Did the latest bout of cold and flu have you opening cans of chicken noodle soup? Homemade chicken soup has long been thought to possess healing properties. Perhaps this can be attributed to the marrow in chicken bones or to the associated memories of mom’s lovingly made broth laced with thick egg noodles brought to your bed when you were a child. In either case, chicken soup is known to bring comfort to the ailing. But what of other ailments besides a cold or the flu? Have these recipes for tonics been lost in our rush to the pharmacy to buy a quick, usually prescribed, fix? The recent increase in the use of natural herbal medicines and food remedies coincides with the popularity of yoga, pilates, and shiatsu which emphasize the premise that the best way to prevent illness is to live a healthy lifestyle. But we all knew that, didn’t we? After all, an old English remedy is “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
But the Chinese have known this much longer. For thousands of years the Chinese have passed down restorative recipes. In Grace Young’s The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic Family Recipes for Celebration and Healing, she saves the last chapter of this beautifully written cookbook to discuss her personal discovery of her family’s bow recipes. Bow is Cantonese for replenishing or restoring.
Her search began when she learned of dong quai from a massage therapist and wondered why no one in her family had taught her about the powerful herb. She wrote, “The Cantonese have a strong tradition of making special recipes that have ingredients such as beef, chicken, ginger, Chinese dried red dates, lotus root, wolfberries, and Korean ginseng, which are reputed by the Cantonese to be blood builders.”
She dismisses the restorative properties of chicken broth, “Jewish penicillin,” by noting that it’s too rich for the body to digest. Instead, the Cantonese believe the sick person should first cleanse the body to remove toxins by eating foods that are fat free and easily digestible such as Gingko Nut Porridge, and then drink chicken broth as a restorative. Both recipes are included in Young’s cookbook.
Young also notes that only non-metal cookware should be used to make her “Homemade Chicken Broth” since metal “diminishes the restorative properties of the broth.” She recommends using a sandpot instead.
Other restorative recipes in Chinese Kitchen include “Korean Ginseng Soup” and “Double Steamed Black Chicken Soup.” Black chickens, or zook see gai, are two-pound game birds from China, but are currently farm raised in South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Canada and sold in Asian markets. Other recipes in this section have specific purposes such as “Pickled Pig’s Feet” for nursing mothers which uses both front and back trotters, black vinegar, sweetened black vinegar, and ginger.
Another cookbook focusing on food as health giving is A Spoonful of Ginger: Irresistible, Health-giving Recipes from Asian Kitchens by Nina Simonds. This beautifully photographed cookbook is filled with 200 healthful recipes. Simonds wrote, “For thousands of years, various foods have been prepared by Chinese doctors and have been prepared by loving mothers to prevent diseases and to cure them. For the Chinese and many Asian cultures, food is a nurturing, benevolent friend that maintains and restores health. We in the West tend to concentrate more on what is not good for us, and we are so apprehensive about what we eat that often food becomes an enemy.”
The basis of Simonds’ work is the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang and the importance of balancing what is eaten. Throughout Spoonful she notes which foods are yin, those which have cooling properties such as seafood, spinach, and asparagus, with those which are yang, such as hot peppers, ginger, and beef. She wrote that not only do the dishes need to be harmonious, but all of us are either yin or yang and need to balance this through the foods we eat.
Rather than a typical cookbook delineated by courses, Spoonful of Ginger has chapters devoted to “Nourishing Soups,” Soybeans and Tofu” and “The Neutralizers: Rice, Breads, and Noodles.” But don’t be put off, the recipes are mouthwatering.
In one section, Simonds states that seafood, a cold food, must be balanced with the warmth of ingredients such as ginger, scallions, cilantro and rice wine and by using cooking techniques such as stir-frying, roasting, and grilling. One of the most tantalizing recipes she includes is “Yin Yang Shrimp with Hawthorn Dipping Sauce.” Here shrimp is marinated in a sake, sesame oil, ginger and scallion, dipped in either black or white sesame seeds, and then oven roasted. The hawthorn in the accompanying sauce is the fruit of a Chinese plant and is thought to promote digestion.
Unlike her first two Asian cookbooks which had readers scouring Chinese markets for hard to find ingredients, Simonds frequently substitutes ingredients with those more readily found in American grocery stores. In other recipes, she tries out a commonly found primary ingredient such as ground turkey for ground chicken with much success. In another classic western Chinese dish, “Fragrant Steamed Pearl Balls,” with black mushrooms, ginger, and sesame oil, she substitutes sweet rice for ground meat to create a vegetarian appetizer.
Simonds met with Daniel Reid, an American who is an authority on Chinese medicine and the author of many books on the subject including The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Medicine. Reid noted that there was no clear line between Chinese cuisine and Chinese medicine. In fact, he believes that in ancient Chinese palaces the cooks were not chefs, but professional herbalists.
In Asia, the kitchen was the place to balance the energies of the person and the season by the inherent properties of the food. Fresh and locally grown produce was part of that diet, a diet devoted to preventing disease. Something for any of us to consider before our next trip to the pharmacy.
The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic Family Recipes for Celebration and Healing by Grace Young, photography by Alan Richardson. (Simon & Shuster Editions, 282 pages, $27.50).
A Spoonful of Ginger: Irresistible, Health-giving Recipes from Asian Kitchens by Nina Simonds, color photography by Beatriz Da Costa, black and white photography by Don Rose and Michael Hodgson. (Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $30).
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2002.
