Category Archives: Knowledge Transmission

The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method

By Serin Quinn

The earliest known recipe referencing tomatoes was published in Naples in 1692. This is not simply the earliest European recipe to include the ingredient, but the first written tomato recipe world-wide. The history of the tomato – a foodstuff indigenous to the Americas – is dominated by European sources: our recipes, botanical descriptions and illustrations all stem from either European or post-conquest authors.

How, then, can we use such European recipes to understand the cultural influence of Indigenous American cultures? This blog explores how following taste offers us a means to recreate the unrecorded past and to bring to the fore hidden histories.

I am not the first to note this issue: following Marcy Norton’s 2008 work Sacred Gifts, scholars have begun to reconsider the role of American foods in European cuisines. Nonetheless, studies to date have focused on foods that have distinct paraphernalia (chocolate cups or tobacco pipes) or that have necessary treatments, such as the nixtamalization of maize or de-toxification of cassava. The pre-Columbian history of the tomato is harder to grasp, but its study shows us that even the most ordinary of American foods had a fundamental influence on the food cultures of Europe.

[Xi]tomamolli: Mesoamerican tomato sauces

To reconstruct pre-Columbian tomato-usage (in Nahuatl xitomatl), we must consider the form and taste of food and relationship between ingredients.

The post-conquest primary sources we do have – ethnographies such as the so-called Florentine Codex and government reports such as the Relaciones Geográficas – provide us with two key pieces of information. These sources do not give us a fixed recipe of the type we would find in contemporaneous recipe European books, but there are notable consistencies in their reports that speak to common, repeated practice. Critically, these sources repeatedly tell us that tomatoes were consumed as a sauce or stew and that they were consistently paired with chili peppers: as the Relaciones report from Texcoco (1582) stated, ‘They have tomatoes and tomatillos, which serve as a spice with chilli, from which they make sauces and appetizers to eat’.

Ethnographic work suggests tomatoes and chilis were first charred to remove the skin and then pounded together using a stone molcaxitl (‘sauce bowl’) and a texolotl grinding stone. This sauce-paste was then used to flavour dishes such as tamales and stews of beans, turkey eggs or meat (deer/dog/turkey/fish/newt). As the authors of the Florentine Codex observed: ‘Where [it is] tasty, [it has] chili, salt, tomatoes, gourd seeds: shredded, crumbled, juiced’. This is the quintessential Mesoamerican tomato recipe, as recreated from common practice.

In the centuries following the conquest, tomatoes continued to be eaten in this way by the populations of New Spain. As one chronicler wrote in 1698, tomato-dishes were the ‘be-all, end-all of the stews of the Indies’.

Salsa de tomates: tomatoes in Iberia

Across the Atlantic, in the Spanish-controlled Mediterranean, we see a clear continuation of both these forms of cooking and of the tomato-chili nexus.

The earliest recipe, from Spanish Naples, is for a tomato sauce ‘in the Spanish style’, and sauces and stews/soups also form the bulk of recipes in Spanish and Portuguese. The author of a manuscript Portuguese cookbook (c. 1715) wrote: ‘Tomatoes in all foods, that is, in meat, in stews, or in roast sauces, add a particular flavor to everything’.

Almost all recipes from this period are directions to use tomatoes as a sauce or as the base for stews/casseroles (with one or two recipes directing tomatoes to be pickled or used in salads). If we deconstruct these recipes to their base elements, a consistent method appears that can be expressed as follows:

Take ripe tomatoes; roast them; remove their skins; mince or crush them until fine; mix with chili, oil and vinegar and [onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, oregano, or thyme], serve with [fish, chicken, eggs, beans, or rice].

Some aspects of the flavour profile varied between recipe in the choice of herbs, spices and alliums, but the addition of chili, as well as oil and vinegar, was almost always to be found. The association between the two foods was so strong that they were customarily depicted together in paintings.

Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.
Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.

