France: Exploring Historical Cookbooks

Introduction

Cuisine has an important place in the cultural heritage of France. In the 21st century, the great classics of French cuisine can be found in starred restaurants of most cities of France and even all around the world. But above all, French cuisine owes its current prestige to the different regional cuisines that were developed over several hundred years, taking advantage of the geographical and cultural specificities of each region.

This is at least the point of view of Mr. Curnonsky who travelled the regions of France throughout his life at the beginning of the 20th century in search of the traditional regional recipes that are the pillars of the French cuisine we know today. His book Recettes des Provinces de France written in 1962 [Figure 1] gathers many traditional recipes collected by himself all around France.

At a time when all knowledge is shared online on the web, it has become easy to obtain information on the history of French cuisine or even many contemporary recipes. However, a significant amount of knowledge and culinary practices are still stored in books that are much more difficult to access. This knowledge would benefit from being digitalized both to share it with the largest number of people, but also to take advantage of the latest computational techniques to perform more in-depth analyses.

This project is hence an exploration of a historical French cookbook. From the physical book to a clean structured dataset, our main focus is on the digitalization of a historical cookbook and its challenges. In addition to that, we use the collected knowledge to extract analyses to better understand the French cuisine of the previous century. We use the cookbook from Mr. Curnonsky mentioned before as an example to answer our research questions.

Research Questions

More specifically, we aim at answering the following research questions:

• What are the steps and difficulties when digitalizing an old cookbook?
• What knowledge can be extracted from a cookbook and what information can it provide about the culture and practices of the region at that time?
• From Mr. Curnonsky's cookbook, what can we say about the regional cuisine of France in the early 20th century?

Project Plan and Milestones

Date	Data Collection	Data Processing	Data Analysis	Research Questions
Week 3	Collect multiple historical cookbooks in French or English			Prepare project proposals
Week 4	Compare the different cookbooks, considering the layout extraction & OCR			Discuss the objectives of the project
Week 5	Decide on one French cookbook. Scan the physical book page by page. Sanitize the initial dataset.
Week 6-7	Separate .png files by subregions. Perform the OCR of each page. Start to construct the dataset.
Week 8-9	Construct dataset and think of data structures to store in an optimal way the information. Milestone 2: Midterm presentation
Week 10	Set up the GitHub repository. Finish the creation of the dataset.
Week 11	Go through the dataset and perform some changes to facilitate the data processing. Create categories for ingredients.
Week 12	Perform the data processing of the ingredients.		Exploratory analysis of the dataset.
Week 13	Further improve the dataset.		Overall analysis & Per region analysis.
Week 14	Prepare the final presentation Finish the Wikipedia page Milestone 3: Final presentation

Methodology

Data collection and digitalization

For a start, we scanned a physical French cookbook. This one is from the 19th century and has ingredients listed on the margin of the page.

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  French cookbook

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  A page of the scanned book

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  Example OCR result

Then we did a basic OCR for the scanned files. Here is a sample output from OCR. It is noticeable that there is a mismatch between recipes and ingredients.

Data processing

In our project, we will extract and construct the following information from the recipes:

• quantity: the amount of the ingredient
• unit: the metric of the ingredient
• ingredient: the entity appeared in the recipes
• category: the major category the ingredient belongs to

Units

Type	Unit
Spoons	cuil. à café, cuil. café, cuil. à soupe, cuil. soupe, petite cuil., grande cuil., cuil.
Glasses	petit verre, verre à liqueur, verres à liqueur, verres, verre, tasses, tasse
Bottles	bout., bouteilles, bouteille
Containers	g rande boîte, boîtes, boîte, tubes, tube
Spices & Aromatic plants	gousses, gousse, branches, branche, bâtons, bâton, pincée
Meat related	membres, membre, tronçons, tronçon, tranches, tranche
Standard measures	litres , litre , cl , dl , kg , g, l

