The first time I read the Suiyuan Shidan — the Recipes from the Garden of Contented Conviviality — I assumed it was a translation of something modern. The prose was too clean. The instructions were too specific. The author seemed to have no patience for the kind of poetic vagueness you’d expect from an eighteenth-century Chinese food writer. “One catty of fresh pork shoulder, sliced the thickness of a coin, marinated in rice wine for the time it takes to drink three cups of tea.” “When the oil reaches the popping stage, drop the fish in for exactly the time it takes to count to seven.” It reads like a recipe in Cook’s Illustrated. It was written in 1766.

Yuan Mei was a poet of the Qing Dynasty. He was also a former government official who quit his post in his mid-thirties, bought a run-down estate outside Nanjing, rebuilt it into a garden that became one of the cultural centers of the eighteenth century, and wrote about food with the same literary seriousness he brought to his verse. He died in 1797, having produced something like forty volumes of poetry, three major works of literary criticism, a memoir of his life, several collections of letters, and a cookbook that has never gone out of print.

The cookbook is what I want to talk about. It’s the only one of his works that I keep open on my kitchen counter.

A Poet Who Quit the Exam

Yuan Mei was born in 1716 in Qiantang, near Hangzhou, into a family that had lost its money but not its ambitions. He was a child prodigy in the expected way: by his teens he was reportedly fluent in the Analects, the Mencius, the Book of Songs, and the Book of Documents. He passed the county-level examinations in his teens and entered the xiucai class — the basic degree that allowed him to take higher exams. He went on to take the provincial and metropolitan exams, passed the juren in 1736, and the jinshi in 1739.

The jinshi was the highest degree in the imperial system, the door to high office. Yuan Mei was, by any reasonable standard, set for life.

What happened next is one of the more awkward episodes in the Qing administrative record. Yuan Mei had been a jinshi for only about two years when he was, by his own later account, dismissed from his post for some kind of personal indiscretion. The exact offense is not entirely clear from the surviving sources. Some scholars have argued he was expelled for forging a document. Some have argued it was a personal matter involving another official’s family. What we know is that, around 1741, he lost his position and was not restored to office.

He returned to the south, took up residence first in the countryside near Hangzhou, and eventually settled in Nanjing. In 1749, with the inheritance money from a deceased relative, he bought a ruined estate on the slopes of Small Bell Mountain (小倉山), just outside the city walls. He called it the Suiyuan, the “Garden of Contented Conviviality,” and over the next forty-eight years he rebuilt it into one of the most famous private gardens in late imperial China. He wrote the poetry, criticism, and the cookbook in that garden. He died there in 1797.

The biographical tradition gives Yuan Mei a particular character: vain, witty, somewhat scandalous, brilliant. He kept a household of forty or so concubines and female companions, some of whom were poets in their own right. He was famously generous to his servants and his cooks. He was also genuinely odd by Confucian standards: he didn’t take the jinshi exam seriously after his expulsion, didn’t keep up the appearance of mourning after his parents died in the prescribed way, and wrote a memoir that made fun of most of his former classmates. He had a good time. He also wrote a lot.

For readers who want the biographical picture in English, Arthur Waley’s [product_affiliate: Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet, Waley biography and translations] remains the standard introduction, and Jonathan Spence’s [product_affiliate: Jonathan Spence, Chinese Portrait, cultural biographies from the Qing, including Yuan Mei] has a beautifully drawn sketch.

The Garden That Became the Cookbook

The Suiyuan Shidan is organized in twelve sections, covering roughly 326 dishes. Some of the dishes are ones Yuan Mei had eaten at other people’s tables. Some are ones he had invented. Some are ones he had adapted from older cookbooks — the Yinshan Zhengyao of the Yuan court, the Suiyi Shi of the Song — and he says so, with attribution. What makes the Shidan unusual is its precision. Where older Chinese cookbooks might say “a suitable amount” of an ingredient, Yuan Mei will say “one and a half ounces.” Where they might say “boil until done,” he will say “twelve minutes over a low flame.” Where they might say “use a good soy sauce,” he will say “soy sauce made in Huizhou from soybeans harvested in autumn.”

