The Kitchen Clinic - Cooking with
Chinese Medicinal Herbs
by Daniel Reid
In Chinese cuisine as well as Chinese herbal
medicine, there is no clearly defined line between food and medicine.
The relationship in Chinese tradition may be depicted by the classical “Tai-chi” symbol
representing the transmutable relation between Yin and Yang: the
border between the two is fluid and flexible, and each contains
within itself the potential seed of the other.
Traditional
Chinese kitchens are always well stocked with a variety or medicinal
herbs (e.g. ginseng, astragalus,
wolfberry, and jujube) that are used in cooking to enhance and
balance the therapeutic properties of food, while Chinese herbal
pharmacies carry herbs that in the Western world are defined
more as food than as medicine (e.g. garlic, ginger, cinnamon, and
cardamom).
In traditional Chinese households, the kitchen serves not only
as the family hearth for cooking food, but also as the family
clinic for preparing herbal remedies. Besides cooking tasty meals
for
the whole family, the family cook also concocts fortifying dishes
laced with the potent therapeutic properties of medicinal herbs.
These dishes are custom blended to meet the constitutional requirements
of various members of the family, to balance the prevailing energies
of season and geography, and to tonify the vital organs and enhance
their functions, all in accordance with the classical principles
of Yin and Yang, the Five Elemental Energies, and other basic
parameters of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
In fact, classical
Chinese cuisine evolved as
an offshoot of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which explains why
virtually all food cooked the Chinese way contains at least one,
and usually several medicinally active herbs, such as ginger and
garlic. In the imperial palaces and wealthy households of ancient
China, professional herbalists—not cooks—were hired
and it was they who supervised the purchase and preparation of
all food and decided which herbs were to be cooked with which foods,
while the cooks simply served as assistants, cooking everything
according to the herbalists' instructions.
It was the herbalists' responsibility to insure
that all dishes and all meals prepared in the kitchen were properly
balanced with medicinal herbs to deliver maximum health benefits
to the whole family, while also meeting the most stringent culinary
standards in taste and appearance. It was also their job to formulate
specific therapeutic recipes for individual members of the family,
based on their personal health requirements, and to determine when
it was time to adjust the blend of Yin and Yang on daily menus
according to seasonal changes. One reason that traditional Chinese
cuisine sits so well on the stomach that you "feel hungry
again an hour later'' is because rich, heavy ingredients such as
meat and fish are always cooked in combination with herbs that
balance their pharmacodynamic properties, such as ginger and scallions,
facilitating their harmonious digestion in the stomach and enhancing
efficient production of metabolic energy. The recipes for preparing
classical Chinese cuisine thus represent the cumulative wisdom
and clinical experience of a 5000-year-old tradition in herbal
medicine, and any food prepared in this manner yields as much therapeutic
benefit to the consumer as it does culinary satisfaction.
The primary principle in TCM is preventive health
care, and this is also the major guideline for using medicinal
herbs to prepare food in traditional Chinese cuisine. In China,
the occurrence of disease has always been viewed as a frontline
failure to properly practice the principle of prevention. In traditional
Chinese households, whenever someone fell ill, an accusing glance
was always cast first at the family cook, for possible dereliction
of duty in preparing that person's meals in strict accordance with
the family herbalist's specifications. It now became the duty of
the herbalist to effect a cure—at his own expense! It was
only in the relatively rare cases when someone actually got sick
that medicinal herbs were used to cook food for explicitly curative
purposes.
For the most part, medicinal herbs were used
in cooking to prevent disease and degeneration, not to cure them.
This was achieved in two basic ways: “constitutional'' formulas
specifically blended to balance inherent or acquired deficiencies
in particular individuals, thereby presenting such constitutional
imbalances from giving rise to disease; and general “tonic” formulas,
which have long been used in China for their therapeutic powers
to boost immunity and increase resistance, enhance vitality and
nurture health, slow aging and prolong life.
