five spice
Cultural layer
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
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 sourcedThe marinade, five spice into soy.
Relocated in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, pages 56, 106 and 146, five-spice powder and soy sauce in the same marinade, and page 245, where the glossary says the powder is mostly used in marinades. The book's red-braised dishes, pages 109 and 145, reach for whole star anise instead; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Five-spice duck.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 216, Fragrant and Crispy Duck marinated in wine, salt and five-spice powder, and page 199, the Cantonese roast duck variation; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Five-spice pork: the deep-fried rolls and the roast belly.
Relocated in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 56, the pork filling marinated with five-spice powder and rolled in bean curd sheets, and page 146, the roast pork belly. The char siu on page 138 has no five-spice powder in it; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Deep-fried five-spice rolls, the seasoned filling wrapped in bean curd sheets.
Relocated in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 56, where the book says the powder lends the dish its name as well as its aroma. Pressed and simmered bean curd is not in this book; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Braising aromatics.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 106, ginger powder and five-spice powder in the same marinade, and page 245, where the glossary lets ginger into the blend itself; 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, "five spice", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/five-spice
/archive/five-spice
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.