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Published online 7 March 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.660
Corrected online: 11 March 2008

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A recipe for food evolution

Researchers apply statistics to cookery books in different cultures.

Daniel Cressey

Many people say they really enjoy food; Antonio Roque can cite a paper to prove his love for it.

Along with an eclectic mix of equally gastronome colleagues — including physicists, a computer scientist and a nutritionist — Roque, who is based at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, waded through more than 3,000 recipes to examine how recipe ingredients have changed over time and dominate within cultures.

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  • Hervé This comments that the paper doesn't clearly define what an 'ingredient' is. During our research we were well aware of the problem with this definition. Given that it is somewhat arbitrary within a range that goes from the very coarse to the very very detailed, we have chosen a description level for 'ingredient' that doesn't take into account the type of processing, e.g. slicing (thick or thin), grating, etc, but includes sufficient details to guarantee a large number of ingredients and at the same time is not too fine grained to avoid poor statistics (i.e. many ingredients being used in only one or two recipes). We also had to deal with situations like when a recipe says to use a given sauce type, e.g. béchamel, or a composite ingredient, e.g. mayonnaise. In such cases we split such "ingredients" into their components according to their entry in the book. Antonio Roque and Osame Kinouchi

    • 12 Mar, 2008
    • Posted by: Antonio Roque