Real-life Mangunrok: Asia’s oldest cookbooks and their modern afterlives
In Bon Appétit, Your Majesty, theMangunrok is both love letter and ledger. It is a book written by King Lee Heon (Lee Chae-min) himself to record the dishes prepared by his cook and eventual lover Yeon Ji-yeong (Im Yoo-na). The title translates to “longing for the clouds”, a name that suggests distance, devotion and the ephemeral nature of memory. Within the show, it’s a chronicle of taste and tenderness: the meals that defined an era and a relationship, preserved on parchment so they might never be forgotten.
The Mangunrok is purely fantasy. Asia’s oldest cookbooks are hardly about a long-lost love. However, across Asia, real kings, courtiers and scholars once kept their own records of the table: manuscripts that mapped entire empires through food. Long before stars or fine-dining guides, cuisine was documented as governance, medicine and philosophy. A meal was not simply nourishment; it was cultural and political.
Asia’s oldest cookbooks (the recorded ones, that is) reveal how civilisations once ate, ruled and healed themselves through food. Each one speaks not just to what was delicious, but to what was worth remembering.
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‘Yinshan Zhengyao’ (飲膳正要) by Hu Sihui: 1330 CE (Yuan Dynasty, China)
A page from the ‘Yinshan Zhengyao’ about animal transformations. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
A hybrid of medical manual and imperial cookbook, Yinshan Zhengyao was composed by the Mongol-court physician Hu Sihui and presented to the Yuan imperial household in 1330. It treats food as therapy: chapters prescribe seasonal diets, list the medicinal properties of ingredients and include recipes for court dishes such as steamed buns and fermented dairy (koumiss-style drinks), reflecting the Mongol taste for milk products as well as the Chinese tradition of hot-food/cold-food balance.
The original 1330 manuscript is lost; modern editors rely on a Ming edition (1456) and later scholarship that parses its dietary prescriptions and imperial etiquette. The text is central to scholarship on medieval Chinese court cuisine and the medicine-diet nexus; contemporary researchers cite it when tracing Mongol culinary influence on China and when rethinking “food as prescription” in historical perspective.
Why it matters today
Yinshan is the touchstone for anyone studying how court kitchens balanced showmanship with medicinal concerns. Food historians and chefs interested in historical palate reconstruction and how seasonal eating was rationalised long before modern nutrition science repeatedly return to Hu Sihui’s prescriptions as a primary source. Modern writers and museum exhibitions often cite it when explaining Yuan-era dining’s role in cross-border taste exchange.
‘Wushi Zhongkuilu’ (吳氏中饋錄): late 13th century CE (Song to Yuan Dynasties, China)
Learn more about the origins of the mysterious but deeply practical ‘Wushi Zhongkuilu’.
Attributed to a female household author known as “Madame Wu”, this 13th-century handbook is one of the rare surviving domestic cookbooks from pre-modern China. Unlike court manuals that emphasise banquets, Wushi Zhongkuilu records everyday household practice: pickling, curing, vegetable preparations, confections and an early reference to soy condiments.
Despite being one of Asia’s oldest cookbooks, its voice is practical even to this day. It lists techniques, quantities and storage tips. Even more remarkable? Its survival. So few household compendia by women from this period were preserved. The first accessible English translation and scholarly edition has only recently made this domestic voice available to wider audiences.
Why it matters today
The book’s step-by-step treatments of preservation and vegetable cookery offer a corrective to the assumption that ancient Chinese gastronomy was only about court excess. Contemporary chefs and artisanal producers who pursue regional, low-waste, vegetable-led cuisine cite Madame Wu as evidence of a long domestic practice of frugality, technique and subtlety. The text has inspired cookbook projects, museum demonstrations and scholarly reconstructions that highlight home cooking as the backbone of culinary continuity.
‘Eumsik Dimibang’ (음식디미방) by Lady Jang Gye-hyang: c 1670 CE (Joseon Dynasty, Korea)
‘Eumsik Dimibang’ contains 51 fascinating recipes. (Photo: Jang Gyehyang / Wikimedia Commons)
Composed by Lady Jang Gye-hyang of the yangban class and written in hangul, the Eumsik Dimibang is Korea’s oldest surviving cookbook in the vernacular. It contains recipes and instructions for making fermented pastes, pickles, soups, rice dishes, sweets and even household alcohols.
Its significance is twofold: it preserves pre-modern Korean techniques before New World chillies reshaped flavour profiles, and it records domestic, not solely courtly, practices from a woman’s point of view. Museums and cultural centres in Korea run workshops based on Lady Jang’s recipes, and chefs consulting early Joseon methods use her manual to reconstruct fermentation and seasonal preservation practices.
