Chinese Food Science and Culinary History: A New Study (Book Review‪)‬

THIS LARGE TOME is a most welcome contribution to the study of Chinese food science and culinary history. The author, Huang Hsing-tsung [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], served as Joseph Needham's secretary in Chongqing in the early 1940s. He subsequently went on to obtain a D.Phil. in chemistry at Oxford, and then worked for food processing and pharmaceutical companies in the United States. He also served as a program director for the National Science Foundation and more recently Deputy Director of the Needham Research Institute. The book was originally conceived in 1954 as a work on fermentation ("the conversion of grains to alcoholic drinks"), and by 1979, two other subjects, food technology and nutrition ("with emphasis on nutritional deficiency diseases"), were added. In 1984, Joseph Needham formally invited Dr. Huang to assume responsibility for the entire volume. The result is an amply documented study of ancient Chinese food resources, culinary methods, literary sources on food and drink, various kinds of fermentation, including alcohol, soybeans, and pickles, food preservation, the production of oils, malt sugar and starch, the processing of wheat flour, tea processing and its effects on health, and food and nutritional diseases in China. Dr. Huang is uniquely qualified to write this book. He has an impressive knowledge of organic chemistry that he applies to his examination of a large corpus of Chinese textual material. His bibliography of secondary sources, especially the works in Chinese, is quite large and contains many items from Chinese journals that I have not seen. In addition, Huang has had a long-time association with Shi Shenghan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], perhaps the leading authority in the twentieth century in the field of Chinese agriculture and food science.