 

Love apple sauce: tomatoes in Britain

The transfer of tomato-tastes to Spanish colonisers and subsequently to their homeland in Iberia is perhaps not surprising. Yet through tomato recipes we can see that the spread of Mesoamerican tomato-chili sauces travelled further, into the early modern British diet.

English recipes for tomatoes – then called love-apples – fall into two categories: pickles and sauces/soups. Recipes for these sauces use the methods seen above: rather than ‘roasted’ they are ‘baked’ and their skins removed by pulping through a sieve rather than peeling, but the result is the same. Importantly, alongside ‘Old World’ ingredients such as onion and ginger, almost all these recipes contained chilis. We see this across both print and manuscript recipes, and usually in the form of ‘capsicum’ or chili vinegar, as in the recipe below.

These sauces came to Britain not through direct colonial contact with Mesoamerica, as in Iberia. Rather, the authors of eighteenth-century encyclopaedias and gardening manuals attested to a different origin of influence: Jewish refugees, specifically Sephardi Jews fleeing the Spanish/Portuguese inquisitions of the 1720s. As one horticulturalist noted, ‘it is agreeable in Soups. Those who are us’d to eat with the Portuguese Jews know the Value of it’. As Iberian consumers once adopted a taste for the tomato from Mesoamericans, so they later brought it with them to their new home.

In both Iberia and Britain, therefore, we see how the tastes of a minority group can have a powerful and lasting impact on the diets and desires of the majority, and how knowledge is spread through a series of incorporations and re-introductions.  

‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.
‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.

The enduring relationship between tomatoes and the chilis illuminates a path of cultural influence from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to eighteenth-century Britain. While we lack detailed guides on how tomatoes were prepared prior to the conquest, understanding preparation methods and flavours profiles allows us to trace the movement of culinary knowledge over time and space and to reestablish the role of Indigenous American tastes in shaping European cuisine.
*****
Serin Quinn is an early modern historian, specialising in food, horticulture and global connectivity. Her PhD at the University of Warwick was on the introduction of the tomato to early modern England and was funded by Midlands4Cities. Her article on the early English reception of sweet potatoes recently won the Food & History Best Article Award 2025. As of October 2026, she has a research fellowship with the Society for Renaissance Studies, working on a new project on aphrodisiac-foods in pre-modern Europe.

 

Bal-Po Stew: The Empire’s Recipe

By Lewis Ebert

Bal-Po Stew in the "Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet." Figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.
Bal-Po Stew in the “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet.” Figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.

The third entry of the section entitled “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavors” in the medieval Mongol cookbook, “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” is the Bal-Po stew, a recipe that exemplifies the multivalent food culture of the Yuan dynasty:

Bal–po Soup [Stew] (Nepali Soup) (fig 1)

It supplements the centre, and brings down qi. It extends the diaphragm.

Mutton, cardamom pods (five), chickpeas (500ml, pulverize and remove the skins), Chinese radish.

Boil ingredients together to make a soup. Strain broth. Chop meat and radish. Add the mutton cut into coin-sized pieces to the soup, then add cooked Chinese radish [4 grams] of saffron, [8 grams] of Turmeric, [8 grams] of Black (“Iranian”) Pepper, [2 grams] of chicory, and coriander leaves.

Adjust flavours with a little salt. Eat over cooked aromatic non-glutinous rice. Add a little Vinegar. [1]

