Author: Yoneda, Soei [Abbess, Sanko-in Temple] with Koei Hoshino and Kim Schuefftan
Title: Good Food from a Japanese Temple: a 600-year tradition of simple elegant vegetable cookery
Publisher: Kodansha
Place: Tokyo
Date: (1982)
Edition: First ed
ISBN: 0870775278
Pages: 224
Binding: Hardback
Condition: FINE fine dj
Illustrations: drawings, color photos
Book Id: MAIN020220I
Details: Introduction by Robert Farrar Capon, index
About the book: Tells how to cook the the food actually prepared and eaten by monks and nuns in Buddhist temples (shojin ryori). The food is light and vegetarian, and portions are small by Western standards.
This is the food of the Sanko-in, a nunnery that belongs to the Rinzai branch of Zen. The tradition is that of Kyoto's Donke-in nunnery, which was founded about 1439 and is known as the "Bamboo Palace," one of the nunneries to which the daughters and consorts of emperors retired. The food there developed out of the cooking used for the imperial court. It was at the Donke-in that the author took her vows when she was seven years old and where she learned shojin cooking for about a quarter-century before becoming abbess of the Sanko-in temple in Tokyo.
Contains 230 recipes; a number of which were created especially for this book to show how Western vegetables can be used. Rice variations, clear soups, miso soups, and pickles for each month of the year are presented in one chapter. The recipes are arranged by season.
About the author: Soei Yoneda was born in Kobe, the daughter of a kimono merchant. She first entered the Donke-in nunnery in the Sagano district of Kyoto when she was four years old and took Buddhist vows there at the age of seven. When she was thirty-one, she was appointed abbess of the Sanko-in temple in the Tokyo suburb of Koganei. After the Second World War, the temple lost most of its land to speculators. In order to make ends meet in the ensuing years, she began to serve shojin cooking to the public in the temple. She celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday in 1982.