Five Elements Cookbook

A stunning and accessible guide to cooking with Traditional Chinese Medicine, featuring over 50 nourishing recipes to eat for healing every day by TCM chef and registered dietitian Zoey Xinyi Gong.

Chef and registered dietitian Zoey Xinyi Gong offers an incredibly fresh, elegant, and authentic approach to food therapy and a truly accessible guide to cooking with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a thousands-year-old practice for holistic wellness.
Named after a foundational theory of what balance and optimal health looks like, The Five Elements Cookbook is a stunning introduction to the beginner concepts of TCM and offers a photographic guide to the most commonly used medicinal ingredients (American ginseng, turmeric, reishi, and more), their healing properties, and how to use them seamlessly in your cooking—whether in a warm tea, restorative bone broth, a sweet smoothie, or your favorite dinner.  
Each of the over 50 delicious recipes ingeniously incorporates a food-as-medicine ingredient, with consideration for seasonality, digestion, and body constitution, and specific concerns, like menstrual pains, nausea, anxiety, blood circulation, respiratory health, and more. For those with dietary restrictions, each recipe also includes a key for vegan, nut free, dairy free, gluten free, plus the TCM energetics and uses. Recipes span all day and every meal, plus beverages and desserts:

• Sesame Goji Granola
• Pumpkin and Lotus Seed Hummus with Crudité
• Reishi Mushroom Miso Soup
• Steamed Whole Fish with Herbal Soy Sauce
• Warming Lamb Noodle Soup
• Saffron Mulled Wine

With beautiful photographs throughout, this soothing, practical guide is perfect for those looking to eat for healing, nourishment, and joy.

Reviews

The path toward modernizing or contemporizing ideas is through understanding the past. To grasp the philosophy of Chinese cuisine, one must begin with the intermingling of nourishment and medicine with food. Zoey gifts us with her deep knowledge of Traditional Chinese Medicine and how it can be utilized, even cross-culturally, in her recipes in The Five Elements Cookbook. I have found myself becoming more interested in TCM, and I am thankful to have this book now as a resource. The graphs and charts make the subject matter much easier to absorb, and the photos are a really useful reference for how to find these ingredients if you are shopping in Chinatown. When food is delicious and gives you health benefits, meals become more purposeful. — Brandon Jew, executive chef and owner of Mister Jiu’s and author of Mister Jiu’s in ChinatownThe Five Elements Cookbook is a wonderful introduction to Traditional Chinese Medicine food therapy. The section on Chinese herbs is an indispensable guide and beautifully photographed. — Grace Young, author of Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge and The Breath of a WokI am simply blown away by how wonderful The Five Elements Cookbook is. It is well researched, beautifully photographed, and, most important, practical. I am so excited for readers to roll up their sleeves and try the recipes! — Thomas N. Leung, DACM, CEO of Kamwo Meridian HerbsThe Five Elements Cookbook is a revelation—not just for how to cook using the elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine but also for how to think holistically about cooking and eating in a way that takes into account the needs of each individual. The book is a beautiful rumination on being in sync with nature and has served as a guide for me to view the world through fresh eyes. Even something as seemingly simple as the idea of opposition in ingredients being relative—to allow for the shifting of flavors depending on positionality and context—has been part of a new set of vocabulary and frameworks for me to think through my approach to food. This book has already been a fixture in my kitchen, and I can’t wait to read it over and over again. — Jenny Dorsey, chef, writer, and founder of Studio ATAOFinally! A modern guide to incorporating traditional Chinese food therapy into our lives, with fun, creative, and simple recipes that will help you lead a healthier, more delicious life. — Danielle Chang, founder and CEO of LUCKYRICE