Constitutional Formulas
Constitutional formulas are designed to compensate
for congenital deficiencies in the human system, or to counteract
systemic imbalances acquired as a result of illness, accident,
toxins, bad habits, or old age. Unlike curative formulas, which
employ powerful, highly bioactive, sometimes semi-toxic herbs to
combat specific diseases in brief but intensive periods of therapy,
constitutional formulas utilize relatively gentle, nourishing herbs
that naturally balance Yin and Yang polarity throughout the system
and harmonize the Five Elemental Energies that govern the internal
organs and their vital functions. These formulas are meant for
long-term use, and the blend of ingredients should be adjusted
from time to time as the individual's system gradually rebalances
itself.
In traditional Chinese households, people consume
constitutional herbal formulas cooked into their daily meals for
many of the same chronic conditions and common deficiencies for
which people in modern Western households take powerful, often
addictive pharmaceutical drugs. For example, many common cerebral
disorders such as chronic mental fatigue, insomnia, memory loss,
and headaches are caused by a constitutional deficiency in cerebral
circulation. The modern Western approach is to take a specific
drug to counteract each specific symptom, such as sleeping pills
for insomnia, analgesics for headache, amphetamines for fatigue,
and so forth. The traditional Chinese way to deal with this condition
is to consume food cooked with herbs that are known to enhance
cerebral circulation, thereby counteracting the root cause of all
of the symptoms. In this case, some of the herbs that might be
useful in cooking food to stimulate circulation to and through
the brain include gotu kola. ginkgo, ginseng, schisandra, and epimedium.
Similarly, a womans with chronic menstrual problems
such as PMS or dysmenorrhea probably has as inherent or acquired
constitutional imbalance in her blood and/or deficiency in circulation.
Regardless of what the specific symptoms are, they may all be readily
relieved simply by rebalancing the basic imbalance responsible
for their occurrence, which in this case is a blood imbalance.
As all Chinese women know, the single most effective herb on earth
for correcting any and all female blood disorders is the great
blood tonic Angelica sinensis (dang-gui), which
lends itself very well to cooking in stews, soups and gruels.
While the lady of the house sips her dang-gui
tang (“Angelica Soup”) to regulate her menses,
the lord of the manor might lunch on a chicken stew liberally
laced with ginseng, wolfberry, epimedium, cardamom and caltrop
to compensate for the constitutional deficiency in kidney/adrenal
system energy (which governs sexual potency) that he acquired
as a result of excessive promiscuity during his profligate youth.
Today, most middle-aged men who suffer from chronic lumbago,
weak knees, cold hands and feet, frequent urination, tinnitus
(ringing ears), impotence, and other common symptoms of this
acquired kidney imbalance take various chemical prescription
drugs to relieve their symtoms, without realizing that they all
have a common root cause that may be corrected and gradually
cured simply by cooking the right selections of herbs into their
meals.
Constitutional formulas may be used to correct
constitutional imbalances in children as well is adults, and timely
application of such herbal therapy early in life can prevent internal
imbalances in vital functions from developing into debilitating
physical conditions later in life. Many children today, especially
in the industrially developed Western countries, display all of
the classic symptoms of extreme Yang excess, known in TCM terminology
as “Fire energy overload.”
Common symptoms of this condition include hypertension,
inability to concentrate, irritability, sleep disorders, constipation,
and a desire for ice-cold food and drink. The therapy of choice
for this problem for over three million children in America is
daily doses of the addictive amphetamine drug Ritalin. The only
thing the drug does is to partially relieve some of the most overt
symptoms, without in any way correcting the root causes, but it
also causes severe damage to the growing child's delicately balanced
endocrine .and central nervous systems, and results in a pattern
of addiction that continues into adulthood.
There are many factors involved in “Fire
energy overload'' in children today, but the primary causes are
excessive consumption of highly refined sugar (especially carbonated
soft drinks), industrially processed junk foods produced with chemical
additives, critical deficiency in calcium, magnesium, and other
alkaline minerals, and excessive exposure to artificial electromagnetic
fields from television, computers, and power lines. Ideally, all
of these causative factors should be eliminated from a child’s
life in order to correct the condition, but since this is often
not possible these days due to modern lifestyles, another approach
is to cook special food for such children, prepared with particular
herbs that counteract the excessively Yang side-effect of the factors.
