🌿 Folk Prescriptions

With the start of the new year and the lingering cold winter, many businesses promote medicinal cuisine for nourishment. The frequent appearances of medicinal dishes in the Korean drama *Dae Jang Geum* have tempted many. Why not treat your entire family to a full banquet of medicinal cuisine this Spring Festival? We’ve gathered some secrets for you—
Medicines Combined with Delicious Foods
According to experts, medicinal cuisine combines herbs and food through culinary processing to create meals with therapeutic effects. It is a product of traditional Chinese medical knowledge fused with cooking expertise. Its hallmark is “medicating through food”—treating medicine as food and giving food medicinal properties—a special diet combining therapeutic benefits and delicious taste.
Medicinal cuisine generally falls into five categories: beverages, soups and dishes, porridges and rice dishes, pastries, and alcoholic drinks. Beverage-type medicinal cuisine is convenient to use, allowing frequent consumption similar to drinks, such as fruit juices and herbal teas. Soup and dish-type cuisine allows both drinking and eating; dishes represent a major category, including various animal and vegetable dishes with therapeutic or health-promoting functions, prepared by cooking chicken, duck, fish, vegetables, and herbs together. Alcoholic medicinal cuisine is especially common, including grain wines, fruit wines, herb-food blended wines, and herb-infused wines. Porridge and rice-type medicinal cuisine uses staple foods as base, suitable as main meals—for example, medicinal porridge made by boiling herbs, herbal juice, and rice together, or directly using edible herbs. Pastry-type medicinal cuisine can be made into traditional snacks with diverse varieties, such as medicinal cakes, medicinal biscuits, medicinal candies, and medicinal powders.
It is known that medicinal cuisine enables people to enjoy delicious food while nourishing the body and treating illnesses. For nourishment and strength, it primarily regulates organ and tissue functions to achieve balance, suitable for those who are physically weak without disease. For treatment, long-term consumption helps cure diseases, ideal for chronic patients. For health preservation and longevity, it enhances immune function and coordination, thereby promoting growth, regulating qi and blood, or delaying aging.
Medicinal Cuisine Must Be Tailored to Individual Conditions
Dr. X points out that medicinal cuisine must be “tailored to the individual.” According to TCM theory, human constitution varies due to genetics, living environment, diet, and lifestyle, leading to different physiological and pathological manifestations. The most important principle in preparing and consuming medicinal cuisine is “individualized dietary selection” based on one’s constitution. One should consider the nature, taste, compatibility, ingredient selection, processing, and cooking techniques of medicinal herbs to adjust constitution and prevent disease before it occurs. Specifically, the following principles should be followed:
1. When using medicinal cuisine, first assess your own constitution, health status, seasonal changes, and geographical environment to determine the basic syndrome type, then establish the corresponding dietary therapy principle.
2. Select high-quality herbs and ingredients scientifically. Herbs and foods must be fresh and premium, with proper color, taste, and appearance. High-quality medicinal cuisine also requires proper cooking techniques. Generally, edible herbs and those without unpleasant odors can be cooked directly with food. If there are many herbs or strong odors, wrap them in gauze before cooking so that their essence infuses into the food or broth; remove herb residue when consuming.
3. Practice moderation in diet. This is a fundamental principle in TCM health preservation. Medicinal cuisine should also be consumed in moderation. Avoid overconsumption in short periods or rushing results. Those without illness may moderately consume certain health-preserving dishes. Those with weak constitutions or illness should still use medication alongside medicinal cuisine. During recovery or for chronic conditions, medicinal cuisine may be more appropriate.
4. Consider disease nature and seasonal changes. Diseases fall into categories of cold, heat, deficiency, or excess. Only with correct differentiation can medicinal cuisine effectively treat illness and strengthen the body. People with cold constitutions should eat more warming foods like scallions, garlic, and chicken; those with heat constitutions should prefer cooling foods like mung beans, lotus seeds, and freshwater fish.
Seasonal Nourishment Should Follow the Four Seasons
Although people commonly believe in winter nourishment, this is not entirely accurate. According to TCM theory, nourishment should vary with the seasons. In spring, focus on liver nourishment, with light diets. Summer belongs to yin within yang, with heart fire dominating—diet should balance cold and warm. Autumn emphasizes lung nourishment, moistening, and clearing. Winter focuses on kidney nourishment and boosting immunity. Throughout the four seasons, spleen nourishment is essential.
In winter, people are prone to flu. To enhance immunity, include herbs like astragalus, ophiopogon, honeysuckle, and forsythia in medicinal cuisine. Honeysuckle and forsythia clear heat and detoxify, combat viruses. Astragalus tonifies qi and consolidates the body’s foundation, enhancing immunity. Ophiopogon nourishes yin, generates fluids, and moistens dryness. Combining these four herbs with fungi in a soup yields a light taste and enhances immunity, preventing colds. Since people love eating dog meat in winter—known as a highly warming food—it can be enhanced with goji berries, epimedium, and ginseng to further strengthen spleen and kidney, enrich blood and essence, and boost yang energy.
It is reported that in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, home-made medicinal soups using herbs have quietly become popular. Due to high costs at medicinal cuisine shops and many chefs lacking basic pharmacological and medical knowledge, relying solely on personal traditional experience to prepare medicinal cuisine. Experts recommend that professional pharmacists should tailor prescriptions based on individual health conditions, select stable, mild-tasting herbs, and design recipes before preparing medicinal cuisine to truly achieve health and personalized nutrition!
Chinese Yam and Mutton Soup
500g mutton, 50g Chinese yam, 6g white pepper powder, and appropriate amounts of wine, green onion whites, salt, and ginger.
Clean the mutton, make several cuts, blanch in boiling water to remove blood. Soak Chinese yam in clean water until softened, cut into segments. Place mutton and yam in a pot with sufficient water, add green onion whites, ginger, white pepper powder, and wine. Boil, skim off foam, then simmer over low heat until mutton is tender. Remove, cool, slice, place in bowl. Strain the original broth, discard green onion whites and ginger, season, pour back into bowl with yam.
Applicable for symptoms of spleen-stomach qi deficiency: underweight, poor appetite, general weakness.
Donkey-hide Gelatin, Ginseng, and Red Date Soup
15g donkey-hide gelatin, 10g red ginseng, 10 red dates. Place all ingredients in a large porcelain bowl, add 300ml of water, cover, steam over water for one hour. Divide and consume the ginseng and soup in two portions. Suitable for qi and blood deficiency, dizziness, palpitations, and anemia caused by excessive bleeding.
Danshen, Wintergreen Pig Hoof Soup
One pig hoof, 100g毛冬青 (Wintergreen), 50g chicken blood vine, 50g danshen. Clean the pig hoof, cut into pieces. Place wintergreen, chicken blood vine, and danshen in a gauze bag, combine with pig hoof in a clay pot, add water, simmer over low heat until hoof is tender. Remove the gauze bag, add seasoning, serve. Drink soup and eat meat.
Applicable for promoting blood circulation, unblocking meridians, detoxifying, and treating abscesses. Suitable for thromboangiitis obliterans.
Angelica, Ginger, and Mutton Soup
Take 30g angelica, 60g ginger, and 1kg mutton. First, clean the mutton, place whole in a pot with angelica and ginger, add water and stew until mutton is tender. Remove, cut into small pieces, sauté with cooking oil, add salt, soy sauce, garlic, and other seasonings, then mix back into the original mutton broth (after removing angelica and ginger). Eat warm, no specific quantity limit—consume in multiple meals. Eat 2–3 times monthly during winter, for 2–3 months annually. If continued for two to three years, frostbite rarely recurs.