Coming from traditional Chinese diets and diet therapy, Chinese medicated cuisines are cuisines made from the combination of traditional Chinese medicine and food. With highly medical value, the cuisine is cooked with unique Chinese fine cooking techniques and modern scientific methods. Unlike traditional Chinese medicine and normal diet, medicated cuisines not only enable people to enjoy delicious food but help with nourishment and treating illnesses.
When using medicated cuisines to treat illnesses, one should take into consideration the patient’s habits, health status, symptoms, time of season and geographic characteristics. After determining the illness type, one can conduct appropriate diet therapy based on the corresponding principles.
Medicated cuisines play a prominent role in treating and preventing illnesses. Some people, in particular children, refuse to take medicine because of its bitterness. However, medicated cuisines are known for their flavor of food. Medicated cuisines can also be made through careful choice of medicine, mix of medicine and food and advanced cooking techniques. Therefore, delicious medicated cuisines are indeed easy to take.
Role of Medicated Cuisine
Treat illnesses
Some illnesses can be treated by medicated cuisines. For example, cinnamon twig decoction is used to treat mild colds due to exogenous attack and malnutrition. In addition, when people are rendered at any stage of an illness, they can also have medicated cuisines to cure their illness.
Keep healthy
A number of medicated cuisines have been widely used to stay healthy. Today, there are many kinds of health foods in markets which are mainly composed of nutritious diets and medicated cuisines with multiple health care functions. Among them, the most widely used are ginseng, Chinese caterpillar fungus, yam, Tuckahoe, licorice, Chinese angelica and fleece-flower root. These nutritious foods and medicated cuisines are unique Chinese specialties.
Diversify people’s daily diet
Delicious cuisines with medical value are very popular among people. Medicated cuisines have a positive and far-reaching effect on enriching health food, improving cooking, beautifying peoples’ daily lives and promoting Chinese food culture.
Production of Medicated Cuisines
Medicine and food both have four characters: cold, hot, warm and cool; and five tastes: sour, bitter, sweet, spicy and salty. When cooking medicated cuisines, one should realize “four characters” are the foundation of medicine and food, and “five tastes” are functions of people’s body. Good taste should also be taken into account when making medicated cuisines.
The most common ways to cook medicated cuisines are stewing, braising, simmering, steaming, boiling, decocting, scrambling and frying. Different ways are used to cook according to the texture and flavor of ingredients. For mild and fragrant ingredients, it is better to be cooked for a short time; while those heavy-flavored and greasy ingredients are better to be stewed, simmered or steamed for a long time.
