For some, recipe writing is an art, born of intuition and pragmatism. But like most disciplines, the culinary world has become susceptible to the pull of data.
In recent years, food scientists and chefs have begun to study the flavor compounds found in certain ingredients and look elsewhere for similarities. Websites like Foodpairing.com even offers paid AI services to chefs looking for new combinations, as well as to customers who want to better understand their own tastes.
The results were surprising. For example, chocolate and blue cheese share over 70 flavor compounds (although that doesn’t mean I’d try this brownie recipe anytime soon). Other combinations are perhaps more predictable: white wine and Parmesan cheese, for example, share a large number of compounds—in fact, dairy products in general and fruit are chemically close to alcoholic beverages. Meanwhile, mushrooms, long considered a scientific wonder, are isolated – they don’t share a statistically significant number of flavor compounds with anything.
Four researchers in the physics department at Northeastern University in Boston set out in 2011 to map out our taste networks. They wanted to understand what patterns might occur in us food combinations and whether it can be attributed to anything other than individual taste.
They started with two major American recipe websites, epicurious.com and allrecipes.com. Wanting to avoid a Western interpretation of “world cuisine,” they added menupan.com, a Korean website. In total, they looked at 56,498 recipes, grouped into cuisines from different geographic regions (North American, Western European, Southern European, Latin American and East Asian).
There were some points of contact between the regions. The average number of ingredients in a recipe is eight – and there were very few cases where recipes had a small or large number of ingredients. Not all ingredients are created equal. Egg appeared in 20,951 recipes, a third of those studied. Meanwhile, jasmine tea, Jamaican rum and 14 other ingredients appeared only once each in the dataset. Within each region, there was much repetition: the 13 key ingredients in North American cuisine appeared in three-quarters of all recipes from the region.
Of course, the research has its limitations – not least the vague and somewhat arbitrary definitions of a particular regional food (is mac and cheese North American or European?) – and little attention is paid to the availability of ingredients in different parts of the world .
In the end, they found that North American and Western European recipes have many more compound-part pairs than would be expected by chance alone. But in East Asian dishes, the trend was the reverse – the more flavor compounds shared by two ingredients, the less likely they would be used together in the same recipe. Exactly why this might be remains a mystery – but we’re a little closer to understanding the connections our brains make when we open the fridge door.
