comes from the upper river area of  the river Xinan.

 

(Swamp loosestrife, Lysimachia fortunei, or centella, Centella asiatica.  The term is more specific to the former, but the latter is a much commoner food and probably intended here.)

 

 

Vegan Roast Duck

 

Boil thoroughly Chinese yam, cut it to inch-long pieces, then wrap each piece with tofu skin.  Fry in oil in a pan, then add some soy sauce, wine, sugar, melon, ginger, and the like [other seasonings to taste].  Cook the dish till the pieces turn bright red.

 

 

Garlic Chive

 

Garlic Chive is a hun vegetable.  [Hun vegetables are the rank-scented ones: big garlic, small garlic, green onion, garlic chive and onion. In Buddhism, hun  means lust.  These five vegetables are thought to arouse sexual feeling of people, so Buddhists are not encouraged to eat these.] Only use the white part, stir-frying with dried little shrimps is the best.  Or cook with fresh shrimps, corbicula and meat.

 

 

Celery

 

Celery is a su vegetable (su is the opposite of hun, see above). The fatter the stalks, the better. Use the stem part to stir-fry with bamboo shoots till well done.  People these days fry it with meat, making it hard to distinguish fish or fowl.  If it is not cooked till well done, then it is crisp with no flavor. One can use raw celery to make a salad with wild chicken; this will be another dish.

 

(Celery evidently already had its use as an extender and crispness-provider in meat dishes.  It went through a period of enormous popularity for this, especially in “diaspora” Chinese restaurants, in the 1960s and 70s, but has waned considerably since then.)

 

 

Bean Sprouts

 

Bean sprouts are tender and crisp.  I love them very much. When stir-fried, they must be cooked till well done, so the flavors of the seasonings can be absorbed.  They can be cooked with birds’ nests: softness to softness, white to white.  However, people [often] think this match is ridiculous because it uses very cheap and expensive ingredients together.  They do not realize that only Cao Fu and Xu You could accompany emperors Yao and Shun.

 

(Cao and Xu were ordinary people promoted for superior talent.)

 

 

Water Bamboo Shoots

 

Water bamboo shoots can be fried with pork and chicken. Cut and use the whole shoots.  Roasting with sauce and vinegar is best.  Stewing with meat is also good.  One must cut them in pieces, each an inch long. The shoots which are too young and thin are not well flavored.

 

 

Green Vegetable [a clear-green form of Chinese cabbage]

 

Pick the young green vegetable, and fry it with bamboo shoots. In summer, it can be mixed with mustard and a bit of vinegar, making a good appetizer.  Or, with some ham slices, it can be made into soup. It must be freshly handpicked to ensure tenderness.

 

 

Tai Vegetable [a type of green leafy vegetable; Hu Shiuying’s Food Plants of China defines it as a seaweed, Enteromorpha compressa, but that does not fit Yuan Mei’s description; plant names are fairly loosely used in old culinary texts, and the name could refer to a quite different plant here]

 

Fry Tai vegetable’s heart [stem base].  It is very tender. Peel the skin and add mushrooms and fresh bamboo shoots to make soup.  Frying with shrimps is also good.

 

 

Chinese Cabbage

 

Frying Chinese cabbage or simmering with bamboo shoots are both good. Simmering with ham slices and chicken broth is also good.

 

 

Peking Cabbage [large, thick, mostly-white form of Chinese cabbage]

 

This vegetable is best from the northern area. It can be made to cabbage with sweet-sour sauce, or simmered with dried shrimps.  Eat right away once it is cooked.  Otherwise the flavor will go bad.

 

(Peking, or Beijing, cabbage is easily stored fresh or dried, or pickled, and thus was the winter mainstay in the old days in the north, where winters are long and hard.  It is still quite common.)

 

 

Bok Choy [Cantonese pak choi, “white vegetable”; a variety of Chinese cabbage with green leaf blades but white leaf stems]

 

To fry the heart part of Bok Choy, the best is to make a broth-less dish with dried seafood. The bok choy that has been covered by snow tastes more tender.  Taishou Wang Mengting’s household makes the best bok choy.  It is needless to add other things.  It is best fried with animal fat.

 

 

Spinach

 

Fat and tender spinach is cooked with sauce and tofu.  Hangzhou people call this “gold inlaid with jade.”  This dish is thin but also rich.  There is no need to add bamboo shoots and black mushrooms.

 

 

Mushrooms

 

Mushrooms not only can be cooked to soup, but also are good for frying. However, white mushrooms [probably meaning our common market mushrooms] are sandy and easily get moldy. They must be stored properly, and prepared and cooked right. Shaggy-mane mushrooms are easy to prepare and cook; they are made to good dishes as well.

 

(Shaggy-manes are Coprinus spp., very superior eating mushrooms if caught in time—they last only a couple of days.)

 

 

Matsutake

 

For frying, matsutakes and white mushrooms are the best. Or one can just marinate it in soy sauce to eat; this is also tasty. The only bad side is that they cannot be stored long. They can be combined with any dish to enhance the flavor. They also can be cooked and layered on the bottom of birds’ nests, because they are tender.

 

(Matsutake mushrooms abound in much of the forested area of China, and are very widely collected today, following the Japanese boom in matsutake consumption.)

 

 

Two Ways of Making Flour Gluten Dishes

 

One way is to oil-fry the gluten till dry, then add chicken broth and mushrooms, and simmer in mild-flavor style. The other involves no frying: soak in water, then cut into strips and simmer in thick chicken broth, adding winter bamboo shoots, heavenly flower vegetable, and similar things.  Observer Zhang Huaishu’s household makes the best flour gluten.  When serving, tear it with the hands, do  not cut with a knife.  One can also add some dried shrimps to make broth, then fry gluten with sweet sauce; this is also a good dish.

 

(Wheat gluten is made into imitation meat for vegetarian Buddhist eaters.  “Heavenly flower vegetable” is defined in our edition as a vegetable from western mountains.  The term is now used for cauliflower, but that was almost surely not yet known in Yuan’s China.)

 

 

Two Ways to  Cook Eggplants

 

In Wu Xiaogu and Guang Wen’s households, they peel the whole eggplant, then soak it in hot boiling water to get rid of the bitterness.  They then fry it with pork lard. Before frying, make sure drain the water off completely, then stew it in sweet sauce; this very good. Landlord Lu Ba’s household cuts the eggplant to small cubes without peeling, fries them in oil till the color turns to light yellow, then adds soy sauce to stir-fry on a high fire.  This is also a good way. I have learned both two ways, but still can’t manage the skill well.

After steaming eggplants, then slicing them open, you can make a salad with sesame seed oil and rice vinegar.  This is a good dish to eat in summer.  Or you can make them into heated and dried eggplants, and place them on the plate.

 

 

Amaranth [spinach-like greens of Amaranthus spp.]

 

Use the top tender tips; fry with nothing else. It is, however, better to cook with dried shrimps or fresh shrimps. Do not add water to make soup.

 

 

Taro Curd

 

Taro is soft and smooth.  It can be combined with either hun or su vegetables.  You can cut it up into small pieces to make duck or meat stew, or stew it with tofu in sauce.  At Mingfu Xu Zhaohuang’s household, they choose small taros, stew them with young chicken to make soup; it’s fantastic!  Unluckily, the recipe was lost.  I assume they only used seasoned broth to stew—no further water needed.

 

(Mingfu is a more respectful form of the title Tai Shou.)

