Book excerpt: The Way of Eating: Yuan Mei`s Manual of Gastronomy (Suiyuan Shidan) is, remarkably, the first English edition of one of the world’s most famous books about food. The Way of Eating is a treatise and a cookbook, written in the late eighteenth century by the Qing dynasty poet Yuan Mei. It includes recipes for well-known dishes such as birds nest and sharks fin, and offers modern readers an appealing perspective on Chinese history and culinary culture, and was translated and annotated by Sean J. S. Chen with editorial advice from E. N. Anderson and Jeffrey Riegel. This edition is in English but includes Chinese characters and vocabulary, and is 250 pages in length. The team’s aim was to convey the charm, humor, and erudition of one of China’s greatest writers. Also included are a glossary and a bibliography of additional sources. Chinese food expert Nicole Mones, author of the novel The Last Chinese Chef, has contributed an engaging introduction to Yuan Mei and his work. “This is far more than a cookbook: The Way of Eating is food history at its finest, a window into a fascinating and long-lost world.” Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums Translator and annotator Sean Jy-Shyang Chen is a scientific developer for computer assisted minimally invasive neurosurgery. This is his first publication outside the fields of science and engineering.