fermented black bean
Cultural layer
长沙马王堆汉墓, the Mawangdui Han tombs collection (湖南省博物馆, Hunan Museum, excavated 1972 to 1974, accessed 2026-09-12)
William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Fermented Black Soybeans, 165 BCE to 2011 (Soyinfo Center, 2011)
Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook (Yan-Kit So, 1984)
Classic Food of China (Yan-Kit So, 1992)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
8 bonds · 8 sourcedBlack bean and garlic, the Cantonese stir-fry base.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 98, Steamed Trout with Black Beans and Garlic, and page 248, where the glossary says the beans combined with garlic and cooked in oil lend their flavour to anything else; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
The Cantonese steaming base.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 98, ginger in the cavity under the black beans, page 93 for the clams, and page 248, where the beans are whole soybeans preserved in salt and ginger; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Steamed and stir-fried dishes.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, pages 93 and 98, thick soy sauce with the black beans, stir-fried and steamed; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Black bean and chilli.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 129, the black bean paste and the chili going into the wok together, and pages 80 and 152; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Sauteed stuffed peppers, the pork stuffing under a black bean and chili sauce.
Relocated in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 152. The book's spareribs, page 46, are spiced-salt and deep-fried, with no black bean; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Finishing.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 80, the black beans mashed with sugar and sesame oil for the steamed prawns, and page 93, sesame oil over the clams; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Beef with green pepper in black bean sauce, the Cantonese standard.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 129, Green Pepper Beef in Black Bean Sauce, which the book calls one of the most celebrated Cantonese dishes using the black bean; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "fermented black bean", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/fermented-black-bean
/archive/fermented-black-bean
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.