 

 

Tofu Skin [the skin that forms on boiling soybean-in-water mash before making tofu from same]

Soak the tofu skin to softness, add soy sauce, vinegar and dried shrimps to mix together.  It is good for summer eating. Jiang Cilang’s household uses sea cucumber to cook with it  This is amazing. Add seaweed and shrimps to make soup is also a good dish. Or use mushrooms and bamboo shoots to make a mild soup  This is good as well.  Cook it till it turns very soft. In Wuhu, Monk Jinxiu rolls up the tofu skin, cuts it, lightly fries in oil, then adds mushrooms to stew till it is very tender.  This is an extremely good dish. Do not add chicken broth.

 

 

Hyacinth Bean

 

Use fresh-picked hyacinth beans.  Fry with meat and broth, then separate out the meat but save the beans.  If frying only the beans, it is better to use a lot of oil. Beans are good if they are fat and soft. They are bad if hairy, rough, thin, and flat.  These were cropped from weak soil.  They are not good to eat.

 

 

Hispid Bottle Gourd, Japanese Snake Gourd

 

Take snapper fish slices to fry first, then add the gourd.  Stew with soy sauce.  These two gourds are cooked the same way.

 

 

Black Ear Fungus and Black Mushroom

 

In Yangzhou, nuns from Ding Hui nunnery stew the black ear fungus till it is twice its original size, and the black mushroom to three times its original size. Before stewing, use mushroom to make soup base first.

 

(One of Yuan’s more minimalist recipes.)

 

 

Winter Melon

 

Winter melon is usually used with birds’ nests, fish, river eels, ocean eels and ham. Yangzhou’s Ding Hui Nunnery makes the best.  It is red as blood-red jade.  There is no need to add meat soup.

 

 

Fresh Water Caltrop Stew [the water caltrop is the nut of an aquatic plant, Trapa natans.  It is often confused with water chestnut, the rootstock of a totally different plant]

 

To stew water caltrops, boil in chicken broth. When serving, keep only half the soup. The fresh tender caltrops are the ones just picked from the pond, floating on the water surface. Add chestnuts and gingko nuts to stew till soft.  This is the best. Or use sugar for stewing.  This is also good.  The caltrops are good as a snack as well.

 

 

Cowpea [the green pods are intended here, not the dry beans]

 

To fry with meat, before serving, save the peas but separate the meat.  Use only the tender part, and peel the ribs [strings] of the pods.

 

 

Stewed Three Bamboo Shoots

 

Use Tianmu bamboo shoots, winter bamboo shoots and Wenzheng bamboo shoots in chicken soup, for “three bamboo shoots soup.”

 

(Tianmu is a mountain in Hangzhou, Wenzheng is one in Anhui.)

 

 

Taro and Cabbage stew

Cook the taro till extremely soft, add the cabbage hearts, then stir in sauce to serve.  This is among the best of homemade cuisine. The cabbage should be fat and tender.  Light yellow ones are best.  If you choose one with green coloration, it tastes old.  If you choose one that has been harvested too long, it will be dry.

 

Aromatic Beans (Young Soy Beans)

 

The soy beans harvested from August and September nights are the fattest and tenderest, and are called aromatic beans. Boil the beans and soak in soy sauce and wine. They can be eaten with or without shells.  They are aromatic, soft and delightful. Other ordinary beans can not be eaten this way.

 

 

Wild Aster [Kalimeris Indica, a wild-gathered medicinal food popular in the lower Yangzi area]

 

Use the tender leaves, mix with vinegar and bamboo shoots, and eat. Eaten after greasy food, it can be a refresher for the spleen.

 

 

Yanghua Cai [a vegetable found in southern China, e.g. around Nanjing.  It is not in Shiiu-ying Hu’s Food Plants of China.  Probably a local form of Chinese cabbage.]

 

In March, in Nanjing, there is yanghua cai, which is as tender and crisp as spinach.  The name of it is very elegant [probably means “it is considered very elegant”].

 

 

Wenzheng Shredded Bamboo Shoots

 

Wenzheng bamboo shoots are available in Hangzhou.  Huizhou people give friends bamboo shoots that are mildly salted and dried.  They need to soak in water.  Then they can be shredded and made into stew with chicken broth. Gong Sima uses soy sauce to cook with bamboo shoots till dry, then serves them.  Huizhou people, eating this dish, think it is the best exotic dish of all. I laugh and think they may finally wake up from their dreams.

 

 

Stir-fried Chicken Legs and Mushrooms

 

At Wu Hu ( a lake in An Hui), the Grand Temple monks wash chicken legs well, rinse off the sand from the mushrooms, add soy sauce, and stir-fry with wine till well done.  They place it on plates to serve the guests.  It is amazing.

 

 

Pig Lard with Turnips

 

Stir-fry turnip in pig lard, add some dried shrimps to stew till it gets extremely well done. When remove from the wok, add some green onions.  The color of the dish is like amber.

 

 

Part 11 Side dishes

Side dishes are for pairing with the main food.  They are like the lower-ranking officers who assist the six highest-ranking officers in government.  The side dishes can wake up the spleen and stomach and get rid of waste.  This is the function of side dishes.

 

Preserved Bamboo Shoots

 

There are many places producing preserved bamboo shoots.  The best ones are from the home garden, cooked barbecue style. Boil the fresh bamboo shoots with salt till done, then place them on a basketry rack to roast.  They must be watched carefully overnight. If the fire goes low, the bamboo shoots will taste soft and turn yellow.  If the bamboo shoots are roasted with mild sauce, the color becomes slightly dark. Winter bamboo shoots and spring bamboo shoots can both be used for preserving.

 

 

Tianmu Bamboo Shoots [as noted above, Tianmu Mountain is near Hangzhou]

 

Tianmu bamboo shoots are usually sold in quantity in Hangzhou. The ones placed above in the basket are the best quality; two inches below are the older shoots. You should buy the sets that are placed on top!  They can command a high price. The more baskets you buy from, the more fresh and tender shoots we get.

 

(I.e., the more you stick to the top ones—and therefore have to skim more baskets—the better you do.  Putting the best quality goods on top of the basket and the less good ones below is not a tactic confined to old China….  Check any modern supermarket’s strawberries, for example.)

 

 

Yulan Slice (Yulan means “magnolia”; here it refers to dry preserved winter bamboo shoots, the appearance and color of which resemble magnolia.  They smell really good.)

 

Yulan slices are made from winter bamboo shoots, roasted with a little honey.  In Suzhou, Sun Chunyang’s household preserves two kinds, one salty and the other sweet.  The salty ones are better.

 

 

Vegetarian Ham

 

Chu Zhou preserved bamboo shoots are called vegetarian ham.  This should be cooked in a short time.  The longer it is cooked, the drier it gets. One can just preserve some fresh bamboo shoots on their own.

 

 

Xuancheng Preserved Bamboo Shoots

 

Xuancheng (Xuanzhou, Anhui) bamboo shoots are black and fat, almost the same quality as Tianmu shoots, and very good.

 

 

Ginseng Bamboo Shoots

 

Preserve the thin bamboo shoots in ginseng shapes  Add a bit of honey water. Yangzhou people value this, so the price is pretty high.

 

 

Bamboo Shoot Oil [actually bamboo juice, not oil]

Take ten jin bamboo shoots, steamed about one day and one night.  Pierce the shoots and layer them on a flat board.  As in making tofu, press the shoots with boards on top, to make the juice come out.  Add one liang of fried salt in juice to make bamboo shoot oil.  After the bamboo shoots are sun-dried, they can be preserved.  Tian Tai monks like to make bamboo shoot oil as gifts for people.

 

Rice Wine Dregs

 

Rice Wine dregs is from Taicang Zhou.  The older they are, the better.

