Food is Life
“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
― Roald Dahl
To me, cooking has always been more like a math function. You take ingredients, cut, stir, heat or cool them and out comes a perfect dish. Is it not just like a function, where you take variables, apply operations to them and out comes the only one possible solution.
Here is a quick study of approximately 40,000 recipes of different cuisines from across the globe, collected in the United States of America.
Cuisines
All recipes were divided in to 20 different cuisines.
Ingredients
The most popular and most ancient ingredient in all of the recipes across all cuisines is still salt. It enhances the flavor of any dish.
Top 2 cuisines and their most popular ingredients
Italian recipes are the most numerous in the United States closely followed by Mexican. Connection to immigration can be assumed and maybe studied further.
Top Italian Ingredients.
Italy and Olive Oil are two inseparable terms in the kitchen.
Its interesting to note that two cuisines that did not have salt as the most popular ingredient are Italy and Morocco. Both countries are located on the Mediterranean Ocean. Mediterranean diet is considered one of the healthiest diets overall. Less use of salt could be one reason for that.
Top Mexican Ingredients.
Bottom 2 cuisines and their most popular ingredients
The last 2 cuisines on the list are Brazilian and Russian. It was interesting to see how much they differ from the top two.
Top Russian Ingredients
As a person of Russian heritage, I was not surprised to find eggs at #2 ingredient on the list. Egg is a very common ingredient in a lot of Russian dishes from soups to salads.
Top Brazilian Ingredients
It was interesting to find cachaca on the list of Brazilian’s most popular ingredients. This is the only country where hard liquor made to top 20 ingredients list.
Compare Use of Ingredients across Cuisines
In this graph we can see how the use of 15 top ingredients was distributed across 5 most popular cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Southern(US), Indian and Chinese in the United States.
As the use of top ingredients varies across different cuisines, water is the one constant that is being equally applied in any one of them.
It is possible that with further research and creation of appropriate algorithms, AI can create original recipes. I wonder if it would get its own cuisine type category.