He is also opinionated. He does not think much of restaurant cookery in his time. He thinks even less of the elaborate banquet traditions of the Yuan and Ming courts, which he considered wasteful and over-seasoned. He is, by his own account, suspicious of garlic. He thinks three-cup chicken should not have the soy sauce added at the end — it should be added earlier, with the wine. He thinks stuffed duck should not be served in the way that most Yangzhou restaurants prepare it, because the stuffing overpowers the duck. He thinks dried mushrooms should be soaked in cold water, never warm. He thinks the crème de la crème of Chinese seafood is the Yangtze freshwater crab, eaten in autumn, and he devotes an entire chapter to it.

The chapters are organized by ingredient: aquatic, fowl, meat, vegetables, tofu, staples, congee, wine, teas. There is a chapter on the proper way to cook a carp, and a chapter on the proper way to bone a chicken. There is a chapter on the use of salt that has been, for two hundred and fifty years, more useful to cooks than most modern textbooks.

It is also a literary book. The recipes are written in Yuan Mei’s characteristic voice, which is conversational, slightly ironic, full of anecdotes and asides. He tells you, for example, that he learned his recipe for steamed fish from a cook named Zhang, who had been his mother’s cook in Hangzhou, and who kept the secret of one particular sauce even from him, and who died with the secret still unspoken. The story is a small piece of social history. It is also a piece of family memoir. And it is, at the same time, a recipe — because by the end of the anecdote, Yuan Mei has worked out the sauce himself, and is now sharing it with you.

The cookbook is a window into the food culture of the Qianlong-era Jiangnan: the Yangzi Delta cuisine that we now recognize as the basis of Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou cooking. Yuan Mei is writing about freshwater fish from Taihu, about hams from Jinhua, about tofu from the local mills, about crabs from the Yangtze estuary. He is writing about a cuisine that is still recognizable.

For readers who want to engage with the cookbook in translation, E. N. Anderson and [product_affiliate: E.N. Anderson translation of Suiyuan Shidan, The Mustard Seed Garden Cookbook, complete recipes with notes] is the standard English edition. For a more recent treatment, [product_affiliate: Jen Lin-Liu, On the Noodle Road, modern scholar cook tracing Qing-era recipes] is a wonderful travelogue.

The Food Itself

A few of the recipes are worth describing in some detail, because they give a sense of what the cookbook is actually about.

The first is the three-cup chicken (sanbei ji, 三杯鸡). This is the dish Yuan Mei is most associated with. He gives the canonical recipe: a whole chicken, cut into small pieces, simmered with one cup each of rice wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil, plus rock sugar and ginger. The dish is cooked covered for about an hour, until the liquid has reduced and the chicken is fall-apart tender. There are no chili peppers in Yuan Mei’s version. The dish became associated with Jiangxi province after his time, possibly because cooks there added chili, but the original recipe is closer to a Jiangnan braise than to the modern spicy version you find in Taiwanese restaurants.

The second is the congee with preserved egg and pork (sidan congee, 食單粥). Yuan Mei gives a precise recipe for the rice base: long-grain rice cooked in chicken stock until the grains have burst, with the century egg — though Yuan Mei doesn’t use the modern name — added near the end, plus shredded pork and ginger. He notes that the porridge should be “neither thick nor thin, the rice grains just barely holding their shape.” He thinks most restaurant congee is too thick.

The third is crab roe tofu. He describes a soft tofu dish enriched with crab roe, briefly stir-fried, finished with a touch of rice wine, served in shallow bowls so the diner can see the colors. It is, by all surviving accounts, a delicate dish, and one that requires fresh Yangtze crabs.

The fourth is the stir-fried crab with ginger. He describes a technique of quickly-cooking the crab in a smoking-hot wok with fresh ginger, a small amount of Shaoxing wine, and no other seasonings. The dish is served hot, with the roe still visible in the broken pieces. It is, he says, the dish to eat if you are only going to eat one crab dish in your life.

These are not restaurant dishes, exactly. They are home dishes, the kind of food that a wealthy Nanjing household with a good cook might serve on an autumn afternoon. They are also not simple. They require a working knowledge of regional ingredients, a fast hand with a wok, and the willingness to source fresh Yangtze crabs, which are not always easy to come by. The cookbook is a manual for someone with a kitchen, a garden, and time.

