It is often said that food and music have no borders, and spices, as an important part of cuisine, are often discussed without borders. However, although there are no borders in the discussion, people always habitually like to find some proud capital for themselves, so there is a dispute about the origin of spices.
The name spice was first used in continental Europe, and in the beginning, spices were mainly used to eliminate odors. This initial definition of spices can be traced back to the time of the Roman Empire in Europe. When did we in the East begin to come up with similar concepts? From the relevant books, it can be determined that our China was proposed by Tao Hongjing during the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Be confident, there is no doubt at all, except for the dark time of modern times, we in China can represent the oriental culture.
The period of the ancient Roman Empire is about the period of our Western Han Dynasty, and Tao Hongjing is in the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, so from the perspective of time, the concept of spices to remove peculiar smells put forward by the European continent is indeed earlier. The content of spices in the present is not simply to remove odors, but the integration of aromatic plants and ingredients, and the interesting modern definition of spices has been proposed as early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and there are specific records.
In the Zhou Li, written in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, there is a record of the use of cinnamon bark and ginger to make meat, which is believed to be the first way of human cooking with aromatic plants. In terms of time, we used aromatic plants in our diets earlier than the ancient Roman Empire, and today's more widely accepted generalized definition of spices was proposed by us thousands of years ago. The Eastern and Western worlds have different views on the origin of spices, and the origin is completely different from different definitions, and we have already proposed a broader definition of spices.