Zhuanshi 饌史

Zhuanshi 饌史 "A history of diet" is a short book compiled by an unknown person at an unknown date. It is sometimes said that it was written during the Yuan period 元 (1279-1368), but there is no proof for this statement.

The short book is a miscellaneous collection of quotations about food from various books like Youyang zazu 酉陽雜俎, Dongjing menghua lu 東京夢華錄 and Wulin jiushi 武林舊事. The stories in the Zhuanshi are quite common and not very rare. The whole composition is furthermore quite confused and by no means a "history" of food in China. Some stories even have nothing to do with diet at all.

It was therefore not included in the imperial series Siku quanshu 四庫全書, but it can be found in the Xuehai leibian 學海類編.