Alas, for the Han Dynasty, we don't have the rich food literature that appears from the Song onwards. Our literary sources are relatively few, and archaeology is limited and sometimes ambiguous. Thus we miss having multiple menus for feasts, recipes, etc. Nonetheless, we can say quite a lot about Han Dynasty food and Han Dynasty royal food.
From archaeology we have a number of Han tombs with a lot of material related to food. The 1st century AD Dahuting tombs of Zhang Boya and his wife. Not royal tombs, but a gift from the emperor in return for Zhang's service, so sufficiently elite to tell us about royal food. These tombs contains murals and reliefs showing feasting (or relatively informal drinking parties?) and kitchens. The former tells us about the setting for elite dining, and the latter tells us about food preparation for the elite. Some of the feasting scenes:
The feasters sit on mats or very low couches. Food is either on plates on the mats they sit on, or on low tables. There is entertainment (juggling and dancing). There is drink - drink appears plentiful. The common drinking cup was the winged cup:
Individual low tables for floor/mat seated diners were still used in East Asia into modern times (notably, in Korea and Japan). Colourful and useful as these tomb murals are, the actual food and drink remains cryptic. The stone reliefs of kitchen scenes tell us more:
What is clear from these is that roasted meat was a prominent feast food for the elite, and soups/stews (geng) were also a major player. The centrality of these also appears in literature - for example, Jia Yi (2nd century BC, quoted in Yü (2016)) wrote
When the Xiongnu have developed a craving for our cooked rice, geng stew, roasted meats, and wine, this will have become their fatal weakness.
It has been suggested that the bottom left of the last picture above showing tofu-making. While this is a plausible interpretation, this isn't the only one, and this must be regarded as somewhat speculative.
Other tombs have also yielded kitchen scenes:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feast,_%26_kitchen,_excavated_from_Shandong_province,_China,_Eastern_Han_dynasty,_1st-2nd_century_AD,stone-Tokyo_National_Museum-_Tokyo,Japan-_DSC08342.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeng_Shen%27s_mother,Liubo_game,%26_kitchen,_excavated_from_Jiaxiang_county,_Shandong,_China,_Eastern_Han_dynasty,_1st-2nd_century_AD,stone-Tokyo_National_Museum-_Tokyo,Japan-_DSC08340.jpg
The 2nd century BC tomb (probably of the wife of the Marquis of Dai) is stunning! First, the body was so well preserved that some of her last food could be identified: musk melon seeds. Second, much of the food left for her afterlife (in bamboo cases, pottery jars, and hemp sacks) could be identified. These included (Yü, 2016): rice, wheat, barley, glutinous millet, millet, soybean, red lentil, hemp, malva (Malva verticillata L.), mustard, pear, jujube (red date), plum, strawberry, ginger, lotus root, mutton, wild goose, mandarin duck, duck, bamboo chicken, domestic chicken, pheasant, crane, pigeon, turtledove, owl, magpie, sparrow, four kinds of carp, bream, perch, cinnamon bark, Sichuan pepper, xingyi (buds of the Magnolia denudata Desr.) and galangal. (The only mammal meat that appears is mutton, but we know from other tombs and literature that other meats, notably beef and pork, were eaten.) Third, there were 312 bamboo slips with inscriptions about food and cooking. Foods mentioned but not found in the tomb include melon, bamboo shoots, quail, and eggs. Seasonings include salt, sugar, honey, ferment/leaven, salted fermented black beans (still a common seasoning), horse meat sauce, and soy sauce. This soy sauce was not the soy sauce of today, whether the liquid-fermented or solid-fermented (i.e., dripped from bean paste (Japanese tamari)) and of course not modern chemically-cracked soy sauce. Instead, it was made by soaking or boiling the just-mentioned salted black beans (Lin, 2015). The horse meat sauce was a fermented meat sauce - chunks of meat and ferment/leaven were packed in a container and fermented (Lin, 2015), with the final product perhaps being like fermented fish sauce but made from meat (meats other than horse were also used for such sauces). Cooking methods mentioned on these slips include roasting, scalding, shallow frying, steaming, deep frying, and stewing. Preservation techniques include salting, sun drying, and pickling. Usefully, the slips give some details about geng. Geng could either be simple and unseasoned (as was proper for dageng, grand stew, used as a sacrificial food and feast food), or more complex and seasoned (ordinary geng). The nine dageng mentioned are ox, sheep, deer, pig, suckling pig, dog, wild duck, pheasant, and chicken. Other geng include beef and rice, deer and salted fish and bamboo shoots, deer and taro, deer and small beans, chicken and gourd, carp and rice, fresh sturgeon and salted fish and lotus root, dog and celery, carp and lotus root, beef and turnip, lamb and turnip, beef and sonchus (a wild grass), and dog meat and sonchus.
(to be continued)