 

 

Shrimp Oil

 

Buy a few jin of shrimps, slowly cook with soy sauce.  Wen removing from the wok, strain the soy sauce with a piece of cloth and wrap the shrimps up.  Then marinate in a jar with soy sauce.

 

 

Spicy Tiger Sauce

 

Chilli, mashed, is steamed with sweet sauce.  Add some dried shrimps.

 

(This is an unusually early recipe for chilli in China.)

 

 

Smoked Caviar

 

The color of smoked caviar is like amber.  The more oil it has, the more expensive it is. In Suzhou, Sun Chunyang’s household makes the best.  The fresher it is, the better. After a long time, the flavor goes dull.

 

(Chinese smoked fish roes are as good as caviar, though not true caviar.  And they are much more sustainably produced.)

 

 

Preserved Chinese Cabbage

Less salt makes tastier flavor, too much salt makes a nasty flavor. However, to preserve it a long time, it needs a lot of salt. I tried to preserve one big jar, opened it in the dog days of summer; the upper half of the jar smelled bad and looked mushy, but the lower half smelled good and looked like jade.  It was amazing! So don’t judge by appearances [lit. “don’t just look at the skin and hair”].

 

(Here and in the next recipe, the maddening issue of exactly how much salt is left to the reader!  Chinese pickled vegetables are less salty than Korean kimchi but more salty than good sauerkraut.)

 

 

Celtuce [a variety of lettuce grown for its thick, succulent stem]

 

Two ways to eat celtuce: freshly made celtuce with mild sauce tastes crisp and tender. If it is pickled and preserved, slice it then eat;  it tastes fresh. But it must be slightly salted; too much salt ruins the flavor.

 

 

Preserved Dry Vegetables

 

Spring mustard greens can be air dried.  Use the stems, slightly salted, for sun-drying.  Add wine, sugar and soy sauce, mix well, then steam. Air-dry it, then seal in bottles.

 

 

Mizuna

Mizuna is also called red-in-snow. One way to preserve it is to preserve a whole jar.  Make sure it is mild; this is best.  Another way is to pick the hearts, air-dry, chop up, preserve in a bottle.  When this is ready, it can be cooked in fish congee, and tastes fine. Or one can slowly stew it with vinegar, or cook it with spicy dishes; these are also good.  It is best of all with eels or carp.

 

(A form of Chinese mustard greens, variously called pot-herb mustard, thousand-leaf mustard, red-in-snow, etc. in English.)

 

Spring Mustard Greens

 

Air-dry spring mustard greens, chop them up, preserve in a jar till ready.  This called “portable vegetable.”

 

 

Mustard Head

 

Mustard sliced, preserved with green mustard, tastes crisp.  Or one can preserve the whole head: sun-dry then preserve.  It will taste musch better.

 

 

Sesame Vegetable

 

Sun-dry preserved mustard greens, then chop up finely, steam, and eat.  This is called “sesame vegetable.”  It is best for the elders.

 

(The name is mysterious; probably the recipe requires sesame oil for preserving and/or sesame seeds for garnish.)

 

 

Shredded Dried Tofu

 

Thinly slice good dried tofu, mix it with shrimps and soy sauce.

 

 

Air-dried Vegetable

 

Use the hearts [leaf bases] of mustard greens, air-dried.  Preserve them, then squeeze out the juice. Seal in small bottles with clay. Then place the bottles bottom up on ashes. This side dish, when eaten in summer, appears yellow, and has a mild and fresh flavor and scent.

 

 

Rice Wine Dreg Vegetable

 

Use air-dried preserved vegetables; wrap them up separately with vegetable leaves.  For each leaf, layer some rice wine dregs and wrap.  Stack them up in a jar. When eating, open the wraps. The dreg will not mix with the vegetable, but the flavor is enhanced.

 

 

Pickled Vegetable

 

Air-dry mustard greens, then slightly pickle them. Add sugar, vinegar, and mustard to put in the jar with the juice.  One can add a little soy sauce.  When having a meal, this side dish can wake up the spleen and stomach after the guests feel full and drunk.

 

 

Tai Vegetable Hearts [again, this obviously refers to some Chinese cabbage relative, not seaweed]

Use the spring tai vegetable hearts. Pickle them, then squeeze out the juice, put it in small bottles, for summer eating. Air-dry the flowers of the tai vegetable, called tai flower head.  This can be cooked with meat.

 

 

Pickled Mustard Roots [tubers of the rape-turnip]

 

Pickled mustard roots from Nanjing Cheng En Temple are better as they get older. Cooking it with hun ingredients will bring out the best flavor.

 

 

Turnips [actually the large Chinese radishes]

 

Use the big and fat turnips to preserve with sauce for one or two days, then eat.  They taste sweet, crisp and lovely. Sometimes, the mashed turnip can be made into shapes of dried fish, and  the slices of turnip for frying can be shaped like butterflies.  Some [presumably the radishes, not the butterflies] are as long as one zhang [3.3 meters], which is quite a spectacle. Cheng En temple sells turnips which are pickled in vinegar, the older the better.

 

 

Fermented Bean Curd

 

The best frmented ban curd is sold at the front gate of General Wen Temple in Suzhou.  It is black in color, with a good flavor. There are dry and wet kinds. There is also a kind with shrimps in it.  I dislike this somewhat, because of its fishing smell. Guangxi produces the best white fermented bean curd.  Bank Overseer Wang’s household also makes tasty fermented bean curd.

 

 

Three Nuts Fried with Sauce

 

Peel walnuts and almonds; no need to peel the hazelnuts. First fry them in oil over a high fire till crisp, then add in sauce.  Don’t overcook the nuts.  Determine the amount of sauce according to the amount of the nuts.

 

(A typically unhelpful Yang suggestion.)

 

 

Agar with Sauce

 

Wash the agar well, then marinate it in sauce. Wash it only just before eating. It has another name, “kylin dish.”

 

 

Agar Cake

 

Boil the agar till really soft, then mash it to make a cake. Cut it with a knife.  The color looks like beeswax.

 

 

Little Matsutake

 

Use mild sauce to cook small matsutake till boiling and the juice is absorbed, then remove from the wok, add some sesame oil, and put it in a jar. It can last up to two days.  If kept too long, the flavor becomes bad.

 

 

Mud Snail

 

Mud snails are from Xinghua and Taixing. Use the newborn tender mud snails.  Soak them in fermented glutinous rice, add sugar.  The snails will automatically spit out the oil. Although called “mud snails,” but the best ones are not muddy.

 

 

Jellyfish

 

Use tender jellyfish, marinate in sweet wine.  They are very delicious. The bell part is white, and called “white skin.”  Thinly slice it, mix with wine and vinegar, and eat.

 

 

Shrimpfish

Shrimpfish come from Suzhou. This little fish has roe when it’s born. Cook it when fresh.  It tastes better than dried fish.

 

(The comment about roe confuses us.  Either the fry still have some yolk not totally absorbed, or the fish breeds when very young.)

 

 

Young Ginger Preserved with Thick Soy Sauce

 

Use raw young ginger, slightly marinate, first in rough [thick, heavy-flavored] sauce, then in fine sauce. Repeat this three times.  Then it’s done.  There is an old trick of putting a cicada’s shed skin in the sauce; the gingers will remain tender for a long time.

 

(Probably magical thinking.  We are unaware of preservative value in a cicada skin, but cicadas live underground for years, and people might have naturally assumed the cicadas had a secret of preserving themselves for long periods.)

