Description:
An academically reviewed first English translation of the Wushi Zhongkuilu, one of the earliest Chinese works on home cooking and the only culinary work written by a Chinese woman from premodern China preserved in its entirety.
Brief description: Eugene N. Anderson is a professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of California, Riverside.Anderson received a B.A. in anthropology from Harvard College in 1962 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. He taught at Riverside from 1966 to 2006, when he became emeritus. He has worked on cultural anthropology, cultural ecology, ethnobiology, and food and nutrition in China, Pacific Northwest, and the Yucatán (Yucatec Maya).
Review Quotes:
"Sean Chen rounds out his careful and excellent translation with thorough, interesting notes that identify ingredients, explain terms, speculate on cooking and preparing methods, and indicate important culinary innovations and continuities. We have long needed a translation of this historically important work. We have thousands of translations of the philosophical classics, but almost no translations of ordinary works on the wants and needs of everyday life. Sean Chen is an adventurer into that little-studied literature."
By Eugene N. Anderson
"Sean Chen does a terrific job rendering this historical gem into English and providing the necessary historical context. His translation will be a must-read for students of Chinese gastronomy, historians, and undergraduates for generations to come. It provides a wealth of information about cross-cultural culinary exchanges in medieval China - and about the relationship between the cooking of Madame Wu's day and those of the present. And in this way, recovers a lost world of eating that continues to shape the meals of the present."
By Miranda Brown