Living in Seasons: Mulberry Wine, or the Moral Perils of Recipes in Times of Austerity
Elaine Leong
By He Bian
April and May on the US east coast = temperature swings = confusing
and sickly weather. This year especially reminds me of the sobering
admonition from the ancient Chinese classic of medicine, <The Yellow
Emperor’s Inner Canon>: “when there is damage from cold in winter,
one suffers from warm diseases in spring (Dong shang yu han, chun bi bing wen)” (see Marta Hanson’s insightful book
on this subject). Seasonality is well known as a central preoccupation
in the Chinese medical tradition: the cosmic resonance of the body and
the larger world according to the quadruple division of the solar year –
the cyclic fluctuation of temperature, directionality of wind, and the
loci of corporal vulnerability that furnished essential cues for a
master practitioner of medicine.
But if etiology in Chinese medicine is classically understood as
seasonal, surely the therapeutics should also follow a seasonal rhythm?
To my surprise, a search for pre-modern monographs that contain the
keyword “four seasons” (sishi) yielded few results. In
addition, they tend to focus on agriculture (which of course also
follows a seasonal rhythm) or popular festivities around the year. I
decide to take a closer look at the latest text that featured “four
seasons” in its title – a title attributed to Qu You (1341-1427), Si shi yi ji (Auspicious
and Inauspicious Deeds in Four Seasons). I thought this text might
teach me something about how a learned scholar approached the notion of
seasonality in the early fifteenth century, and how that might align or
depart from the canonical medical model of seasonality.
The book consists of twelve chapters, each describing the dos and
don’ts for a specific month. I flipped to the chapter on the fourth
month (which corresponded roughly to this present moment in Western
calendar). I learned, to my surprise and delight, a ton of practical
advice with specific recipes: how to properly dry and insulate book and
painting cases before the advent of rainy season; “use eels that have
been sun-dried, burn them inside the house to thwart the thirst of
mosquitoes” (seems appropriate for New Jersey habitat); “wrap your
battle gears along with Sichuanese peppers (huajiao) or powder of Daphne flowers (yuanhua)
to prevent worm damage… wrap windshield collars and earmuffs and store
them in a vat, tightly seal it up, so as the fur will not fall off.”
After the first full moon this month, one “should drink mulberry wine”
to prevent “wind heat” illnesses (see Shigehisa Kuriyama’s discussion of wind in classical Chinese and Greek medicines). The recipe goes as follows:
Use Mulberries, get its juice of three dou (1 dou ~ 18 liter). White Honey four ounces (liang); Butter (suyou) one ounce; raw ginger juice two ounces.
Bring mulberry juice to a boil in a pot, and reduce its volume to three sheng (1 sheng = 1/10 dou), and then add honey, butter, and ginger juice. Add three drachm (qian) of salt and keep boiling till the texture is thick.
Store in porcelain utensils. Each time, take a small cup with wine. This effectively cures various wind-induced illnesses.
Not only does this sound completely delicious and doable to me, I
also realize how recipes like this are in fact completely grounded in
the seasonal rhythm of biological life (I just saw a friend posting the
harvest of fresh mulberries in her backyard in China).
In sum, what Qu You did in this book was to cull from a wide range of
medical and non-medical sources (a rough count yielded over 60
different titles) for hints and tips on how to live according to the seasons.
Some of his references were archaic almanacs that offered divinations
on the most auspicious dates to travel, have sex, trim your nails, or
remove grey hair, as well as dates one should abstain from such
activities. Some were quasi-ethnographic accounts of “customs” (fengsu)
in ancient cities that still lend to a viable reading as practical
guides to festivities. Still others draw from esoteric Daoist literature
on the preservation of vital essence (I have blogged on a related topic
here), a decision on Qu You’s part that raised many eyebrows both during his lifetime as well as centuries later. A Daoist talisman in Qu You, Si shi yi ji (1920 reprint of an 1836 edition).
We must remember that Qu lived through the Ming dynasty’s founder,
Hongwu emperor’s reign (1368-1398) – a period known for its austere
message of moral purity and simplicity. His fourth son, who usurped the
throne shortly after Hongwu’s death to become the Yongle emperor (r.
1404-1424), was not exactly friend of the letters either. Those were not
easy times for a literary aficionado with keen interests in morally
dubious subjects, and yet Qu You continued to compose and comment on
poetry, wrote short stories featuring ghosts and women, and collected
esoteric recipes. He even managed to publish those works, prefacing them
with loud self-defense of his moral stature. Qu eventually got into
trouble, endured decades of exile in the north, and yet again outlived
the Yongle emperor, who threw many a undisciplined scholars like him
into jail, by three years.
Perhaps the seasonal recipes did work well for him after all?