 

 

Cucumber Preserved  in Thick Soy Sauce

First pickle the cucumbers, then air-dry them, then put into soy sauce, the same way as with young gingers. It’s easier to preserve them sweet than crisp. In Hangzhou, Shi Luzhen’s household makes the best thick-soy-sauce-preserved cucumber. I heard that re-preserving the cucumber, after it’s been preserved once, will make the thin skin shrink.

It tastes crisp and delicious when eating.

 

 

New Broad Beans

 

The new broad beans are tender.  Fry with preserved sherpherd’s purse.  This is the best. The right way to eat broad beans is to pick them only when you plan to eat them [very soon].

 

 

Pickled Eggs

 

The best pickled eggs are from Gaoyou [a small town in Suzhou].  They are of  red color and preserved in plenty of oil. They are Gaowen Duangong’s favorite dish.  At dinner, he always serves the eggs to his guests first. The eggs are placed in plates, cut in halves, with the shells still on.  They are served with egg yolks and whites; one cannot only use yolks and throw away whites,  If so, the flavor would be gone, and the oil taken away too.

 

(Evidently the pickle softens the shells enough that they can be sliced.)

 

 

Mixed Match

Make a small hole in a raw egg, empty out the yolk and white.  Use only the white.  Mix it with thick chicken broth.  Then put the mixture back to the shells, seal with paper, and steam in a rice-cooker type of steamer. When done, peel the eggs.  They still look like whole eggs. This way of cooking gives the best flavor.

 

 

Preserved Water Bamboo Shoot Slices

 

Marinate the water bamboo shoots in sauce first, then pick them out to air-dry, slice to eat, as in making preserved bamboo shoots slices.

 

 

Niushou’s Dried Tofu

 

A monk at Niushou makes first-class dried tofu. However, there are seven places selling dried tofu.  The Xiaotang Monk’s is the best of the seven.

 

 

Pickled Japanese Snake Gourd

 

When Japanese snake gourds are still young, pick the thin ones to pickle in sauce.  They are crisp and fresh.

 

 

Part 12. Snacks

 

Liang Shao Ming (first son of the northern and southern dynasty emperor Liang Wu Di) ate snacks as small meals.  Zhen Cansao [another historic figure] also persuaded her uncle to do the same.  As we can see, snacks originated from long time ago.  Thus I write my section on “Snacks”.

 

 

Sea Eel Noodle

 

Take a big sea eel, steam till very soft, get rid of the bones, mix the meat in flour, add some chicken broth to make the dough, roll flat, cut into thin noodles. Add chicken broth, ham broth and mushroom broth to boil.

 

 

Warm Noodle

 

Boil thin noodles, then drain, then place in a bowl. Use chicken and black mushroom to make thick sauce. When eating, scoop the sauce and cover on top of the noodles.

 

 

River Eel Noodles

 

Slowly stew the eel in sauce, then add the noodles and boil. This is Hangzhou style.

 

 

“Skirt” Noodles

Use small knife to shred the dough to thin and wide pieces, called “skirt noodles.”  Normally, for noodles, more soup than noodles is better.  It is good not to see the noodles in the bowl; rather finish the noodles, then add more.  This way it will make people want to eat more. This is very popular in Yangzhou, which makes some sense.

 

Vegetarian Noodles

 

Stew mushrooms heads to broth one day ahead,.  Strain.  Next day, stew the bamboo shoots in broth, then add the noodles to boil. This method is best done by the monk at Yangzhou’s Dinghui Temple, but he wouldn’t teach it.  However, it certainly can be copied. The dish is pure black.  Some people said he added shrimp broth and mushrooms broth, only making sure the sand and dirt were cleaned well.  Do not change the water for washing the mushrooms.  Once it is changed, the flavor will be thinner.

 

 

Straw Rain Cape Cake

 

Use cold water to make the dough, not too much. Flatten the dough thinly, then roll up, flatten it again, scatter some pork lard and white sugar evenly on top, then roll it up, and flatten to a thin cake. Fry it with pork lard. If you choose salty-flavor style, then add pepper and salt.

 

(The lard, sugar and dough create a rough surface like that of a straw raincape.)

 

 

Shrimp Cake

 

Raw shrimps, green onion salt, Chinese brown pepper, and a bit of wine.  Add some water to make the shrimp cake.  Use sesame oil to fry thoroughly.

 

 

Flat Cake

 

In Shandong, Accountant Kong’s household makes flat cakes, thin as cicada’s wings, big as tea plates, and soft with a rich flavor.  Nothing can compare with them.  My household tried to copy, but ours were still not as good as his.  I cannot find the reason.

A tin can from Shanxi can hold thirty flat cakes. Each guest gets one can. The cake is the circumference of an orange.  The can has a lid for easy storage. The filling is shredded meat and green onion, thin as hair. It could be pork and lamb together, in which case it is called western cake. [Lamb is a western Chinese dish.]

 

 

Pine Cake [Shortcake]

 

In Nanjing, the best shortcake is made by Jiao Men Fang store.

 

 

Flour Mouse

 

Use hot water to make a dough.  When chicken broth is boiling, use chopsticks to put the pieces of dough in.  The size doesn’t matter.  Cook with fresh vegetable hearts.  The dumplings taste particularly flavorful.

 

(Simple dumplings, very possibly from sticky rice flour, more or less the size and shape of mice.)

 

 

Dumplings

Flatten dough pieces.  Fill with ground meat and steam. The key to good dumplings is the filling. Use fresh, tender meat, get rid of sinew, then season it. I was once in Guangdong, and had dumplings at Guang Zheng Tai.  These were the best. They used filling made from  pig skin paste.

 

Meat Wonton

 

To make wonton, make the same way as for dumplings.

 

 

Fried Leek Dumplings

 

Mince the leek finely, mix it with ground pork, add seasonings, then wrap it in dough wrappers. Fry in oil. It would be better to add some butter to the dough.

 

(A very unusual reference to butter.   Leek dumplings are a central Asian specialty; is there a Tibetan influence here?)

 

 

Fried Sugar Pancakes

 

Use sugar water to make the dough.  Heat oil in a pan.  Put the dough in the pan with chopsticks, and fry. Make the dough into pancake shapes.  It is called Soft Wok Cake.

 

 

Sesame Seed Cake

 

Crush pine nuts and walnuts, add sugar [for the stuffing].  Use pork lard in the dough [for wrapping].  Fry it till both sides turn golden color, then sprinkle sesame seeds on the dumplings. Kou Er (a girl’s name, apparently one of Yuan’s servants) is very good at making this. She sifts the flour four or five times.  The color will be as white as snow.  You must use a sizable pan, to fry them on both sides.  If there is butter [in the dough or perhaps in the filling], the cake tastes better.

 

(This is a thoroughly west-Asian recipe, up to and including the butter, and reminds us of western recipes in Yuan and Ming cookbooks.)

 

 

Thousand Layers Buns

 

Staff Advisor Yang’s household makes buns, as white as snow, with what seems like thousands of layers. Nanjing people don’t know how to do it. The method is half from Yangzhou, half from Changzhou and Wuxi.

 

 

Seasoned Millet Mush

 

Brew some tea, add in roasted flour [evidently meaning—or maybe replacing—the parched meal of Tibetan usage], fried sesame seed paste, and milk. Add a little salt. If there is no milk, use butter or milk skin.

 

(This is a central Asian recipe, an elite form of Tibetan tsampa or its Mongolian descendent zompa.  The milk skin reprises the qaymaq of central Asia.  Yuan did have eclectic tastes.)

 

 

Apricot Kernel Custard

 

Mash the aproicot kernels to paste, then get rid of the dregs. Add the rice powder to the juice, cook it with sugar.