“The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” compiled in 1330 by Hu Sihui, occupies a unique position in the history of Eurasian cuisine. Written under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, it is designed to offer life-extending medical solutions for the emperor and to foster a healthy diet for the court. As it is described in a famous encyclopedia of the Qing era: “[the author] compiled into a single book the rare and unusual delicacies, medicinal soups, poultices, and decoctions he offered, along with the formulas and methods found in the medical works from famous physicians.” [2] This manual for life-engendering dietary practice straddles multiple cultural products, ingredients, economic ties, and ritual cosmologies. Its genesis mirrors the vast empire that it was designed to accommodate: Mongol ancestral food types met Near Eastern ingredients all condensed into Traditional Chinese Medical form. Its prescriptions for the imperial table reveal a world in which food was never merely sustenance but a medium for negotiating health, hierarchy, and cosmology. Later, during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), it was officially promulgated as a compendium of useful culinary insights; the Ming Imperial preface to the text states: “We have examined the entire book Yinshan zhengyao of the former Yuan dynasty…this book is not just an aid for hygiene and nourishing. It is also a great aid for training to receive the correct [way of living].” [3] The culinary and medicinal recipes detailed therein were thus disseminated by imperially sponsored publishing houses from the 14th century and beyond, even into the Qing dynasty. [4]

Among the “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavours,” the Bal-Po stew, a seemingly modest dish of mutton, chickpeas, and spices, offers a particularly rich case study in the articulation of Mongol Empire culinary cosmology. The chapter features ninety-five courtly recipes, ranging from mutton to camel to wolf; each entry is first described in terms of its medical benefits (relation to qi or organs) before detailing its ingredients. At first glance, Bal-Po stew resembles the Mongol šülen, the mutton broth that, as Buell and Anderson have noted, was believed to contain the “very essence, the soul of the animal.” [5] The broth was achieved by the boiling down of whole animals, usually sheep, for extended periods of time until their collagen thickened the stew and the carcass imparted a strong flavour. In this way, the essence or soul of the sheep, its vital energies, were transposed directly into the broth, thus creating a nourishing meal. It is for this reason that the stew could be said to supplement the individual, balance the qi, or extend the diaphragm; its effects were at once nutritious and medicinal.

From this traditional šülen form, Bal-Po distinguished itself through its inclusion of imported aromatics (saffron, turmeric, and black pepper), Near Eastern ingredients (chickpeas), and ingredients typical of East Asia at the time (radish and cardamom). These ingredients, sourced across the empire from as far as India through Islamic trade networks, marked the stew as a product of the trans-Eurasian circulation that the Mongol empire made possible; they represented a new fusion of food that had never been consumed before on Chinese soil. The result, Buell and Anderson claim when cooking the recipes themselves, is a dish that resembles a curry from the Kashmir: “an excellent dish.” [6]

Of particular interest is the inclusion of chickpeas and radishes. The first, a typically West Asian ingredient, at once accommodates for the many Muslim clients of the Mongol Empire, but also fulfils a curious role as thickening agent. As mentioned above, šülen is generated out of the prolonged boiling of a sheep carcass until a thick broth is produced: chickpeas, however, along with a number of other thickening agents included throughout the cookbook, can expedite that process. In place of the long-standing collagen-based thickening technique, the introduction of the chickpea from West Asia symbolises an evolution of culinary technique: instead of waiting for hours for the broth to thicken, the use of chickpeas (along with ground almonds and mung beans elsewhere) can reproduce the desired texture in minutes. The second, the Chinese radish, had likely come into contact with the Mongol šülen in the past given the occasional assimilation between Mongol and Chinese cultures, but here, instead of being used in dumpling mixtures or in chopped salads, the radish’s inclusion has a more functional role: removing the gamey odour of the stew. As has been accounted for across the materia dietetica of this era, the šülen, although nutritious and of great spiritual significance, tended towards pungency. Thus, with the inclusion of one half-way domestic ingredient and one imported one, a stew could be produced with increased speed and reduced smell.

What appears to be a simple stew, then, actually features a unique set of cultural impulses that could only have come together during the territorial zenith of the greatest land empire in history: from its name, Bal-Po, meaning Nepal, one of the old territories of the Tibetan Empire then under Yuan dynastic control, to the diverse set of ingredients generated through an extensive Muslim trading network, to its textual representation in a Chinese medical framework, to its flavours that could even be considered West Indian, the dish exemplifies the multivalent nature of the Mongol Empire.
*****
Lewis Ebert is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, specializing in East Asian culinary and ritual cultures. His research focuses on Mongol and Chinese food cosmologies, examining how recipes encoded beliefs about vitality, spirit, and nourishment. Combining archaeological, textual, and anthropological analysis, he explores the intersection of food, ritual, and social life across the Eurasian world.