If you want to cook from the Shidan, the [product_affiliate: bamboo wok spatula set, traditional Chinese cookware, restaurant grade] is what Yuan Mei would have used in a domestic kitchen. For the wine, [product_affiliate: Shaoxing huadiao rice wine, traditional aged, cooking and drinking] is the right bottle. And for the crabs themselves, the [product_affiliate: hard-shell crabs from Yangtze estuary, autumn season, shipped live] is the closest modern equivalent.

What Yuan Mei Did to Chinese Food Writing

The Shidan was not the first Chinese cookbook. There are earlier ones going back at least to the Tang dynasty. But it was the first one that treated cooking as a literary subject, in the sense that the text itself was meant to be read as literature. Yuan Mei wrote the Shidan as part of a literary project. He intended the recipes to be quoted, discussed, and held up as examples. He used his own name. He named his cooks when he had them.

What this changed: it put the cook into the book. Earlier cookbooks were anonymous, or attached to a court or a religious institution. The Shidan is the work of a named author. It has a voice. It has preferences. It has jokes. It is the first time in the Chinese culinary tradition that you can read a recipe and know who the person writing it was.

This mattered because it turned cooking from a craft into a form of literary self-presentation. After Yuan Mei, the cookbook became a recognized literary genre in late imperial China. The Yangzhou Huafang Lu (揚州畫舫錄), a kind of guidebook to Yangzhou restaurants and entertainment written in the late Qianlong era, drew directly on Yuan Mei’s model. The literary cookbooks of the nineteenth century — Wang Zengqi’s, Zhang Youqin’s — kept the voice. Modern Chinese cookbook writing, in the tradition of Fuchsia Dunlop and Yan-Kit So, is still in conversation with Yuan Mei.

He also made the food itself more visible. The Shidan does not, by and large, feature banquet food. It features the kind of food Yuan Mei and his household actually ate: simple fish, river shrimp, local vegetables, slow-cooked meats, fresh tofu, the daily rice. He was suspicious of elaborate presentations and theatrical cooking. He wanted the ingredient to be the star. This is, by a coincidence that turned out to be useful for the history of Chinese food writing, more or less what modern Chinese cooking writers, both inside and outside China, want to recover now.

The Suiyuan Shidan is in print in China continuously since the late eighteenth century. It has been reprinted in more than fifty editions. There is a Yuan Mei memorial museum in Nanjing, in the grounds of his old garden, and a small reconstructed kitchen that serves the recipes from his cookbook. The garden itself is gone, replaced in the twentieth century by a succession of schools, hospitals, and administrative buildings, but a portion of the site is preserved.

For an English reader who wants to engage with the original Chinese culinary tradition in depth, the best single text is still the Shidan in translation. For a broader picture of Qing-era food culture, [product_affiliate: E.N. Anderson, The Food of China, comprehensive academic survey] is the standard scholarly reference.

The Man and the Manuscript

Yuan Mei’s life ended in 1797 in the garden he had built. He was eighty years old, or possibly eighty-one — the source dates diverge slightly. He had been working on a poem about the arrival of spring the day before he died. He had, by then, lived long enough to see several of his female students marry and have children, his former cooks retire, and his poetry become required reading in the imperial examinations. He had also outlived most of the literary controversies of his middle age, and was by his last decade a kind of elder statesman of Jiangnan letters.

His final wish, by his own account, was that his garden not become a public site for tribute. That wish was honored for about a hundred and fifty years. Then it wasn’t.

What survives of him, in English, is the poetry — uneven in translation, with a few good pieces — and the cookbook, which holds up. The Suiyuan Shihua, his literary criticism, has been translated in parts. His memoir, the Suiyuan Yibian, has been partially translated. The Shidan is the one that you can still read and cook from.

The thing I find most striking about Yuan Mei, in the end, is not the scandalous personal life or the wit or the garden. It is the practical precision. He wrote down what he knew, in a form other people could use. He specified the temperatures, the times, the weights. He did not assume that his reader already knew. He wrote, in other words, for a stranger who would pick up the book in 1966 or 2066 and want to know how to make a freshwater crab taste like the autumn of the Yangtze. He didn’t get there — the Shidan is too dependent on ingredients and techniques that no longer exist in unmodified form — but he tried. The trying is the rare thing. Most literary writers don’t try. Most cookbook writers don’t write that well. He did both.