 

(Another western Asian recipe; in China, apricot kernels normally replace the almonds of the western world.  This recipe, or various forms of it, remains common, as a dessert or for soothing a sore throat.)

 

 

Powder pancake

 

Made the same way as fried sugar pancakes. Add sugar or salt depending on which is wanted at the time.

 

 

Bamboo Leaf Rice Pudding

Use bamboo leaves to wrap the sweet rice and boil. It has a pointy point, like new water chestnuts.

 

(A totally inadequate recipe for the familiar zongzi.)

 

 

Turnip [i.e., radish] Dumplings

 

Shred the turnip.  Boil it to get rid of the smell. Dry it, add green onion and sauce, and mix. Use it as fillings to wrap in sweet rice dough. Then deep fry in sesame oil or cook it thoroughly in broth.  Kou Er learned how to make Chun Pufang’s household’s turnip dumplings.  She can make leek dumplings and pheasant dumplings with this method.

 

 

Sweet Rice Dumplings

 

Use sweet rice flour to make dumplings.  Make them very smooth. Fillings can be made with pine nuts, walnuts, pork lard and sugar. Or make the fillings from tender pork without any veins, ground, with  green onion mince and soy sauce. To make the sweet rice powder, soak the rice in water for a day and night, then ground the rice with water, using a cloth bag to strain the rice liquid.  Under the bag, layer some wood ash to help drain the liquid out faster.  Until the contents of the bag are thoroughly dry, use previously dried rice powder.

 

 

Pork Lard Cake

 

Mix sweet rice powder with pork lard,  place on a plate to steam, then add bits of  rock sugar in the powder, and keep steaming till done. Use knife to cut it open.

 

 

Snowflake Cake

 

Cooked sweet rice, mashed, is filled with sesame seeds and sugar, shaped into cake, then cut into squares.

 

 

Soft Fragrant Cake

 

The first-ranked soft fragrant cake is made at Suzhou’s Duling Bridge.  Second is Huchou cake made by Xishi House.  The third is from Nanjing, from Southern Gate Bao En Temple.

 

 

Hundred Nuts Cake

 

In Hangzhou, the best nut cakes can be found at the North Gate.  It is best with soft sweet rice, plenty of pine nuts and walnuts, and without orange bits. The cake’s sweetness is hard to define; one cannot tell whether it is honey or sugar.  It can be stored for a long time. My household has not been able to find the recipe.

 

 

Chestnut Cakes

Boil chestnuts to very soft, then mash.  Add sweet rice powder and sugar to steam. On top of the cake, add some sunflower seeds and pine nuts. This is a traditional food for the Chongyang festival.

 

Green Cake

 

Mash some green leaves to get the juice, mix it in rice powder to make balls. The color is as green as jade.

 

 

Happy Together Cake

 

Steam the rice paste as one would steam rice. Press the rice paste to make the shape of a gongbi  Roast it on an iron rack, adding a little oil to prevent it sticking on the rack.

 

(A gongbi is a jade piece for ritual ceremony; see (http://pic.chinajade.cn/up/jade/2011/09/22/982_110449137d.jpg).)

 

 

Chickpea Cake

 

Grind chickpeas, add some sweet rice powder to make the cake, place it on a plate to steam till well done. When eating, cut it with a small blade.

 

 

Chickpea Congee

 

Grind chickpeas to make congee.  Fresh peas are the best, older ones are fine also. Add Chinese yam and Poria cocos [a medicinal fungus].  This will make the congee taste much better.

 

 

Gold Sweet Rice Balls

 

To make Hangzhou-style gold sweet rice balls, carve shapes of peaches, apricots and gold ingots on pieces of wood to make the molds.  Press the dough in to shape the gold sweet rice balls.

The fillings can be either meat or vegetable.

 

 

Lotus Powder and Lily Powder

 

If the lotus powder is not homemade, one cannot trust that it is really made from lotus. The same is true of lily powder.

 

 

Sesame Balls

 

Steam sweet rice till very soft, then make balls. Use sesame seed powder and sugar for fillings.

 

(If these are then fried, they are the familiar sesame balls of Chinese snack shops today.)

 

 

Taro Balls

 

Grind taro, then dry it, mix it with rice powder.  Chao Tian Temple’s Daoists make the best taro balls.  They use pheasant for fillings, which is very delicious.

 

(Apparently the “taro horns” of today’s snack shops—again, assuming they are fried.)

 

 

Lotus Roots [actually rhizomes—underwater stems—not roots]

To make lotus roots, one should make them at home.  Cook with sugar and rice. Eat with soup; this is the best. The lotus roots sold by vendors are cooked with filthy water, the flavor is bad, and they not edible. I love to eat baby lotus roots, because even if been cooked too long and overly soft, I still need to bite it with teeth, and the flavor is all there. But if the old roots have been cooked too long, they become mushy, with no flavor at all.

 

(Evidently the candied rhizomes found in snack shops then and now.)

 

 

New Chestnuts and New Water Chestnuts

 

Stew new chestnuts  till very soft.  They then have a pine nut flavor. Some cooks do not want to stew till soft, so some Nanjing people never have tasted the real flavor of chestnuts.  It is the same with new water chestnuts; some Nanjing people have to wait until the water chestnuts  become old to eat them.

 

 

Lotus Seeds

 

Fujian lotus seeds are expensive and not cooked as easily as Hunan lotus seeds. When cooking, by the time the seeds just begin to get cooked, separate kernels from skins, and put back to the soup to stew on slow fire. Cover with lid, do not open it to check and do not stop the fire. Cook like this for about two sticks of incense time.  The lotus seeds should be well done, and when eatent should not taste rough.

 

 

Taro

 

When it is sunny in October, sun-dry the taro until very dry.  Then store in dry grass.  Do not let it get frozen in winter.  Cooked next spring, it still tastes sweet and delicious. Not everyone knows about this method.

 

 

Xiao the Beauty’s Dim Sum

 

At Yizhen South gate, there is a store owned by Xiao the Beauty.  She is good at making desserts such as buns, cakes, dumplings and such things.  They are small and delicate, and snow white in color.

 

(Dianxin, Cantonese tim sam, corrupted to “dim sum,” is now a familiar word in the western world.  It literally means “dot the heart,” and is equivalent to “hit the spot” in English.  In religious art, dotting the eyes—painting the pupils in—is the last stage in painting an image; it brings the life and soul into it.)

 

 

Liu Fangbo’s Mooncakes

 

Use the best fine flour from Shandong to make buttery skins.  Fillings are made with pine nuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, sugar, and pork lard. When eating, they taste mild sweet, soft and fragrant—incredible!

 

 

Ten Types of Tao Fangbo’s Desserts

 

At the end of every year, Mrs. Tao makes ten desserts, all made of Shandong fine flour.  They are of strange shapes, colorful, sweet and fragrant.  One can’t praise them enough. Governor Sha said:  “After I ate Kong Fangbo’s flat cake, other flat cakes taste like nothing; after had Tao Fangbo’s ten desserts, other desserts from around the world taste like nothing.”  After Tao Fangbo died, the recipe of the desserts disappeared just like [the long-lost song] “Guang Ling San.”  How sad!

 

 

Yang Zhongcheng’s Western Pancake

 

Mix egg whites, water, and fine flour to make a batter.  Create a pancake maker: Use the tips of copper tongs to make pancake shapes of butterfly size, on both top and bottom. When you close the tips, the space left should be less than one centimeter. Over a high fire, heat the tongs, add the mixture, close it, then open it: the pancakes are made. White as snow, transparent as cotton paper. Add some crystal sugar and crushed pine nuts to eat with this.

