Recipes from the Garden of Contentment – a gastronomic guide from 1792

Recipes from the Garden of Contentment (2018) is the first bilingual (Chinese and English) edition of Suiyuan Shidan (1792), a work on gastronomy by Qing dynasty poet and scholar Yuan Mei. However, its translator, Sean J.S. Chen, is neither a classic Chinese scholar nor a chef in a high-end Chinese restaurant looking for inspiration; rather, his field is science and engineering.A “research scientist and algorithms dev­eloper for computer-assisted minimally invasive surgery”, Chinese-Canadian…