Ginger, for example, is a savory herb with potent
alkalizing properties, and it may therefore be used to prepare
tasty dishes (and drinks) that counteract the extremely acidifying
effects of sugar and chemical additives in food. Chinese jujube,
which has a sweet fruity flavor, is very suitable for cooking the
sort of food that children will eat, such as hot, naturally sweetened
breakfast porridge. This herb not only counteracts excess yang
factors in the diet, it also calms the nervous system, balances
cerebral functions, and pacifies the heart, thereby directly relieving
the most troublesome symptoms of this condition.
Tonic formulas
Tonic herbs have been used in China to promote
health and prolong life for thousands of years, and one of the
most popular ways of taking them is to cook them together with
tonic foods, particularly seafood and wild game. Tonic formulas
are unique in the annals of herbal medicine in that they are meant
to be used exclusively by people who are already in a state of
relative good health and who wish to elevate themselves to a state
of superior health. In other words, they are strictly preventive
herbs, not curative. lf you're using tonic herbs and foods regularly,
but for some reason you get sick, you should immediately terminate
consumption of tonics and switch over to curative formulas specifically
designed to cure your ailment. Only when your system is completely
restored to normal health should you resume the use of tonics.
In Chinese herbology, all tonics fall into the
category known as “Superior Medicine'' (shang-yao) . This
indicates that they are completely non-toxic and have no negative
side-effects whatsoever, which means that they may be safely used
for prolonged periods or even for life. In the parlance of modern
Western herbology and nutritional science, Chinese tonic herbs
are sometimes refered to as “Food Grade Herbs,” because
they have been found to contain such a broad range of essential
nutritional factors that they have potent nutrient value as food
as well as therapeutic value as medicine. Due to the sheer demand
for tonics among Chinese people throughout the world, they have
become the most highly prized—and expensive—items in
the entire Chinese pharmacopeia.
Another unique feature of tonic herbs is their “bidirectional
properties”. Most medicinal herbs, particularly of the curative
variety are “unidirectional'' which means that they function
in only one way when ingested into the human system, and that they
always function that way regardless of internal or external conditions.
For example, a cooling curative Yin herb such as gardenia always
cools the system, even if the person taking it already has an overly
cool system. Tonic herbs, however, are bidirectional (adaptogens)
which means that they can influence the human system to move in
either direction—Yin or Yang, hot or cold, stimulation or
sedation, moist or dry—depending on the internal and/or external
conditions that need to be rebalanced. For example, ginseng root,
which is revered in Chinese medicine as the “King of the
Myriad Herbs'' due to its broad range of tonic properties, raises
blood sugar in people whose levels are chronically low (e.g. hypoglycemia),
but lowers it in those who have chronically high blood sugar (e.g.
diabetics). Similarly, ginseng lowers blood pressure when it's
too high, and raises it when it's too low.
Tonics are therefore whole body medicines that
rebalance the entire human energy system, normalize vital functions,
harmonize the system with environmental energies, and adapt the
body to respond successfully to metabolic pressures caused by diet,
stress, fatigue, travel, ageing, and environmental pollution. Such
herbs are known in Western herbology as “adaptogens,'' due
to their proven power to swiftly adjust vital bodily responses
to meet the challenges of adverse conditions, internal as well
as external.
Tonics work their therapeutic wonders primarily
by boosting the energy and balancing the functions of three major
systems: immune, cerebral, and sexual. These three systems interact
and mutually support (or suppress) one another by virtue of internal
biofeedback among hormones, neurotransmitters, and various immune
factors, secretions of which are stimulated by tonic herbs. The
much touted aphrodisiac properties of Chinese tonics are really
just the side-effects of the overall enhancement of glandular and
cerebral secretions prompted throughout the system by these herbs.
The powerful self-healing response known as “psychoneuroimmunology” (PNI)
is mediated by positive self-sustaining biofeedback between neuropeptides
produced in the brain and immune factors produced in the glands,
bone marrow, and blood. Similarly, high levels of sexual hormones
increase immune response by stimulating glandular secretions throughout
the entire endocrine system, which in turn improve cerebral functions
by activating secretions of various neurotransmitters. Tonics therefore
provide a balanced blend of benefits that together pave the way
for human health and longevity. As Western herbal scientist Dr.