 

(This recipe is particularly interesting since it is not only a European one but specifically identified as such [xiyang, lit. “western ocean”].  It is, not surprisingly, a rather confused account.  The tongs have wide, round, flat tips with a shallow depression, or mold shapes, on the inside.  The pancake batter is put in these when the tongs are hot.  The tongs are closed and the pancakes are almost instantly cooked.  The tongs are then opened and the pancakes taken out.  See Waley 1956:196-197; he was rather confused by this recipe too.  I have seen these made, and thus at least know what is involved.)

 

 

White Cloud Flakes

 

Make white rice crust, thin as cotton paper.  Fry it with oil, add a bit of sugar.  It tastes very crisp. Nanjing people know how to make it best.

 

 

Wind Xiao  (Glutinous Rice Crust)

 

Glutinous rice powder is mixed with water, made into small thin pieces, then fried in pork lard.  Before removing from the wok, add some sugar. Its color as white as frost. It melts right after being put in the mouth. Hangzhou people call it Wind Xiao.

 

 

Three-layerdc Jade Stripe Cake

 

Use pure glutinous rice powder for making this cake. Divide it into three layers: one layer of rice powder, one layer of pork lard and white sugar, and one layer of rice powder.  Bind them together, steam, then cut. This is the Suzhou method.

 

 

Yunsi Cake  [a Yunsi is an official in charge of water traffic]

When Lu Yayu was a Yunsi, he was really old.  A Yangzhou bakery made this cake for him.  He praised it highly, so the cake got its name.  This cake as white as snow, on top of it decorated with a little rouge, red as peach flowers. The filling is made with a small amount of sugar, mild but tasty. This kind of cake is best made by the store in front of the Yunsi department [presumably the one in Yangzhou]; other stores’ Yunsi cakes are rough and of poor color.

 

 

Sand Cake

 

Use glutinous rice powder.  Steam the cake.  The inside is filled with sesame seeds and sugar crumbs.

 

(Like “sandy cookies” in English and sandtorte in German, this name refers to the sandy, crunchy texture of the granulated sugar.)

 

 

Small Buns , Small Wonton

 

Make small buns the size of walnuts, steam, and eat. Chopsticks can pick up two at a time. This dish is from Yangzhou. Yangzhou makes the best fermented dough, pressed by hand.  They flatten it down to no higher than a half inch, release the dough, and it rises high again. Small wontons are as small as longan fruit, and are cooked with chicken broth.

 

Snowy Steaming Cakes

 

When grinding the rice, use a proportion of glutinous rice and normal rice of 2:8; that is the standard.  Mix the powder.  Place it on a plate.  Sprinkle some cold water on the powder until it can easily be formed into rice balls, and easily separated as well.  First sieve the rice powder.  The fraction that is sieved out should be ground again and re-sieved.  Then use the rice powder that has been sieved twice.  Mix it well with water, not too dry or too wet.  Cover it with a towel to avoid drying it up.  Save the dough for use. Add some sugar in the powder to enhance the flavor, mixing the powder as for Zhen Er cake’s sold in the markets. Wash a tin steamer and tin cake molds well.  Before using, spray with a layer of water and oil, then wipe with a piece of cloth. You must wash and wipe for every steaming time. In one tin steamer, place the molds.  Put in half the dough [in a flat layer], then layer on some fruity filling, then cover up with more dough.  Gently tap the surface flat.  Then cover the steamer, steam above a pot of boiling water till steam comes straight up.  Then it’s done. Place the steamer upside down, remove the steamer, then the molds.   Decorate the cakes with red food coloring.  One can use two steamers in turns. Wash the water pot well, fill it with water till reach the shoulder of the pot. The more steaming, the less water is left in the pot, so carefully watch and prepare for adding hot water when in need.

 

 

Crispy Cakes Recipe

 

Take one bowl of cooled butter, one bowl of hot water. Mix the butter and water first, add in a piece of raw dough, completely knead it till very soft.  As if rolling pieces of small dough, knead cooked steamed dough with the butter well.  Do not let it become hard. Then make pieces of small raw dough as big as walnuts. Make the cooked steaming dough into slightly smaller balls.  Then wrap the cooked steaming dough inside the raw dough.  Then roll it flat, to a length of eight inches, and width of two or three inches.  Then fold it like a bowl, filled in with fruits, and seal it.  [Then, evidently, cook it—presumably by steaming.]

 

(This confused recipe seems to suggest that you mix the butter and water and some dough till that dough is hot, or possibly use pre-steamed dough; then make balls with raw dough stuffed with steamed dough, as if for central European fruit bread.  The recipe resists clear interpretation.)

 

 

Original Cake

 

In Shanxi Jingyang, Ming Fuzhang’s household makes very good “original cakes.”  They choose first-class white flour, add some sugar and butter to make buttery dough, then knead it to cake shapes the size of bowls, either round or square, about two centimeters thick. Then they bake them on top of clean small heated cobblestones, regardless of the uneven levels.  The cakes can thus be either concave or convex. When the color turns slightly yellow, remove from the stones.  They have an amazing flavor. One can use salt instead of sugar.

 

(“Original” is literally “Heaven-generated” or “Heavenly spontaneity.”  The name mystifies us; possibly these have a religious significance.)

 

 

Flower-Petal Moon Cakes

Ming Fu’s household’s flower-laced moon cakes are as good as Liu Fangbo’s in Shandong. I often invite Ming’s lady chef to use my own sedan chair to come my place to make the cakes. She uses fine flour mixed with raw lard to knead with hundreds of strokes, then uses jujubes for filling. inside. Then she cuts the dough into the size of a bowl, making the four sides look like flower petals. Use two fire basins, she bakes the cakes on both sides. Using the jujubes with peel gives a delicious favor.  Using the raw lard gives a fresh flavor. Once it gets in the mouth, it melts right away. It’s sweet but not greasy, not dense but not falling apart. The secret is in the skill of kneading the dough.  The more you knead, the better the dough.

 

Chinese Steamed Bun Recipe

 

I happened to eat Xin Ming’s household’s steamed buns.  They are white as snow, glowing like silver on the surface. I thought it was because they used fine flour from the north.  Long Yun told me that there’s no difference from flour from south or north, as long as it has been finely sieved five times.  Then the flour will be naturally white and fine.  It is not necessary to use northern flour. The only difficulty is rising the dough.  I have invited their chef to teach us, but we still can’t manage getting the same result, with cakes as soft and well-risen as theirs.

 

(Many a baker will relate to that last confession.)