FURTHER READING

Buell, Paul D and Eugene N Anderson (2013). Soup for the Qan. Milton Park: Routledge.

Hu, Sihui (1994). Yinshan zhengyao sanjuan 飲膳正要三卷. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.

Qinding Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 欽定四庫全書總目提要 (1997). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

NOTES

[1] YSZY 1994, juan 1, 27A. My translation: measurements have been adjusted for broader audience.

[2] Qinding Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 欽定四庫全書總目提要 1997, 9026. My translation.

[3] YSZY 1994, 1A

[4] This text is printed and reprinted even up until the modern day, with critical editions being consistently produced at a regular basis. The impact of the text on the Ming is hard to measure but its official promulgation is evidence for an interest and investment into its recipes.

[5] Buell and Anderson 2013, 42.

[6] ibid., 272, footnote.

[7] Bal-Po Stew in the “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet,” figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.

Sound Recipes: Music as Medicine in Early Modern Goa

By Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

"The Mount of the Good Shepherd," c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.
“The Mount of the Good Shepherd,” c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.

In early modern South Asia, sound worked as a therapeutic agent that crossed textual, ritual, and oceanic worlds. European observers in the Jesuit entrepôt of Goa — one of the most prominent hubs of Catholic missionary activity in India — and household compilers across the Atlantic world translated, adopted, or rejected these sonic practices. This contribution situates “sound recipes” within the logic of the pharmacopeia, according to which a rāga (a melodic framework in Indian classical music associated with specific moods and times) or mantra (a sacred verbal formula believed to have spiritual or healing power) can be dosed, timed, and combined with other substances, such as herbal infusions, perfumed oils, or mineral pastes, much like a drug.[1] Musicological studies on early modern South Asia, roughly spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have linked rāga, time, and rasa (the aesthetic mood or emotional essence evoked in performance) to somatic and emotional states.[2] Building on this insight, this contribution triangulates close readings of three sources: first, Sanskrit medical and musical sources in which mantra, nāda (primordial or resonant sound), and rāga act as therapeutic agents, (e.g., Bhaiṣajya Ratnāvalī and Saṅgīta Parijāta); second, missionary letters and reports from Goa that frame healing as a site of translation; and third, early modern European recipe books in which prayer and chant appear beside simples.

Goa as a contact zone

On the western Indian coast, sixteenth-century Portuguese physicians such as Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa catalogued Indian materia medica while operating inside a Catholic imperial world.[3] Their dialogues show how Portuguese medicine negotiated local drugs, practices, and authority. Jesuit letters and mission histories from the same context present healing as a privileged site of cultural brokerage. Missionaries learned and sometimes used local therapeutics, staging cures that blended prayer, relics, and vernacular ideas of efficacy.[4] While the Jesuit archive highlights Christian ritual sound, it also attends to Indian bodily techniques and substances, suggesting that mantra-like repetition and Latin prayer were mutually legible within a shared recipe logic. In Jesuit infirmaries and domestic chapels, healing often unfolded as a multisensory practice: prayers were murmured over decoctions, oils were stirred in rhythm with chants, and Latin invocations blended with Sanskrit syllables. The result was a working grammar of healing in which utterance and dose reinforced each other. The ladle, mortar, and pestle set the rhythm, and the voice kept time. What emerged was not a confused hybrid but a practical recipe culture that judged efficacy by repeatable acts, including speech.

