France: Exploring Historical Cookbooks

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	Task	Completion
By Week 10	Finish the creation of the dataset	✓
By Week 11	Perform the data processing of the ingredients	✓
By Week 12	Exploratory analysis on the dataset	✓
By Week 13	Overall analysis & Per Region analysis	✓
By Week 14	Prepare the final presentation & finish the wikipedia page	✓

Methodology

Data collection

For a start, we scanned a physical French cookbook.

French cookbook.

A page of the scanned book.

The we did a basic OCR for the scanned files. Here is a sample output from OCR.

Sample OCR.

Data digitalization

Template output of the digitization

Data processing

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

• quantity
• unit
• ingredient

Units 'litre', 'litres', 'l', 'cl', 'dl', 'kg', 'g', 'pincée', 'cuil.', 'cuil. café', 'cuil. soupe', 'cuil. à soupe', 'petite cuil.', 'grande cuil.', 'verre', 'verres', 'petit verre', 'verre à liqueur', 'verres à liqueur', 'tasse', 'tasses', 'bout.', 'bouteille', 'bouteilles', 'grande boîte', 'gousse', 'gousses', 'branche', 'branches', 'membre', 'membres', 'tronçon', 'tronçons', 'tranche', 'tranches', 'tube', 'tubes',

Links

Github repository: Colonial-heritage-in-Switzerland

Primary source: Caricom Compilation Archive

Website : Switzerland and the Transatlantic Slavery Website

Secondary sources: geonamescaches, uscapitals.

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