A generative grammar of cooking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generative grammar model of cooking that captures the underlying principles of recipe creation and culinary structure, offering new insights into culinary practices and potential health applications.

Contribution

It presents the first formal generative grammar framework for cooking, based on analysis of extensive recipe data, to understand culinary logic and synthesis.

Findings

Identifies core concepts and rules in recipes.

Develops a combinatorial system for culinary synthesis.

Provides insights into the structure of cooking practices.

Abstract

Cooking is a uniquely human endeavor for transforming raw ingredients into delicious dishes. Over centuries, cultures worldwide have evolved diverse cooking practices ingrained in their culinary traditions. Recipes, thus, are cultural capsules that capture culinary knowledge in elaborate cooking protocols. While simple quantitative models have probed the patterns in recipe composition and the process of cuisine evolution, unlike other cultural quirks such as language, the principles of cooking remain hitherto unexplored. The fundamental rules that drive the act of cooking, shaping recipe composition and cuisine architecture, are unclear. Here we present a generative grammar of cooking that captures the underlying culinary logic. By studying an extensive repository of structured recipes, we identify core concepts and rules that together forge a combinatorial system for culinary synthesis. Building on the body of work done in the context of language, the demonstration of a logically consistent generative framework offers profound insights into the act of cooking. Given the central role of food in nutrition and lifestyle disorders, culinary grammar provides leverage to improve public health through dietary interventions beyond applications for creative pursuits such as novel recipe generation.