Tofu has a long history. According to legend, it was invented by Liu An, the grandson of China's great-grandfather Liu Bang, in BC 164. When Liu An was burning medicine and alchemy on Bagong Mountain at the junction of Shouxian County and Huainan, Anhui Province, he accidentally ordered bean juice with gypsum, thus inventing tofu.

Yuan Hanqing believed that tofu only existed in the Five Dynasties. According to Qing Louis written by Gu Tao in the Five Dynasties, Japanese scholar Shinoda believes that tofu originated in the late Tang Dynasty.

Extended data

1960, the stone mural found in the tomb of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Dahuting, Mi County, Henan Province, once again set off the debate about whether tofu originated in the Han Dynasty. Huang Xingzong, the author of the book "Fermentation and Food Science" in the fifth volume of Needham's History of Science and Technology in China, thinks that the murals of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Dahuting depict the process of making tofu instead of brewing wine.

However, he believes that the tofu invented in the Han Dynasty did not heat soybean milk, but was primitive tofu, and its coagulability and taste were not as good as the current tofu, so it failed to enter the mainstream of cooking.

Tofu didn't become an important food until the Song Dynasty. Lu You, a poet in the Southern Song Dynasty, recorded that Su Dongpo liked to eat candied tofu tendons. Wu's Dream records that restaurants in Lin 'an, the capital, sell tofu and fried tofu.

Baidu encyclopedia-tofu