Why it matters today
As a vernacular cookbook by a woman, the Eumsik Dimibang is a cultural anchor. Its recipes inform contemporary revivals of pre-modern Korean tastes, particularly in temple cuisine and in restaurants that foreground seasonal vegetable work and traditional fermentations. The text is often invoked in discussions of kimjang, or communal kimchi making, and of Korea’s living fermentation culture.
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‘Ryōri Monogatari’ (料理物語): 1643 CE (Edo period, Japan)
Food historian and chef Max Miller replicates a noodle recipe from ‘Ryōri Monogatari’.
The earliest surviving practical Japanese cookbook compiled and printed during the Edo period, Ryōri Monogatari (literally “a tale of cookery”) contains recipes and technique notes for soba cutting, tofu handling and dashi, which is the elemental stock of Japanese cuisine. The text survives in archives (facsimiles are available in Tokyo museums) and is frequently cited in studies of how Edo culinary practice codified precision and seasonality.
It’s an instructive record of the moment when simple temple and provincial foodways were becoming urbanised, professionalised and circulated in print.
Why it matters today
Modern soba artisans and kaiseki chefs look back to Edo manuals like Ryōri Monogatari to understand classical cutting techniques and the primacy of broth or dashi. Contemporary chefs and scholars cite it when teaching the discipline and aesthetic rigour that underpin Japan’s culinary export: the insistence that technique and season be visible in every plate.
‘Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh’ (كتاب الطبخ) by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq: ca 10th century CE (Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad)
YouTuber V Birchwood recreated recipes from the ‘Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh’ and enjoyed them for one week.
Compiled in Baghdad by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, the Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh is the earliest extant Arabic cookbook, a compendium of hundreds of recipes and culinary essays drawn from the cosmopolitan courts of tenth-century Iraq. Its pages document stews, sweets, meat and bread techniques and the transregional cuisines of the Caliphate, which are Persian, Turkic and Arabian influences braided together. Scholars prize it for what it reveals about medieval trade in spices, the sophistication of early Islamic court cuisine and the movement of culinary knowledge across Eurasia.
Why it matters today
TheKitāb al-Ṭabīkh is a crucial link in the chain that carries Persian and Arabic technique into South and Southeast Asian palates (and later into Iberia via Al-Andalus). Like the rest of Asia’s oldest cookbooks, contemporary historians and chefs use this tome to reconstruct recipes for academic conferences and themed tasting menus to demonstrate how medieval kitchen techniques anticipated later culinary syntheses such as Mughal cuisine.
See more: Desserts and traditions: 10 fascinating sweet rituals in Asia
‘Ain-i-Akbari’ (آئینِ اکبری) by Abū al-Fażl al-Allāmī: 1590 CE (Mughal Empire, India)
‘Ain-i-Akbari’ is not a cookbook per se, but it documents royal hospitality. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Part of Abū al-Fażl’s larger chronicle of Akbar’s reign, the Ain-i-Akbari is an administrative compendium that also contains detailed sections on palace kitchens, provisioning and culinary customs of the Mughal court. It lists dishes, ingredients and standards for royal hospitality and the logistics behind feeding a palace, including grain supplies and kitchen staff hierarchy.
As one of Asia’s oldest cookbooks, it is an invaluable document for reconstructing Mughal culinary culture (khichdi, pilafs and rich desserts are described across the work). Historical translations are widely available in English, and it is a primary source for studies of Mughal material culture.
Why it matters today
Scholars of South Asian culinary history use Ain-i-Akbari to trace the administrative and aesthetic origins of signature Mughal foods (biryani, pilaf, kormas, halwa). Chefs reviving imperial menus consult Abū al-Fażl’s lists to recreate texture, spice balances and the performative aspects of royal banquets for contemporary high-end dining.
‘Shijing’ (食经): late 6th to early 7th century CE attribution (Sui and Tang Dynasties, China)
Mentioned in lists of early food texts, the Shijing (a food classic distinct from the Book of Odes) is referenced by later bibliographers as containing recipes for porridge and early roasting techniques; however, the textual record is fragmentary, and some of what is attributed to Shijing survives only in later quotations.
As such, its precise contents and date remain somewhat contested in the scholarship, but it is useful as evidence that ritual gruels, porridges and roasting methods were discussed at a learned level by imperial bureaucrats in early medieval China. Scholarly reviews caution that the lack of a complete surviving manuscript limits definitive claims.
Why it matters today
There are no photos of Shijing. However, even as a partly lost text, Shijing signals that, by the Sui-Tang transition, there were efforts to systematise food knowledge at court. The echoes of ritual porridges and roasting praxis attributed to it help historians locate the roots of later banquet and medicinal foodwriting (including works like Yinshan Zhengyao). The cautionary lesson: not all “old” culinary texts survive intact; however, their traces matter for how we reconstruct taste history.
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