Daniel B. Mowrey explains in his book Herbal Tonic Therapies:
A tonic is any substance that balances the
biochemical and physiological events that comprise body systems.
. . The consumption of tonics is a fail-safe approach to restoring
balance and promoting overall health of the body. . . It is a
worry-free method of handling life's daily challenges to health
and happiness.
In this day and age of pernicious pollution,
chronic stress, denatured diets, and other factors of life that
pose grave “daily challenges to health and happiness,” the
judicious use of tonic herbs as part of one's daily diet makes
good scientific sense and provides a safe, easy, and pleasant way
to keep the whole body in a state of optimum balance and harmony.
Curative Formulas
In the traditional Chinese view, the onset of
disease is a clear indication that normal preventive health care
has been neglected or carelessly applied, opening a window of vulnerability
through which illness enters. In wealthy households, whenever someone
fell ill, the family doctor was held responsible for failing to
foresee and prevent it, and all payments to the doctor were immediately
stopoped until he effected a cure, entirely at his own expense.
In other words, family doctors only got paid when they kept everyone
in the family healthy, not when someone got sick, and therefore
it was always to the doctor's own advantage to cure a patient swiftly
and effectively. This system was a powerful incentive against malpractice,
and it prompted the development of curative formulas with swift,
lasting effects.
When used for curative purposes, therapeutic
food cooked with medicinal herbs is usually taken as an adjunct
to more concentrated forms of herbal medicine, such as decoctions,
pills, or extracts. It's also important to strictly regulate the
entire diet during curative herbal therapy, to avoid consumption
of foods and seasonings whose pharmacodynamic properties conflict
with the effects of the therapeutic herbs, or further aggravate
the condition to be cured. For example, consumption of seafood
and soybean products is contraindicated when using some of the
most potent curative herbs, and chilli peppers should be avoided
when taking herbal remedies for liver problems.
Many of the herbs used in cooking food for curative
purposes fall into the “bitter” flavor (Fire element)
category, because bitter herbs are well known for their detoxifying
and anti-inflammatory properties, and they also assist digestion
and assimilation of nutrients and herbal essences in food. The
therapeutic benefits of “bitters” were once common
knowledge in western households as well, as evidenced by the wide
range of bitter herbal digestifs traditionally produced in Europe
and still available in gourmet shops, but today, especially in
America, bitter flavors have gone completely out of style, while
consumption of sugary sweets has risen drastically. That's one
reason why more than 50% of the American population report some
sort of chronic digestive ailment, especially hyperacidity, a situation
that could be readily remedied simply by consuming food and drink
prepared with bitter herbs.
* * * *
The idea of using food as medicine occured to
the founders of Western medicine as well as traditional Chinese
medicine, and it has only been since food started coming to us
from factories rather than farms about 50 years ago that Western
food stopped supporting human health and became a primary source
of disease and degeneration instead. Hippocrates, known as the
father of western medicine, taught his students “Thy food
shall be thy medicine,” which accords well with the words
of the famous Tang dynasty physician Sun Su-miao, who fourteen
centuries ago wrote a milestone medical tome called “Precious
Recipes” in which he states, “The truly good physician
. . . first treats the patient with food; only when food fails
does he resort to drugs.” One wonders what these venerable
physicians would have to say about the medicinal value of the products
found today on the shelves of most modern supermarkets and fast-food
outlets.
Dr. Charles Mayo, one of the most renowned American
physicians of the 20th century, had this to say:
“Normal resistance to disease is directly
dependent upon adequate food. Normal resistance to disease never
comes out of pill boxes.”
lf that's true, it no doubt helps explain why
so many people today have lost their “normal resistance to
disease,” despite the bewildering array of pill boxes that
are now sold alongside food in supermarkets. One way to remedy
this situation would be to emulate the traditional Chinese approach
by taking the “food as medicine” concept one step further
and using “medicine as food.” To do this, the medicine
must be herbal and edible, not chemical and noxious, and it must
be prepared at home in the "kitchen clinic" with the
same finesse and flavor as haute cuisine.