Mike shinoda yao ming biography

Robban Toleno, Columbia University

Few collections of food recipes survive from ancient and early imperial China. Ancient classical texts sometimes touch on food topics, but tend to focus on theoretical ideas that informed the dietary practices of literate elites, or they merely name foods but do not leave instructions for their preparation. What recipes we do have from early periods tend to be embedded in literary works such as medical literature and agricultural manuals that were valued for much more than the food recipes that they contain. Roughly around the Tang-Song dynastic transition (ca. tenth to eleventh century), improved woodblock print technology stimulated a new print culture that allowed publication and widespread circulation of genres of writing that previously might have only have been shared as hand-copied editions. The emergence of the recipe collection as a stand-alone and publication-worthy literary genre appears to date from after the development of this new print culture, in Song China (960–1279). Before this time, recipe collections may have circulated locally and played a role in domestic affairs (some have been found in tombs), but they did not earn a place in the orthodox bodies of writing handed down to the present.