Categories

We map different ingredients to several major categories

Category	Ingredient
Viande (Meat)	viande, oie, canard, oiseau, lard, bœuf, veau, poule, poulet, poularde, volaille, porc, caille, canard, caneton, mouton, cochon, coq, chevreuil, lièvre, levraut, lapin, faisan, gibier, jambon, chorizo, cervelas, agneau, escargot, grenouille
Poisson (Fish)	poisson, brochet, carpe, morue, lamproie, lotte, maquereau, omble, rouget, sardine, thon, truite, anchois, anguille, merlan, sole, barbue, turbot, raie, perche, saumon, colin, goujon, loup, congre, rascasse, grondin, merlu, merluza, hareng, alose, brême
Fruit de mer (Sea food)	crevette, langouste, moule, écrevisse, palourde, homard, chiperon, seiche, huître, coquille, poulpe
Alcool (Alcohol)	alcool, bière, vin, cidre, fine, liqueur
Plante aromatique (Aromatic plant)	bouquet garni, ail, anis, aromate, angélique, basilic, persil, sarriette, cerfeuil, ciboule, ciboulette, clou de girofle, clous de girofle, girofle, cive, câpre, estragon, feuille de vigne, fines herbes, laurier, menthe, pissenlit, romarin, thym
Epice (Spicy)	cannelle, coriandre, curry, safran, poivre, sel, moutarde, muscade, paprika, piment, sauge, serpolet, épices
Produit laitier (Diary product)	lait, crème, fromage, gruyère, parmesan
Légume (Vegetable)	artichaut, asperge, aubergine, bette, betterave, cardon, chou, cornichon, courgette, cresson, céleri, fenouil, légume, navet, panais, poireau, pomme de terre, pommes de terre, potiron, rave, salade, tomate, échalote, épinard
Fruit (Fruit)	abricot, banane, cerise, coing, fraise, framboise, groseille, raisin, olive, orange, pomme
Agrume (Citrus)	citron, cédrat, fleur d'oranger, fleurs d'oranger
Céréale (Cereal)	farine, pain, pâte, riz
Légumineuse (Legume)	févette, haricot, pois
Fruit sec (Nut)	amande, noix, noisette
Champignon (Mushroom)	champignon, truffe, cèpe, girofle, morille, levure, oronge, duelle

Region

We map subregions to 6 major regions in 19th-century France.

Region	Subregion
Paris, Ile-de-France, Val de Loire	Paris, Ile-de-France, Orléans, Touraine
Pays de l’Ouest	Anjou, Bretagne, Poitou Vendée, Charentes
Sud-Ouest & Pyrénées	Bordelais, Gascogne, Pays Basque, Roussillon, Périgord, Languedoc'
Sud-Est & Méditérannée	Provence, Nice, Corse, Dauphiné, Savoie, Lyon, Auvergne, Limousin
Bourgogne, Champagne, Bresse, Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine	Bourgogne, Champagne, Bresse, Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine
Nord & Normandie	Nord, Normandie

Data analysis and visualization

Dataset Overview

We have a total of 352 different recipes from 30 regions, 6 subregions.

Top 10 most used ingredients.

Rank	Ingredient	Number of occurrences	Picture
1)	Beurre	180
2)	Sel	167
3)	Poivre	146
4)	Œufs	101
5)	Oignons	95
6)	Farine	89
7)	Persil	82
8)	Ail	76
9)	Vin balanc	69
10)	Bouquet garni	46

Region Analysis

From this graph, we could see that "Plante aromatique" and "Epice" are frequently used by all the six major regions while "Fruit sec" is the least frequently used one.

Heatmap of categories by region.

Subregion Analysis

Heatmap of categories by subregion.

Co-occurrence Analysis

We could see that "Plante aromatique" and "Epice" appear together a lot, then they appear together with "Viande", "Légume", and "Céréale".

Matrix of co-occurences by subregion.

Map of France.

Discussion and limitations

Like many other research, this project has its limitations. For example, in the data analysis part, it was a roughly count of categories and we did not take quantity into account.

Future work

• Build a search engine that would display the recipes and add filters to search them by name, region or ingredients

• User-friendly interface to visualize the results of the analysis

• Comparison with other cookbooks from different periods or different countries

Links

Github repository

Scanned book

OCR result