I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

The flavor bible.

I can assure you that it does not contain 1800 ingredients in all of there combinations, but it does a remarkable job of covering a widely used selection of herbs spices vegetables and meats. I doubt a compressed version of the text would even be very large.

The trouble I find with LLM generated recipes is they miss the nuance of the technique. Often the success of a depends on a single step or ratio. For instance “fried chicken” has a million incarnations the world over, but you can’t just average out the recipes and end up with tasty fried chicken.

Unless I'm missing something, there's also nothing in the paper to indicate this is "all of human ingredients"? It looks like it's 11 data sources covering a bunch of common cuisines, with the English + Chinese sources accounting for 90% (!) of the dataset. Among others, Africa and the Arab world are not present in the data (good for about 25% of the global population).

Also, all non-English terms were AI-translated to English which is methodologically understandable but surely leaves room for error.

> But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting

I saved a beef stew I was making for twelve people once by adding tomato sauce.

Beef hardens if stewed incorrectly and tomato acid tenderises it again.

EDIT: removed incorrect information about store bought tomatoes.

If you are interested in that you might want to check out this paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00196

Tomatoes are high in glutamate, which accentuates beef flavor.

One that has long tickled me is cabbage +/- pickling. I eat both sauerkraut and kimchi from the jar and enjoy them as additions to _roughly_ the same foods, and when friends/family ask I insist they are basically the same thing anyways, but they are uninterested in such shenanigans. I'd love to learn more about these cross cultural shared foods.

+1.

On a side note (and maybe off topic), I am thinking about food pairing which is based on the idea that two ingredients sharing volatile aroma compounds or certain molecular families may have a potential sensory compatibility (broccolis and strawberries for example). I'd love to test those ingredients and find some unknown food pairings. But .. time is what it is (for now).

It's also based on 11 sources across just 7 of the 7,150 human languages (English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English)

> all of human ingredients

Depending on who you ask, this may also sound misleading

It's cheaper to train a robot how ingredients go together than to cook for humans.

can anyone check whether pineapple goes well with baked dough with cheese/tomato sauce?

I like it. Reminds me a bit of the table format on Cooking for Engineers (scroll to the bottom of the recipe): https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/19/Erics-Chocolat...

Nice! this reminds me of https://www.reddit.com/r/flowchartrecipes/ and the table view on the https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/87/Carrot-Pulp-Ca... pages.

Ahh - the dependency graph recipe card. These are excellent. I've imagined something like this forever. Always annoyed that recipes put ingredients in a giant undifferentiated list and then give an instruction like "mix the dry ingredients in a deep bowl".

For a while I expected there could be a good return on a good implementation of this, but now as soon as a strong interface itself is created it seems easy to copy.

That's a very cool site! I enjoyed the hand-drawn graphs.

Your tables remind me of recipes in Modernist Cuisine. They all have ingredients grouped by the procedures together with weight, sometimes volume, and ratio.

Example: https://modernistcuisine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Mac-...

This is like "Picture Cook: See, Make, Eat": https://www.amazon.com/Picture-Cook-Katie-Shelly/dp/16460416...

I love this! I bet you could make a successful recipe book based on this concept, with large schematics that a cook can read from a distance while working in the kitchen.

This is cool - I tried automating different recipe formats/visualizations at https://www.gobsmacked.io. I was thinking of trying to do something similar to this next.

My friend did a similar thing https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1077776268/recipe-redes...

Thank you for sharing!

This is inspiring. Cooking is this sort of an activity that is simple enough to not be overwhelming but also complex enough to be very interesting.

Both in practice and in modelling :-)

Cute! I have a lot of handwritten notes. I've been waiting for a competent "paper scan to SVG" workflow to be developed so I can digitalize them properly. I think your project would also greatly benefit from something like that

I really like these. I went through a phase a couple years ago where I got really into cooking new fancy recipes, and having to scroll around on recipe pages, or try and read my own chicken scratch notes or understand the context I was trying to imply when I wrote the notes weeks ago was a struggle. Having everything more or less right there in front of your face seems really nice.

And I don't know why, but "Beans (green)" is really tickling my funny bone.

Nice ideas, it just misses amounts. And of course there may be nuances of technique missing, e.g. low or high heat. So it might work best as a recap and starting point "how to vary m favourite recipe".

This is how I write down recipes for myself! There’s got to be some cognitive archetype that works better with this style encoding.

These are amazing. It feels so clear to see a visual ”map” of the cooking process before you even start.

This would help coordinate two cooks to make prepping more independent.

I’m trying to figure out if an landscape Ipad, with interactive elements for extra details if needed, would be a good UI for this.

