Every cuisine, while sharing many common elements with others, uses a handful of ingredients that combine for unique flavors.
With Chinese food, you often see soy sauce, green onion, and sesame oil. With Italian food, you often see garlic, parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Vietnamese food uses fish sauce. Korean food uses chili paste.
As I venture into new cooking territories, it’s been fun to discover the flavor bombs from various cuisines. A lot of “where have you been all of my life” moments.
So what are the ingredients that make each cuisine?
I looked into a Yummly ingredients dataset. It contains ingredient lists for a bit under 40,000 recipes from 20 cuisines. This amounted to 6,714 ingredients. Here are the five most used ingredients in each cuisine:
It’s somewhat interesting. Soy sauce and fish sauce take the top spots in the Asian cuisines, whereas salt is the main seasoning ingredient elsewhere. You see oregano in Greek and garam masala in Indian.
However, overall, this view covers more general ingredients. Salt is used in a lot of cuisines. So is soy sauce. What ingredients are more specific to certain cuisines?
I calculated the relative usage of each ingredient for each cuisine. More specifically, I calculated the percentage of recipes that used an ingredient in a cuisine and divided it by the usage among all other cuisines. For example, in the results below, sweetened condensed milk showed about 22 times the usage in Brazilian recipes than the other cuisines.
*Only ingredients that were in at least 10% of available recipes are shown.
Now we’re getting somewhere. The French recipes use relatively more shallots and butter; the Greek recipes use more feta cheese; the Moroccan recipes use more couscous.
Combine the two measurements, and you can quickly spot the ingredients that are both common and unique.
All in all, the data confirms my experiences with certain cuisines. For the ones I haven’t tried much of yet, it’s nice to see what I might be getting into later on. Filipino pork belly, here I come.
Notes
- As usual, I used R for analysis and data preparation. The bar plots were also made in R, edited in Illustrator, and then exported with ai2html. The interactive scatterplot was made using D3.js. I used a force-directed graph as a form of jitter to reduce overlapping.
- The cuisines and ingredients collections are limited by the dataset. Each observation only contained an ingredient list and the cuisine, so it’s hard to say what each category covers. Main dishes? Beverages? However, the recipe count hopefully reduced some of the possible noise.
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