At the core of this book is a facsimile reprint of the 1456 edition of a dietary manual, "The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink," including its enchanting illustrations of kitchen scenes and foodstuffs such as rice, wheat, millet, wolf, crane, sheep, crab, and carp. It was written by Hu Szu-Hui, who probably came from a bilingual Chinese-Turkic family in northwest China and who served [End Page 563] as imperial dietary physician to several short-lived descendents of Qubilai Qan in the early 1300s. The text, which he originally presented to the emperor in 1330, consists of three sections, the first two comprising over two hundred recipes interspersed with nuggets of dietetic advice and the third being a comprehensive materia dietetica describing the nutritional and medical properties of various foodstuffs.
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Rachel Laudan (2003) studied this question.