 

 

The Hong Household’s Zongzi

The Hong household in Yangzhou makes superior Zongzi.  They use the best glutinous rice. Choose long and white and no damaged ones.  Throw away half-damaged or crushed ones. Wash well, wrap in big bamboo leaves, fill in one big piece of good ham, seal and cook in a pot for one day and one night, keep adding firewood without stopping. When rice and ham are all well cooked till soft and melting, it tastes incredibly smooth and good.  Another option: use the ham fat, chop it up to mix in the

 

 

Part 13.  Rice

 

Congee and cooked rice are the basic foods, dishes should be on the side.  Once the basics are established, the [proper eating] Way is produced. Therefore, I write the Rice section./

 

 

Rice

Wang Mang [briefly Emperor, 9-23 AD]  said: Salt is the essential of hundreds of dishes. I said: Rice is the fundament of hundreds of flavors.  The Book of Songs says: “The sound of washing the rice is swish, The steam [of cooking rice] floating, floating.”  As we can see, ancient people also like to eat steamed rice, and dislike it if there’s no moisture in the rice. Whoever is good at steaming rice knows how to cook the rice separately with liquid locked in.  When chewing it, it tastes soft and fragrant. There are four keys: first, use good rice, such as fragrant rice, or winter frost rice [a.k.a red rice, which mentioned in A Dream of Red Mansions, a very expensive kind], or late rice, or Guanyin xian [a type of rice that is long and thin, a very good kind] or peach flower xian [reddish, short rice]. Rice needs to be washed well until it is really white.  In humid weather, you need to lay out the rice on the ground to dry.  Do not let the rice get moldy and stick together. Second, wash the rice really well.  Don’t feel that it is wasting time to wash the rice.  It must be rubbed to wash off foreign substances.  Keep washing until the water becomes transparent and clear, with no rice color. Third, know how to use the fire: high power first, then small fire.  Gradually turn down the fire till it is very low. Fourth, add the right amount of water according to the amount of rice, not too much or too little.  The cooked rice should be neither too hard nor too soft.  I often see rich families who care only about how fancy their dishes are, but tolerate poor cooking of the rice.  Such attending to trifles and neglecting the essentials is very funny.  I do not like to soak my rice in soup, because in this way I can’t taste the original flavor of rice. If there’s good soup, I prefer one spoon of soup, then one bite of rice.  Take them one after another to satisfy both appetites.  If I have to, I would soak the rice in tea or hot water! In this way, I would still taste some of the rice flavor.  The essential taste of rice is above hundreds of flavors; Those who know how to appreciate the rice like to eat just rice without any dishes.

 

(Good advice!  One need only add that the rice should be soaked for an hour between washing and cooking.  The horrible wallpaper paste that passes for “rice” in American kitchens and restaurants can be banished forever by using this simple advice—especially the part about really caring for and appreciating good rice.)

 

Congee

 

It is not congee if you can see only water, not rice, or if you can see only rice, not water.  You must combine and blend rice and water well.  Exquisiteness grows in silkiness! This is real congee. Yin Wen Duangong said: “ It’s better to wait to eat congee than to make the congee wait to be eaten!”  These are true words.  Avoid waiting a long time after the congee cooked.  Its flavor goes bad, and gets dry.  Recently, some people make duck congee, adding meat in congee; some people make eight treasures congee, adding fruits in it.  Both lose the true flavor of the congee. If you have to add some other items in congee, then it is better to use green beans in summer. In winter, use millet. You can add any of the “five grains” [i.e. any grains], it doesn’t ruin the congee. I once had dinner at an Inspector’s place, at which every dish was good enough except the cheap rice—I barely made myself eat it. After I went home, I got sick from eating it. I joked it with my friend: My five internal organs’ spirits suffered—indeed I couldn’t take it!

 

 

Part 14 Tea and Drinks

 

Drinking seven bowls of beverages feels like riding the wind.  Drinking even one cup helps one forget all worries. When talking about drinks, these must be the “six clear things” [water, milk, sweet liquor, rice juice and tea, unfiltered liquor and watery congee].  So I write my Tea and Drinks section.

 

 

Tea

To make good tea, you must use good water. Water is best from Zhong Leng and Hui Quan. Ordinary families can’t afford transporting this water, but natural spring water and snow water are easy to get and store.  Fresh water can have a bit of strong flavor, but the longer it is stored, the sweeter and milder it gets.  I have tasted all kinds of tea around the world.  The best is the white tea from the summits of the Wuyi Mountains. However, this tea is for the  royal court, and really rare. How can commoners easily get it?  Second, no other tea is better than Longjing.  The teas picked before Qingming time [the third day of the third lunar month, around April] called “lotus-heart” tea is really mild. The tea picked right before the rain is the best, with one leaf on the sprout tip, green like jade.

When storing tea, wrap it in small paper packets, four liang for one pack.  Put it in a pot of lime, and change the lime every ten days.  Seal the pot opening with paper and press it tight to avoid leaking scent and flavor and to prevent color change. When boiling the water, use a high flame. Once it’s boiling, pour in tea right away.  If the water is boiled too long, the water flavor changes. If the water is not boiling, the tea leaves will float on the surface. Once the tea is made, drink it right away.  Don’t cover with a lid, or the tea flavor goes bad.

The key to making tea is to be precise and make no mistakes. In Shanxi, Fei Zhongchen had said: “I passed by Shuiyuan yesterday, and finally had good tea.”  [Shuiyuan produces good tea.]   E ven Fei Zhongchen, a person from Shanxi, said such words. I have seen a Shidafu [a senior official] who grew up in Hangzhou drink boiled tea every time he attends court. The tea tastes bitter like Chinese medicine, red as blood. This is the vulgar way for those fat and cheesy people who like to eat areca.

Except the Longjing from my hometown, every other kind of tea is ranked below it.  [Unclear referent here, probably referring to the material on Wuyi.]

 

(Again, good tips on tea.  The water would be jut beginning to bubble, not boiling in our sense, when the tea is put in.  I would not recommend the lime, but it may have been necessary in Yuan’s time, to keep bugs and mold out.  Many a gourmet would still rank Wuyi white tea at the top.  The Wuyi mountains were so important in the tea trade that the English in the old days often referred to tea as Bohea [pron. “bohay”], from the way “Wuyi” is pronounced by the people in the mountain range itself.)

 

 

Wuyi Tea

I used to dislike Wuyi tea for its bitterness.  It is as bitter as Chinese medicine. However, in 1786, I was traveling in Wuyi and got to Tianyou temple on Manting summit. The Daoists there all rushed to serve me their tea. The cup is as small as a small walnut, the teapot is as small as a citrus fruit. Each cup has less than one liang of tea water. Every sip that I had I could slowly enjoy. First, I smell its aroma.  Then I took a small sip, tasting its flavor slowly and meditating on it. It’s absolutely fragrant and fresh.  The aroma swirled in my nose, leaving sweetness on my taste buds. After I finished the first cup, I had one and two more. It made me feel calm and refreshed. At this time, I realized that Longjing was refreshing but tasted really mild, and Yangxian tea was good but lacking in sweet tones. It’s like comparing jade with crystal: totally different styles. So Wuyi tea has its good reputation, as it should. The teapot could be refilled with boiling water three times, and the flavor still lasted.

 

(Many a traveler has had this experience, ENA included.  The use of tiny pots and cups is Fujian standard, and truly does make one appreciate the tea.)

 

 

Longjing

 

Tea from Hangzhou is all fragrant. The best is still Longjing. Every time when it is Qing Ming time in my home town, the tomb keeper will serve us with a cup of tea.  Clear water, green tea—this is the tea that even rich families can’t get.

 

(Tombs were cleaned up and maintained on Qing Ming day.)

 

 

Changzhou Yangxian Tea

 

Yangxian tea, as green as jade, shaped like sparrows’ tongues, and appearing as very large grains. It tastes sronger than Longjing.

 

 

Dongting Jun Mountain tea

 

The tea from Dongting Jun Mountain tastes similar to Longjing. The leaf is wider, the color is greener. It is hard to get.  The official Fang Liuchuan once gave me two containers of this tea; they were extremely good.  Later someone else gave me some of the tea, but it was not the true original one.

In addition,  Lu’an, Silver Needles, Mao Jian, Borneolum, and Anhua Tea all rank after the first cut.

