Food has always been my biggest interest. I love the joy of trying all the delicious dishes from different cultures. Whenever I visit a new city, I spend hours on researching the best-rated restaurants in town on yelp. I never let my stomach down. I also thought it would be very interesting if I compare how differently people cook in various cultures. It would also be fascinating if I can find a relationship between culture and the ingredients mostly used in these cultures, plus how diverse cultures cook different ingredients. Thus I decided to collect several recipes of different courses from dissimilar backgrounds.
Before I started searching for the recipes, I realized recipes are very special comparing to other types of text like academic journals or public speeches. They are usually in a format that is like a list of instructions. There is also another issue of collecting recipes: the angle of analyzing recipes is very crucial for collecting texts. There is such a wide variety of styles and ingredients of cooking. Therefore, it can be simple to lose focus or hard to find a focus. Unlike academic papers or political speeches, recipes don’t get digitalized by people. Thus there are not plenty of materials to be collected although these materials are various.
In order to obtain the most accurate result, I decided to first several some representative cultures from all major cultures. From all the European cultures, I chose French cuisine. I think France is a country with a long history and French culture is attractive. At the same time, French food has always been regarded as one of the best-tasting food in the world. I then selected Chinese cuisine from all Asian recipes. I chose China because China is a country with the longest history and the most diverse culture blended by 56 different ethnic cultures. Plus many other east Asian countries developed their cooking techniques by referring to China. Among all the African cultures, I chose Morocco. For the same reason, Morocco has a relatively long history. Their recipes have been developed for many years. From middle eastern cultures, I chose Egyptian culture. Since Egypt is also a country with one of the longest histories. It would be interesting to find out how Egyptian cook. From all the Pacific cultures, I selected Australia since Australia is a country that is isolated from all the other countries. Thus Australian culture must be special in some way.
Then my next step is to select representative recipes from each selected culture. Another aspect of recipes is the recipes are not very long; especially after all the stop words are removed. Therefore, it is possible for me to collect a large number of recipes from each culture. I chose recipes using different proteins. I also chose recipes that are vegetarian. Finally, I also collected two dessert recipes within each culture.
Although my plan of collecting texts is reasonable, it is still tricky to find all the materials I expected. The resources of the cook book are surprisingly limited. I found that wikibook is an excellent and helpful resource that exceeds my expectations.
I will also try to find some extra information on different recipes, for example, the year when a certain recipe is created. If I can associate more information on the recipes, I should be able to identify a more exact relationship between different factors and recipes.
After finish collecting all my corpora, I will use Jigsaw as my distant-reading tool to do my textual analysis. I will be looking for connections between cultures and cooking techniques, as well as connections between ingredients and corresponding cooking techniques.