Jesuit correspondence from the Estado da Índia — the Portuguese imperial territories in the Indian Ocean, with Goa as their administrative and missionary center — consistently treated healing as a tool of persuasion. Medical care, herbal knowledge, and ritual sound became the means through which missionaries sought to demonstrate the efficacy of Christian devotion and attract converts. The letters sketch a choreography of roles: a lay brother to measure and infuse, a scholar to recite orisons over the sick, and a converted nurse to translate for patients and procure medical ingredients at the market. Prayer did not cancel the dose; it stabilized it. In practice, for example while cooking, repeated Pater Nosters or litanies functioned like a timer, dictating the duration of the simmer, the cooling, and the interval between spoonfuls.[5]

Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies catalogued Indian drugs and the social settings in which they were obtained. Merchants and physicians visited the houses of the sick, kitchen workers were consulted, and patients received decoctions that tasted of cinnamon and clove as much as of missionary hospitality. Orta weighed local testimony, sometimes admitting to a plant’s healing power while omitting information about the ritual words that accompanied its use. His description of Goa’s medical life reads less like a study than a domestic pharmacy staffed by servants and informants who knew that recipes often traveled with words, prayers, and spells attached to them.[6] Cristóvão da Costa’s printed Compendium extended Orta’s list of drugs and diagrams. Its path from Goa’s kitchens to Europe’s presses shows how a cure that began with a whispered invocation could be reduced to a chemical extract or powdered preparation — stripped of its ritual and sonic dimensions —     even as prayer in Goa’s Jesuit college continued to time the stirring of medicines in the infirmary.[7]

Music as medicine

The Jesuits also worked with an acoustic theory of cure. Relics, blessings, and the sign of the cross functioned as spoken technologies. In Goa, missionaries recognized that Indian patients already understood the logic of a spoken remedy. Atharvavedic and Ayurvedic pairings of plant and verse were not exotic outliers but familiar structures with different words. And so, in the mission kitchen, Latin did not replace mantra in the act of dosing so much as stand alongside it . A Konkani-speaking patient might not understand the words or meanings of Latin words but could recognize the pattern: an uttered formula, a breath, and the spoon. Jesuit chroniclers marked successful cures with the language of grace, while local interlocutors could interpret the same cure as the right plant, rightly cooked, with a voice that prepared the body to receive it.[8]

These spaces of missionary healing also served as spaces of translation. At the cauldron, a Jesuit brother preparing remedies learned to name plants as his patients did, adopting local terms and pronunciations so that recipes and treatments could circulate across languages and communities.. He learned timings shaped by coastal winds, monsoon humidity, and fasting calendars. He learned that certain decoctions were best taken at dawn, when the body’s heat and the day’s rāga aligned. Even if the mission did not adopt Indian musicology, it absorbed its clock. The schedule of matins and vespers met local dosing of mornings and evenings. In the Goan kitchen, college bells doubled as timers. The clang that called the community to prayer also told the cook when to lift the pot.[9]

European household  medicine and recipe culture had already prepared missionaries to accept words as curative adjuncts. Early modern recipe books placed psalms and charms beside simples without discomfort. A charm to staunch blood might sit next to a syrup for coughs. The value of these entries lay not in abstract theory but in the report that they had proven efficacy. When Jesuits in Goa encountered Indian sound medicine, they carried this idea with them. It allowed them to absorb counts of recitation or the tying of a thread while a verse was spoken. In the Goan mission kitchen, such actions could be recoded as Christian piety without altering the rhythm the patient’s body was used to feeling.[10] Yet the kitchen could also be erased. When cures moved from the voice-filled room to printed missionary accounts or natural histories, the words were often flattened. Efficacy was attributed to the drug alone, and the context of sound was treated as superstition or allowed to fade.
*****
Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Literature at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India. He earned his Ph.D. in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. At SMVDU, he teaches courses on applied linguistics and stylistics. His recent work has focused on folk songs, folks tales, and Hindi proverbs.