 

 

Alcohol (Jiu)

 

From birth I disliked alcohol, so I am really strict on picking it.  This helps me to better know how good or bad the alcohol is. Nowadays, Shaoxing jiu is very popular around the country, but Cang jiu’s mildness, Xun jiu’s coldness and Chuan jiu’s freshness are also as good as Shaoxing jiu. Generally speaking, Jiu is like a well educated scholar: the older, the better.  The best is froma jar that is just opened, as the saying “Head start for jiu, foot for tea” [i.e., freshly opened jiu, cured and aged—or possibly reinfused—tea] indicates. To warm the alcohol, inadequate warth makes the taste cold, too hot a warming makes it dull, and setting it too close to the fire makes the flavor bad [smoky]. It must be warmed in water [i.e. the closed bottle put into a pan of water and the water warmed slowly].  It cannot contact the fire directly.  It must be covered tightly to avoid the fragrance [and the alcohol] evaporating away.  That is best.

I have picked a few that are drinkable; descriptions follow.

 

(Jiu is usually translated “wine,” but it is almost always grain alcohol—technically beer or ale when brewed, vodka when distilled.  The word “wine” in English is correctly restricted to fruit wines, which do exist in China but were rare until modern times.  China now has a substantial grape wine industry with rapidly improving quality, and there is every reason to use words correctly in this context.  The jiu described below are noncarbonated ales or beers except for the shochu, which is distilled, and thus technically are vodka [unaged] or whiskey [aged]).

 

Yu’s Gold Jia Jiu

Yu Wen Xianggong’s household makes sweet and spicy two kinds of jiu. The spicy one is better.  It tastes spicy and lively, and reaches to our bones.  The color looks like crystal flowers. The flavor is similar to Shaoxing but spicier.

 

 

Dezhou Lu Jiu (Dezhou used to be part of old China; it is now part of Vietnam)

 

Lu Yayu’s household made Lu jiu at home.  The color is normal, like ordinary jiu, but it tastes richer.

 

 

Sichuan Pitong Jiu (Pi is a county in Sichuan Province; tong is a bamboo tube;

people in Pi supposedly made wine in bamboo tubes)

 

Pitong jiu is extremely cool and crystal clear.  It tastes like pear juice and sugar cane juice.  It’s hard to tell that it’s wine. But it is transported from thousands miles away, in Sichuan, and almost no Pitong jiu can stand so much travel without changing flavor. I have had Pitong jiu seven times.  The one jar carried by governor Yang Li Hu’s raft was the best.  [It was least disturbed by the travel.]

 

 

Shaoxing Jiu

 

Shaoxing Jiu is like an official who is free of corruption, authentic and honest.  The flavor is mellow and normal.  Also it is like famous old people, who have lived long and experienced more.  Its quality is thick and flavorful.  Shaoxing Jiu takes at least five years to make.  If aged less than that it’s not drinkable.  Fake Shaoxing Jiu, with added water, cannot be stored for five years. I often say Shaoxing Jiu is a celebrity, and Shochu is a hoodlum.

 

(Shochu is distilled jiu—basically, at least in Yuan’s day, raw vodka—and if it isn’t a hoodlum itself it has certainly made many people act so!)

 

 

Huzhou Nanxun Jiu  (Huzhou is a district in Zhejiang)

 

Huzhou Nanxun Jiu tastes like Shaoxing, but spicier. The best Nanxun Jiu is that which is more than three years old.

 

Changzhou Lanling Jiu

Tang poems has sentences such as: “Lanling Jiu is pretty as a tulip; a jade bowl holds it and it shines like amber.”  When I passed throiugh Changzhou, Prime Minister Liu Wending shared his eight-year-old Lanling Jiu.  Indeed it had amber color, but tasted too thick and strong, no longer containing a fresh lasting flavor. Yixing has a similar brew, Shushan Jiu.  Wuxi Jiu is made with second-rate spring water; it should have top quality, but the market businessmen make it roughly.  This leads to poor taste and watery jiu.  It’s such a pity. It is said hjat there is good Wuxi Jiu, but I have not had it so far.

 

 

Liyang Black Rice Jiu

 

I do not usually like drinking.  But in 1766, in Liyan, at Mr. Ye’s house, I drank sixteen cups of black rice jiu. People around me were shocked.  All tried to stop me.  But I couldn’t help drinking it.  I thought they were ruining my mood. This jiu is black, and it tastes sweet and lively.  I can’t find words to express my amazement.  It is said in Liyang: When a family has a newborn baby girl, they must make a jar of this jiu with fine-quality new rice. Wait till the day of the girl’s wedding day; then it can be opened. So the least time for making this jiu is 15 years. When the jar is opened, there is only half the volume left.  It is thick and sweet and is sticky on the lips. The fragrance swirls out from the house.

 

(Waley 1956:197 provides a freer translation.  He assumes fan—literally, cooked grain—means millet here, since millet was usually used for wine, but fan could just as well have its usual south-Chinese meaning of cooked rice.

Chinese wine cups hold only an ounce, but downing sixteen of them is still a truly impressive accomplishment.  Yuan’s claims to be unused to drinking must obviously be taken with, as Mark Twain put it, “a few tons of salt.”)

 

 

Suzhou Old Three-White Jiu (the “three whites” are white rice, white water, white flour)

 

In Qianlong’s thirteenth year, I was drinking at Zhou Mu’an’s house. His jiu tasted really delicious, and stuck to my lips.  When the cup was filled, it still won’t flow. When I was having the 14th cup, I still didn’t know the name of it, asked the owner, he said: “This is my three-white jiu, more than ten years old.”  Because I really liked it, he sent another jar to me the next day,  However, it tasted quite different. My lord!  The treasure of the earth can not be obtained more than once. Accoding to Zheng Kang Cheng’s  Zhou Guan definition of  “Ang Qi” [white jiu]: ”Jiu is really old and white.” I think it was talking about this jiu.

 

 

Jinhua Jiu (Jinhua is a place in Zhejiang)

 

Jinhua jiu has Shaoxing jiu’s clearness but no spiciness; it has women’s jiu’s sweetness, but is not cheesy. This jiu is also the older, the better. Perhaps it’s because the water along Jinhua is clear.

 

 

Shanxi Fen Jiu  

To drink Shochu, the best is to drink one with really high alcohol content. Fenjiu has the highest among shochu varieties.  Speaking of shochu, I refer to it as like a hoodlum among people, and cruel officer in government. To defeat the bandits, one needs cruel officers; to chase away chill and cold, one needs shochu. Fenjiu ranks on top, Shandong sorghum shochu follows next.  When it has been stored for ten years, the color changes to green, and it tastes sweeter—just as a hoodlum eventually ages out of it, has no more bad temper, and becomes easy to get along with.  I once saw Tong Ershu’s family making medicinal shochu, using ten jin of shochu to infuse herbal medicines.  They used four liang of Chinese wolfberry, two liang of atractylodes, one liang of Indian mulberry, to a jar of shochu.  They wrapped up and sealed the jar for a whole month.  When they opened it, it smelled fantastic. When eating pig’s head, lamb’s tail, Tiaosheng Meat, and such types of dishes, shochu is a proper match.  This is called eating the dishes with the right drinks.

 

(Chinese distilled shochu does indeed vary in strength, or used to, from about 20 to 40% alcohol or even more.  I have encountered shochu well over 50%.  Shochu of various kinds is still used very commonly to produce medicinal tinctures, including the ones mentioned.)

 

Just to mention a few more jiu:  There are Suzhou’s women’s jiu, Fuzhen jiu, Yuanzao jiu, Xuanzhou’s soybean jiu, Tongzhou’s red jujube jiu, but these are all bad types. The worst one is Yangzhou quince jiu.  It tastes bad as soon as it touches the lips.

 

(The jujubes and quinces are put in the jiu to infuse; it is not made from them.)