Simple Fare from a Mountain Home: Literati Taste in a Song Dynasty Vegetarian Cookbook

Written by the Southern Song literatus Lin Hong, Simple Fare from a Mountain Home stands as one of the most representative notebook-style recipe collections in the history of Chinese cuisine. The book records well over a hundred dishes, a good many of them built around vegetables, mushrooms, and soy products, and its pages convey the Song literati's taste for plain living and closeness to nature.

More Than a Recipe Book

What makes Simple Fare from a Mountain Home distinctive is that each dish is typically accompanied by a literary allusion, a line of verse, or a personal reflection from the author. Food thereby transcends its function as mere sustenance and becomes a vessel for the author's temperament. Dishes recorded in the book, such as “Dongpo Tofu” and “Snow Glow Soup,” carry names that are poetic in their own right.

A Microcosm of Song Dynasty Vegetarian Culture

Through this book, we can glimpse several features of vegetarian life in the Song dynasty:

• The scholar-official class chose simple eating deliberately, not solely out of economic necessity
• Combinations of wild seasonal vegetables, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and soy products had already grown quite sophisticated
• Culinary writing and literary composition were closely intertwined
• Vegetarian food was invested with cultural meanings of purity, refinement, and reclusion

The book remains, to this day, an unavoidable primary source for studying Song dynasty life aesthetics and the evolution of vegetarian craft, as well as an important model that later vegetarian cookbook writers have repeatedly drawn upon. Many of the dish names it records are still used on tables across the Jiangnan region today.