-

Edit: Showed it to my non-Engineer wife and she said ”this is horrible” after staring at it for 10 seconds. Maybe not for everyone…

This will perhaps be overkill for what you're trying to achieve, but there is Object Process Methodology (OPM)[1] which may be inspiration for modelling recipes. It looks similar to the methodology you're using, and as an example, expects the following type of modelling:

"peeling carrot" (process) consumes "washed carrot" (object)

"peeling carrot" (process) yields "peeled carrot" (object)

"peeling carrot" (process) yields "carrot peel" (object)

"finely dicing carrot" (process) consumes "peeled carrot" (object)

"finely dicing carrot" (process) yields "finely diced carrot" (object)

"prepare mirepoix" (process) consumes "finely diced carrot" (object)

"prepare mirepoix" (process) consumes "finely diced celery" (object)

"prepare mirepoix" (process) consumes "finely diced onion" (object)

"prepare mirepoix" (process) consumes "butter" (object)

"prepare mirepoix" (process) yields "mirepoix" (object)

The advantage of OPM is alignment of graphical and textual representations.

The downside of such approach is you soon discover how many millions of objects may exist in recipes--unwashed carrot, washed carrot, orange carrot, purple carrot, yellow carrot, white carrot, peeled carrot, coarsely diced carrot, finely diced carrot, julienned carrot... and purple julienned carrot vs. yellow julienned carrot. And that's just basic preparation complexity well before any contemplation of cooking or plating up elements. To go further you then discover a lack of useful labels such as "mirepoix" or "soffrito", if for example, you wanted to substitute sweet potato in place of carrot in the recipe.

Then there is SysML 2[2] which is kind of like OPM if you ever wanted to write a recipe in 35,000 lines of code, including possibly all the complexity of mathematical modelling of the Maillard reaction for purple carrots vs. yellow carrots using either extra virgin olive oil or butter. Probably best suited for the largest food processing companies such as Nestle, Unilever, Modelez, etc and even then, inherent complexity of their food products rarely would reach the level of a fine dining dish prepared by a chef.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Process_Methodology

[2] https://www.omg.org/spec/SysML/2.0/Language/PDF

a lot of the schematics have avoidable edge crossings, that could improve intuitive readability enormously, theres entire subfields of graph theory that consideres rendering of graphs and planar embeddings.

The flowchart factorio of food preparation. Neat

Nice! I do similar but yours are much more sophisticated. I list the ingredients and then group them at the side with instructions.

Great initiative ! So simple and yet it works (from those recipes listed I know, they are all working nicely).

That's really neat and easy to parse, love it!

My God what do you do to your feta?

I love it too, bookmarked and hopefully adopted! Did you write about it somewhere?

Dang this is the best way to represent a recipe I've ever seen. I love it

It's amazing how much more readable this format is. I love it.

I write down recipes similar to this. I realised one day it's very similar to how a makefile works: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/cooking-with-make/

I'd prefer it if you minimized the crossing paths :-)

This is really really awesome

Recipes-as-JSON?

Now this I love. It respects the craft of cooking and the human element, while giving instructions in an easy to grok and straightforward way.

Great job!

That is brilliant. Going to try some of yours then maybe transcribe my own favourites into the same format. You've struck on a great idea here.

> "pumpkin"--that is "squash", so there are some localisation improvements which could be made to improve British and American English use

That's a much bigger issue than just wording differences. As an American, there's several different squashes in common use of which pumpkin is only one. (acorn, butternut, and spaghetti are the ones I'm thinking of; zucchini if you want to be pedantic).

That does represent 70% or so of the current world population. It isn't 100% coverage but it is most of the many of the biggest groups.

It is missing the Italian, Japanese, Greek and Mexican cooking - that are incredibly popular worldwide and it is incomplete without them, and nothing from Africa at all or Middle East.

Yes. I mean if you look at the corpus basically HALF of recipes are Chinese/Korean.

They do quickly acknowledge it, but definitely not a balanced set.

The space of palatable human food is small. There are only a few thousand ingredients and a few thousand preparation techniques. This could easily be compressed at high fidelity into a model.

The table lists Italian, French and other cuisines. The 11 source listing is for language. The resource is missing authentic French-language described recipes, but there is surely an English-language French onion soup.

Yep. Zero temperature is neither necessary nor sufficient for deterministic inference.

Two major contributing factors I can think of:

- land meats were all but banned in Japan for centuries prior to Perry's ultimatum, encouraging the development of alternatives in flavor and nutrition like natto and katsuobushi

- geographically, Japan had less access to land crops (even wheat was not common!) and more access to fish and seaweed than Korea

It is good enough to have much fun reading it. About chef photos, in Cook French in America, page 11: no eggs on a breakfast tartine.

As a French, I would like the French version.

To help you out, this is distinctly different from “cooking human”.

Meal replacement powders.

As soon as you start adding our beloved french recipes, frogs, snails and other oddities might substantially increase the 1,790 ingredients count

French and Italian languages. There are many recipes from both cuisines written in English which, I assume, will have been included.

it's a clickbait title

It's an appeal to the attention economy. "All of human cooking compressed into 2 MB" is(mentally) palatable relative to "Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings".

Getting you to click is the ultimate goal.