Abstract
The world has long needed a comprehensive ethnobotany of China. For decades Hu Shiu-Ying has been the authority of first and last recourse for all of us who need accurate scientific names for Chinese plants. This huge and thorough book more than satisfies the need for an ethnobotany of Chinese food plants. Dr. Hu has already covered the medicinal plants (Hu 1999).
The book under review introduces China's environment and agriculture, with many delightful personal reminiscences and stories. Hu then provides hundreds of botanical and ethnobotanical accounts of species ranging from algae and ferns to roses and sunflowers. Dozens of excellent drawings and photographs illustrate a wide cross-section of the flora.
China is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, spanning a huge range of habitats. Few other countries can count among their native food plants both the Arctic crowberry and the deep-tropical Canarium album (L.) tree. The Chinese have figured out ways to use almost all the flora for food.
This book catalogs plants from the most remote and obscure parts of China. Many were not known outside their tiny homelands until Dr. Hu introduced them to science; many culinary uses are described here for the first time in English. She brings to the wider world her own taxonomic revisions, especially of beans, and her discovery that the “English” or “Persian” walnut (Juglans regia L.) is apparently Chinese (pp. 337–338).
Hu goes far beyond mere technical accounts. Truly noteworthy is her long section on bupin (“supplements”). These are herbal materials that, in traditional Chinese medicine, are tonic or strengthening. (There are also countless animal bupin, but they fall outside this book.) At least bupin herbs “work” in terms of biomedicine as well. Some are rich in vitamins and minerals, such as the gouqizi, a wolfthorn berry (Lycium chinense L.), that is essentially a vitamin pill; others have chemicals with apparent stimulant effects on the body. Hu provides available knowledge of the medicinal compounds involved. She also provides something all too rare in ethnobotanies: good recipes. For all the common bupin, she gives traditional recipes, highly authentic and typical (though see below). I have had many of these dishes; some taste like medicine, but many are excellent teas and soups. The bupin section of the book could be a major stand-alone volume by itself.
Chinese names are always creative, and this book has its share of delightful ones. Yerengua, “wild man's melon” (Holboellia fargesii Reaub.), is one; the “wild man” is the Chinese Bigfoot, hairy and savage. Melastoma sanguineum (Sims) is called, from its leaf shape, “police dog tongue;” the Chinese is “wolf dog tongue;” it seems the German shepherd is a “wolf dog” in China!
In short, this is a Great Work, one that every reader of this journal needs to know, and everyone with much interest in Chinese food or plant life will want to buy. (The price is very cheap considering what you get. A throwaway paperback these days costs around $20, and this book is worth a million such.)
Of course, no work on Chinese food plants can be complete, if only because the Chinese adopt food plants with such eagerness that even a comprehensive volume would be out of date by the time it were published. Many plants known from marginal, frontier, and minority areas are not included here; for example, Solanum khasianum (C.B. Clarke), a small eggplant popular in frontier southwest China. For all those who are obsessed with Maya-Chinese ethnobotanical relations, I can add a couple of recent Maya imports. Hylocereus undatus (Britt. and Rose), mentioned herein only for the use of its flowers in soup, supplies a huge and bizarre-looking fruit now well known in outward-looking Chinese cities under the name “fire dragon fruit” (huolungguo). The k'anistel (Pouteria campechiana Baehni) has turned up as “heavenly peach” (tiantao; it may have come via Australia, where it is grown and sold as “yellow sapote”).
Dr. Hu is the authority on Chinese economic botany, and this book has very few errors (except for countless typos). Dr. Hu's Chinese-influenced English is a delight—personal, vivid, and striking. For instance, Chinese chives are fond of “overtaking the garden” (p. 315); indeed, some are overtaking my garden even now. The one problem that can cause real confusion is Dr. Hu's mistranslation of jiu—liquor, alcoholic liquid—as “Chinese gin” or “rice gin.” The word “gin” is legally restricted to grain neutral spirits flavored with juniper. This commodity is nonexistent in China except as an expensive import from the West. Jiu can be either nondistilled Chinese “wine”—technically a still ale, made from rice or other grains—or distilled spirits, called by such names as maotai and sanshu, and typically made from millet, sorghum, or sweet potatoes, not rice. These would be “whiskey” or “vodka” in the west; “whiskey” is the better translation, since it implies a definite grain-and-ferment taste (which Chinese distilled drinks possess), whereas “vodka” is more or less tasteless. If you use Dr. Hu's recipes, use Chinese wine when she says “sherry” and, at least in most cases, Chinese whiskey when she says “gin.” Most of the bupin that are prepared by steeping or bottling in “gin” are really kept in Chinese distilled spirits, but Chinese wine is very often medicinalized with herbs too; moreover, the particular kind of spirits or wine matters. We need a better account here.
A more trivial confusion concerns badanren, literally “almond” (from Persian badan, almond, and Chinese ren, “kernel”; Prunus amygdalus Batsch). The term is used in China for nonpoisonous apricot kernels (from Prunus armeniaca L.; pp. 227–228, 442). Hu says this is always its meaning, and almonds are unknown. No, almonds are known, especially in west China, and under this name; and the apricot kernels in question are usually just xingren (apricot kernels). Clearly, Hu speaks from experience, but in this case there is a bit more to the story.
Dr. Hu has been everywhere in China, but her experience of America is largely at Harvard, where she has been associated with the Arnold Arboretum for well over half a century. As such, she has a Boston-centric view of Chinese plants in America. When you read that a plant is grown or sold in Boston, you can assume it is known all over urban North America. Sometimes this provincialism becomes a bit unfortunate. She credits an Amherst, Massachusetts, firm with recently introducing soybean skin to the United States (p. 119), missing not only generations of Chinese grocers but also the yeoman service of William Shurtleff and his Soyfoods Center group, who popularized soybean skin in California several decades ago and have kept it in play. Similarly, mentioning that water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica Forsskal) is grown in homegardens in Boston rather slights the long-standing popularity of it as a commercial crop in California.
These quibbles hardly detract from the monumental achievement of Dr. Hu in bringing order to the incredible world of Chinese food plants.