France: Exploring Historical Cookbooks

Introduction

This project is an exploration of historical French cookbooks containing recipes in the 19th century. Through analyzing these cookbooks, we explore the most frequently used ingredients and food categories by region.

Research questions

1. What were the main ingredients used in 1900 in France?

2. Can we observe a difference per region?

Project Plan and Milestones

Date	Tasks	Completion
Week 3	Find multiple French cookbood in French or English from different times. Prepare slides for the initial project idea presentation.	✓
Week 4	Compare different cookbooks, consider the OCR scan and think of possible research questions. Discuss with TAs the goal and implementation of the projects.	✓
Week 5	Decide on one French cookbook. Scan the physical book page by page. Sanitize the initial dataset.	✓
Week 6-7	Separate files by region Give OCR scan for the pages. Start to construct the dataset.	✓
Week 8-9	Prepare for midterm presentation. Construct dataset and think of data structure to store the information.	✓
Week 10	Set up the GitHub repository. Finish the creation of the dataset	✓
Week 11	Fix bugs in extraction script and take exceptional cases into consideration. 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	✓

Methodology

Data digitalization

For a start, we scanned a physical French cookbook.

• 

  French cookbook

• 

  A page of the scanned book

Sample OCR.

The 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.

Template output of the digitization

Data processing

In our project, we will extract 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

Units

• 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

• 'Viande': ['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': ['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": ['crevette', 'langouste', 'moule', 'écrevisse', 'palourde', 'homard', 'chiperon', 'seiche', 'huître', 'coquille', 'poulpe'],
• 'Alcool': ['alcool', 'bière', 'vin', 'cidre', 'fine', 'liqueur'],
• "Plante aromatique": ["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': ['cannelle', 'coriandre', 'curry', 'safran', 'poivre', 'sel', 'moutarde', 'muscade', 'paprika', 'piment', 'sauge', 'serpolet', 'épices'],
• "Produit laitier": ['lait', 'crème', 'fromage', 'gruyère', 'parmesan'],
• 'Légume': ['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': ['abricot', 'banane', 'cerise', 'coing', 'fraise', 'framboise', 'groseille', 'raisin', 'olive', 'orange', 'pomme'],
• 'Agrume': ['citron', 'cédrat', "fleur d'oranger", "fleurs d'oranger"],
• 'Céréale': ['farine', 'pain', 'pâte', 'riz'],
• 'Légumineuse': ['févette', 'haricot', 'pois'],
• 'Fruit sec': ['amande', 'noix', 'noisette'],
• 'Champignon': ['champignon', 'truffe', 'cèpe', 'girofle', 'morille', 'levure', 'oronge', 'duelle']

Region2SubRegion

• "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']

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 to the code

Github repository: Historical Cookbook