NOTES

[1] Schofield, K. B. (2023). Music and musicians in late Mughal India. Cambridge University Press. https://assets.cambridge.org/97813165/17857/excerpt/9781316517857_excerpt.pdf;  Jairazbhoy, N. A. (1971). The rags of North Indian music: Their structure and evolution. Lok Virsa Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725

[2] Rowell, L. (1992). Music and musical thought in early India. University of Chicago Press; Kaufmann, W. (1968). The ragas of North India. Indiana University Press. Open Library

[3] Orta, G. de. (1563/1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (C. Markham, Trans.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org; da Costa, C. (1578/1582). Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales. Internet Archive. https://archive.org

[4] Županov, I. G. (1999). Disputed mission: Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India. Oxford University Press; Wicki, J. (Ed.). (1948–1988). Documenta Indica (Vols. 1–18). Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. HathiTrust Digital Library

[5] Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 3 (2003): 343–366.

[6] Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1913), ix–xii, 65–72.

[7] Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (Burgos: Martín de Victoria, 1578), 1–10, 145–150.

[8] Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–20.

[9] Josef Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. III, 1553–1557 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), 45–47, 112–118.

[10] Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 1–12, 95–108.

Preparedness for the Unexpected: Expedient Recipes for Survival in Wartime China

By Chang Xu

If you were stocking up on disaster relief supplies, what kind of reference would you want by your side? Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852) reads like just such a survival guide. Compiled during and after the turmoil of the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), this text wasn’t intended solely for military use, despite what its title suggests. In the preface, the compiler Luo Shiyao explained that the collection grew out of his personal encounters with everyday illnesses.[i] His project belonged to a longer literati tradition in which scholars compiled and published practical encyclopedias and daily-use compendia, creating their own textual museums of useful knowledge. Since disease during military campaigns could be especially debilitating, as Luo observed, remedies proven effective under such extreme conditions then held particular value for the wider public, meeting an urgent need for survival in wartime.[ii]

Black-and-white text fills a page of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches.
Fig. 1. Preface of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches. Digitized and online at Google Books, URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/行軍方便便方/hylWAAAAcAAJ?hl=en.

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The manual contains 679 recipes, organized into six sections (see Table 1). What began as a personal collection of useful prescriptions unexpectedly revealed the remarkable efficacy of “expedient recipes” (bianfang). These recipes arguably relied only on ingredients that were familiar and accessible to readers: beans, chestnuts, vegetables, tea, and other mundane materials. They didn’t require rare or costly components, nor did they depend on professional diagnoses or individualized modification. Yet, when followed as directed, they consistently produced immediate, reliable results. In effect, the manual empowered its users to be their own doctors, as Yi-Li Wu also noticed in the case of women’s medicine.

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Section # of recipes
Preparedness for the Unexpected 26
Preventive Defense 45
Treating Injuries 117
Curing Illnesses 309
Rescue and Relief 71
Miscellaneous Addenda 111
  Total: 679

Fittingly, most of the recipes focus on treating injuries and illnesses, reflecting the compilation’s original purpose. But it is the recipes for preparing food and drink for the unexpected that appear first—framing the two as the foundation of survival. To underscore this point, Luo drew on a grim catalog of historical episodes, including accounts of cannibalism during sieges and famine, to convey the urgency of such knowledge.[iii] In response, he assembled a diverse range of recipes from pharmacopeias, medical texts, and agriculture manuals, offering practical strategies for preserving food, reducing consumption, identifying substitutes, and finding safe drinking water.

The first group of recipes, all titled “Method for Avoiding Grain and Preventing Hunger During Military Marches,” offers strategies for reducing food intake while sustaining the body during prolonged periods of deprivation. One of them reads:

Astragalus root (huangqi), 3 qian (approximately 11.19g)

Red halloysite clay (chi shizhi), 3 qian

Dragon bone (fossilized bone), 3 qian

Siler root (fangfeng), 5 fen (approximately 1.9g)

Processed aconite root (wutou), 1 qian (approximately 3.73g)

