MUZIChinese Matrix
Imperial Cuisine · FFET10462
Qing palace kitchens proposed menus for Imperial Household Department approval and kept records of each meal.
The kitchens, meals and banquets of the emperor and the court.
Qing imperial meals were prepared for the emperor and court by palace kitchens managed by the Imperial Household Department. The emperor usually had two main meals a day, called the morning and evening meals, with snacks in addition. The kitchens proposed menus for departmental approval, eunuchs carried the dishes, and each meal was entered in the meal records.
Qing imperial meals were the food prepared for the emperor and court by palace kitchens. The Imperial Tea and Meal Office belonged to the Imperial Household Department and handled palace meals, tea and banquets, with sub-units for meals, tea and meat.1
The emperor usually had two main meals a day, with snacks in addition. A later article describes a menu for the first day of the lunar year in 1765, the thirtieth year of Qianlong's reign, listing 11 dishes for the morning meal and 18 for the evening meal. This is a secondary account whose Qing original has not been checked, so it does not establish when the custom began.2
The emperor's own kitchen was at the Hall of Mental Cultivation in Beijing's Forbidden City.1
The kitchens proposed menus, the Imperial Household Department approved them, and eunuchs brought the dishes to the table; each meal's dishes were recorded. Suzhou cooks were also brought to court, including Zhang Dongguan.2
The Imperial Household Department approved menus and kept meal-by-meal records, so palace food was managed and recorded in an organized way.2
One article says the meal records run to nearly 200 million characters, leaving material for studying Qing palace food. A later overview of court cuisine describes reconstructions of late Qing dishes in Beijing and Shenyang based on kitchen menus; these were later recreations.2,3
According to the tale, during Cixi's flight from Beijing in 1900 a Shanxi official offered her a pastry, and she named it longfeng wasu. The story is retold in a later article; no original account has been checked.
Told in: The story is retold in a 2019 article about archival history.
