New Delhi, May 9 (PTI) A whiff of mango pickle can take someone back to their grandmother's kitchen, while the aroma of a slow-cooked stew may evoke memories of grand family lunches from childhood. Yet,
beneath the nostalgia, there may also lie a hidden science.
Food perhaps remains humanity's most universal language, bringing millions of people across the world together. A study by researchers at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD) likens recipes to human language.
The study suggests that the way humans create recipes across cultures may be governed by underlying statistical patterns and mathematical laws.
In an attempt to uncover hidden patterns in culinary traditions, researchers analysed more than 118,000 recipes spanning 26 cuisines from around the world using artificial intelligence (AI).
The AI tools broke down every recipe into its core building blocks -- ingredients, cooking steps and kitchen tools -- before examining them for recurring structures and overlaps.
What emerged, researchers said, were four striking statistical "laws" that appear to shape cooking across cultures, from Indian curries to Italian pasta and Mexican stews.
"What appears as boundless culinary creativity may, in fact, be guided by hidden statistical structure. Every recipe is an expression within a larger, evolving system, much like a sentence in a language," said Ganesh Bagler, professor of AI at IIIT-Delhi and one of the lead researchers.
The study likens recipes to human language, where a handful of commonly used words dominate everyday communication while rarer words appear occasionally.
"In the culinary world, ingredients such as salt, onion, butter and oil function much like the words 'the' or 'and' in English, appearing repeatedly across cuisines. Meanwhile, rare spices, herbs or speciality ingredients are used sparingly," Bagler explained.
Researchers found that this pattern, known in mathematics as "Zipf's Law", remained remarkably consistent regardless of geography or culture.
Another pattern emerged in the way culinary diversity expands. As more recipes are added to a collection, the number of entirely new ingredients discovered gradually slows down.
Researchers compared it to collecting trading cards, at first every new recipe introduces unfamiliar ingredients, but over time, the same ingredients are reused in different combinations.
This follows the "diminishing returns" rule, also known as "Heap's Law", which defines, "The vocabulary of cooking grows, but it grows slower and slower as the collection gets bigger."
The study also identified what it called a "complexity trade-off". Simpler recipes with fewer ingredients often rely on distinctive or rare ingredients to create flavour, while longer, more elaborate dishes tend to depend on common staples to avoid becoming overwhelmingly complex.
Perhaps most intriguingly, the nutritional composition of dishes, including protein, fats and carbohydrates, was also found to follow predictable mathematical distributions across cuisines worldwide.
The study describes this as a "nutrition curve" rule similar to the bell curve. An analogy to understand the same would be that in a room full of people, most are of average height, a few would be very short and a few very tall. But if one were to look at the logarithm of their heights, as through the lens of mathematics, the distribution would become a perfect, symmetrical bell curve.
"Whether it's a tiny snack or a massive feast, the amount of fat or protein in a dish follows this same mathematical curve, which suggests that nature and human cooking habits have a 'sweet spot' for nutrition that repeats itself across the entire globe, regardless of the culture or cuisine," the study quotes.
To test whether these patterns emerged by accident or through deliberate design, the researchers built simple computer models of recipe creation.
They found that most culinary evolution appears to follow three simple principles: reuse popular ingredients, stay within cultural and flavour constraints, and modify existing recipes incrementally rather than inventing entirely new ones.
The findings suggest that cooking, much like language or music, may function as a "compositional symbolic system" governed by universal structures beneath its apparent creativity.
For the researchers, the implications go beyond kitchens and cookbooks.
"Whether you are in New Delhi, Paris or Mexico City, the math behind your grandmother's secret recipe is likely the same as the math behind a modern chef's dish. We are all speaking the same culinary language, just with different accents," the study concludes. PTI AHD SHS
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