szechuan pepper
Cultural layer
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
Taylor Holliday, Why It's So Hard to Get Sichuan's World-Famous Peppers in America (Slate, with Roads & Kingdoms, 23 October 2017)
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
6 bonds · 6 sourcedMa la, the axis Sichuan cooking is built on.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 233, Yu-ling's hot and numbing chicken, deriving its heat from chilies and Szechwan peppercorns, and page 202; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Mapo tofu, the soul of Sichuan cooking.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 159, ground roasted Szechwan peppercorns over the bean curd cooked in hot soybean paste; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Sichuan stir-fry base.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 234, Szechwan peppercorns with garlic, ginger and scallion, and page 16; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Sichuan sauces.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 16, where star anise, Szechwan peppercorns and cinnamon are said to enrich soy sauce-based slow-cooked dishes, and page 134; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Five spice.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 245, the peppercorns among the spices of five-spice powder, and page 241, both in the flavour-potting mix; the cited Classic Food of China was not the book in hand.
Sichuan aromatics.
Read in Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook, page 241, ginger among the flavour-potting spices with the peppercorns, and page 17; 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, "szechuan pepper", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/szechuan-pepper
/archive/szechuan-pepper
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.