Analysis of Food Pairing in Regional Cuisines of India

Abstract

Any national cuisine is a sum total of its variety of regional cuisines, which are the cultural and historical identifiers of their respective regions. India is home to a number of regional cuisines that showcase its culinary diversity. Here, we study recipes from eight different regional cuisines of India spanning various geographies and climates. We investigate the phenomenon of food pairing which examines compatibility of two ingredients in a recipe in terms of their shared flavor compounds. Food pairing was enumerated at the level of cuisine, recipes as well as ingredient pairs by quantifying flavor sharing between pairs of ingredients. Our results indicate that each regional cuisine follows negative food pairing pattern; more the extent of flavor sharing between two ingredients, lesser their co-occurrence in that cuisine. We find that frequency of ingredient usage is central in rendering the characteristic food pairing in each of these cuisines. Spice and dairy emerged as the most significant ingredient classes responsible for the biased pattern of food pairing. Interestingly while individual spices contribute to negative food pairing, dairy products on the other hand tend to deviate food pairing towards positive side. Our data analytical study highlighting statistical properties of the regional cuisines, brings out their culinary fingerprints that could be used to design algorithms for generating novel recipes and recipe recommender systems. It forms a basis for exploring possible causal connection between diet and health as well as prospection of therapeutic molecules from food ingredients. Our study also provides insights as to how big data can change the way we look at food.

Food-Bridging: A New Network Construction to Unveil the Principles of Cooking

“…Food-pairing : In Figures 2 (A) and (B) we observe that there are clearly two distinct groups with respect to food-pairing: Western-based cuisines; and Eastern Asian cuisines. It corroborates with the observations in [1,2,5] that Eastern Asian cuisines avoid food-pairing more than the Western based cuisines. Moreover, from Figure 2 (B), we observe that there is a negative trend of food-pairing against the average number of ingredients used in a recipe.…”

“…The hypothesis of food-bridging stems from the combination of the theory of complex networks and gastronomy [1,2,3,5,8,9,12,13]. It assumes that if two ingredients do not share a strong molecular or empirical affinity, they may become affine through a chain of pairwise affinities.…”

Utilization of Flavor Network Analysis for a New Recipe in Marmara Region

“…However, these highly scored ingredient pairs shared lower number of flavor compounds (Kort et al, 2010). The results of this study were similar to the negative pairing of ingredients in recipes of East Asian cuisine (Ahn et al, 2011;Jain et al, 2015).…”

Social success of perfumes

“…However, perfume-note data has not been studied as a complex network. There are similarities with the analysis or food recipe networks [14,15,16], networks of flavour compounds [17,18,19] and drug prescriptions [20] as well as analysis of social media, such as Twitter [21], concerning recipes.…”