Roast [the ingredients] until dry, then pound in a stone mortar one thousand times. Refine [the resulting powder] with honey to form bullet-sized pills. When traveling urgently with no time to prepare food, eat a full meal of rice beforehand, then take one pill to sustain a journey of 500 li (approximately 165 miles). Two pills will keep you going for 1,000 li.[iv]

For readers who found the ingredients in this recipe uncommon or difficult to obtain, the manual offers more accessible alternatives. One recipe, for instance, recommends steaming asplenium trichomanes (tiejiao fengwei cao; literally, iron-foot phoenix-tail grass) together with black beans. Eating five to seven of these infused beans is said to keep hunger at bay for an entire day.[v]

Fig. 2. Asplenium trichomanes from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé;s Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond simply reducing food intake, some recipes go further by offering ways to transform inedible materials into food. One recipe, quoted from the renowned pharmacopeia Ben cao gang mu (Systematic Materia Medica), describes how to render rock edible:

Gather white stones from mountain streams, and boil them in juice from scallions or with the root of sanguisorba officinalis (diyu). Once cooked, they become as soft as taro and can serve as a hunger remedy. This is called “stone soup” (shigeng).[vi]

Likely originating in Daoist texts, “stone stops” carried cultural weight in literati writings and poetry as part of the cuisines of transcendence. While Daoist sources emphasized absorbing the qi of stones produced through this cooking method, Luo’s inclusion of this recipe highlights its practical utility rather than its association with longevity-inducing nourishment found in other texts. [vii]

Food poisoning was another major concern addressed in the treatise. As Luo noted, there are cases where troops suffered from consuming poor food, resulting in swelling, shortness of breath, and death. In the “Rescue and Relief” section, therefore, he gathered guidance on identifying toxic plants and animals, as well as detecting contaminated water and spoiled fruits. He warned that if a dead animal’s mouth remains closed, its liver appears dark, or its flesh is marked with black spots, the meat should not be consumed.[viii] In this part of the collection, the focus shifts from treating the ill to equipping readers with the knowledge to avoid contaminated food in the first place.

Luo Shiyao’s effort to compile practical knowledge parallels the work of late Ming scholars who sought to collect and classify natural objects, as Benjamin Elman has discussed. Amid the twin crises of warfare and illness, Luo’s manual offered not only remedies but also a structure for navigating chaos, something tangible readers could hold onto. By using recipes, Luo drew on what Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata have identified as the strengths of medical formulars in transmitting knowledge: their modularity and experiential basis made them easy to adapt and share.[ix] Yet such recipes typically required learned physicians to turn a generic formula into a specific prescription. Luo’s collection attempted to break from that model. His emphasis on expediency—on accessibility, broad applicability, and consistent outcomes—shifted the power of care from professional practices to ordinary individuals. It was a solitary act of hope, an effort to make order out of chaos, and to leave behind something enduring when so much had already been lost.

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[i] The author did not specify the types of illnesses he had experience in the preface. However, based on the section “Curing Illnesses,” the compilation addresses various conditions such as coughing, colds, diarrhea, headaches, toothaches, lower back pain, as well as ulcers and skin diseases.

[ii] Luo Shiyao羅世瑤, Xingjun fangbian bianfang 行军方便便方Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852), Preface, 1a.

[iii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Preface, 1b.

[iv] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[v] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[vi] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[vii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[viii] One of the example could be found in Lin Hong 林洪 (1127-1279), “Bai shigeng” 白石羹 (White Stone Stop), in Shanjia qinggong 山家清供 Simple and pure cuisine of Master Mountain Dwelling, https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E5%AE%B6%E6%B8%85%E4%BE%9B.

[ix] Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.” Isis 108, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 20. https://doi.org/10.1086/691411.

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Chang Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research interests cover the global history of medicine, the history of military technologies, and the interconnections between human and non-human bodies. She is currently working on a monograph derived from her PhD research at Washington University in St. Louis, which examines medical practices in military organizations during the Qing’s territorial expansion.