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 studying the flavor compounds that appear in certain ingredients and searching for similarities elsewhere. Sites like Foodpairing.com even offer paid AI services to chefs looking for new combinations, as well as to customers seeking to better understand their own palates.
The results have been surprising. For example, chocolate and blue cheese share more than 70 flavor compounds (though that doesn’t mean I’ll be trying this brownie recipe anytime soon). Other combinations are perhaps more predictable: white wine and parmesan cheese, for instance, share a huge number of compounds – in fact, dairy products in general and fruits are close in flavor chemically to alcoholic drinks. Meanwhile, mushrooms, long understood as 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 flavor networks. They wanted to understand what patterns might appear in our food combinations and whether they can be attributed to anything other than individual taste.
They started out with two huge American recipe sites, epicurious.com and allrecipes.com. Wanting to avoid a western interpretation of “world cuisine”, they added menupan.com, a Korean site. In total, they looked at 56,498 recipes, grouped into cuisines from different geographical regions (North American, western European, southern European, Latin American and east Asian).
There were some commonalities among the regions. The average number of ingredients in a recipe is eight – and there were very few instances in which recipes had a tiny or huge number of ingredients. Not all ingredients are created equally. Egg appeared in 20,951 recipes, a third of those studied. Meanwhile, jasmine tea, Jamaican rum and 14 other ingredients each appeared just once in the dataset. Within each region, there was a lot of repetition: the 13 key ingredients in North American cuisine showed up in three-quarters of all recipes from the region.
Of course, the research has its limitations – not least the vague and slightly arbitrary definitions of a particular regional cuisine (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 a lot more compound-sharing 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 for them to be used together in the same recipe. Just why that might be remains a mystery – but we’re a little closer to understanding the connections our brains make when we open the fridge door.