Read All About It
Henry C. Lu’s “Chinese Herbs with Common Foods” (Kodansha International, $18) and Lee Hwa Lin’s “Chinese Home Cooking for Health” (Wei-Chuan, $19.95) present the Chinese approach to healthful eating from different angles. Lu concentrates on herbs and food as medicine; Lin presents appetizing recipes, only a few of which involve Chinese medicinal ingredients.
Lu is the principal of the International College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Vancouver, Canada. He has written 20 books for Chinese medicine practitioners and five for general readers.
In his latest, he presents a scheme of self-diagnosis. The reader looks up an ailment and matches the symptoms with syndromes believed to give rise to that ailment. Bronchitis, for example, may result from spleen-dampness-attacking-the-lungs syndrome or liver-fire-attacking-the-lungs syndrome. Symptoms listed under these range from “heavy and foggy sensations in the head” to “excessive thirst.”
Then Lu suggests foods and herbs appropriate for treatment. If you had chronic bronchitis, for example, you would prepare dishes that involve duck or chicken eggs, honey, pears, walnuts and dried lotus rhizome.
After the foods, Lu recommends appropriate herbs--the idea is to add these to whatever you are cooking. Then he provides a recipe for a medicinal soup made by boiling crushed apricot kernels, licorice and garlic. Bronchitis sufferers would eat this soup twice a day.
Lu acknowledges that herbal preparations can taste bad. “Herbal soup is terrible,” he said in a telephone interview. “So what we do is, we combine them [food and herbs] together, to enjoy our meal without knowing that we are eating herbs. This has been practiced in China for thousands of years.”
“We are not talking about very fancy cooking,” he added. “The way to prepare herbs is very simple. You just boil the herbs and make a soup, or you can bake the herbs, crush them into powder and put this on food. If you were having spaghetti with sauce, you could sprinkle herbs on this.”
Lu explains that herbal treatments are designed to cure a disease, not merely to control the symptoms. “Some herbs are mildly toxic,” he acknowledged, “but they don’t cause any serious side effects. Our aim is to cure the disease without causing any side effects.”
Educated in Taiwan and China, Lu opened his college 12 years ago. The course of study there lasts four years, so it seems improbable that one could successfully diagnose and treat an illness by reading a single book. Nevertheless, Lu provides an interesting overview of Chinese medical theory and introduces 222 herbs commonly used in treatment, making his book a useful reference.
Lee Hwa Lin is director of the Wei-Chuan Cooking School in Taipei, Taiwan, so it follows that her book emphasizes cuisine more than medicine.
However, each of the 80 recipes is accompanied by its supposed health benefits. These are stated conditionally.
A dish titled lily bulbs and chicken “may relieve coughs and reduce anxiety,” the book says. And tomato beef stew “may improve metabolism and prevent coarse skin.” The benefits aren’t her own guesswork, though. The manuscript was reviewed by a doctor of Chinese medicine in Taipei.
The Chinese idea of health food differs from the popular Western approach, judging by recipes that involve deep frying and others that emphasize eggs. On the other hand, a drink such as carrot and wheat grass punch could have come straight from a natural foods shop.
In between are lots of dishes you would eat because they sound so good, not only because they are considered beneficial. A few involve Chinese medicinal herbs. Small red lycium berries are sprinkled over a salad platter that is mostly a collection of sprouts. Ginseng and lycium berries go with steamed ginseng chicken, and drunken chicken marinates with shaoxing wine, broth, lycium berries and tangkuei.
Most of the recipes require nothing more exotic than ingredients easily found in Asian markets. You would need chive buds and wood ears to make a pretty dish called flowery cuttlefish, canned gingko nuts for gingko chicken and bean curd sheets for happy purses, which are little pouches stuffed with shrimp, pork, water chestnuts and bean threads.
And there are plenty of easy, light dishes that call for nothing but supermarket ingredients. Among these are braised potatoes with basil, mushrooms with sugar snow peas, shrimp with canned corn and green onion, garlic chicken soup and chicken with green beans, carrots and apple. Tofu is involved in several recipes, and there are a couple of Chinese vegetarian dishes based on wheat gluten.
The recipes appear in Chinese and English side by side, which is helpful when shopping for special ingredients in Chinese markets. And each dish is photographed close up in color, so the cook has a clear idea of the outcome.
* Sources for Chinese herbs, H2