The 'Sioux Chef' on the Map

A nice piece came my way via Twitter: "The 'Sioux Chef' Is Putting Pre-Colonization Food Back On The Menu" about Sean Sherman, cook and student of the ethnobotany of his own Oglala Lakota tribe. I like projects like these. Map your Recipe, a website that can find the fruits and vegetables in a recipe and show where they were domesticated, was created with the intent of analyzing exactly such things. I do not have Sherman's recipes of course but using the gallery page from his website it is possible to get some of his ingredients. Here is what happens when you put them on the map:

The graph on the right shows that for these few ingredients as many are native to the new world as are native to the old world. The second thing that is immediately clear is that most of these plants were never domesticated at all.

But what does this mean in regard with the claim of Sherman cooking food from before pre-colonization? As I have been saying all cooking is fusion cooking and the origin of an ingredient has nothing to do with authenticity (the pizza is no less Italian for using the South American tomato). In this case it is even more interesting because it is perfectly feasible for a 17th/18th/19th century non-colonized prairie Lakota to eat plants brought to the continent by European invaders. This is the point made by Alfred W. Crosby in his book Ecological Imperialism. A plant like the humble dandelion was preparing the ground for the European onslaught long before they themselves got that far west.

My great plains anthropology is sketchy but it is to be remembered that this was a way of life made possible by the horse, a European animal. The various nations (or even empires) of plain Indians who learned how to re-domesticate (and later breed) feral horses in order to live out on the prairie are among few recorded examples of formerly sedentary people becoming nomadic. Their way of life was a creative and successful response to new pressures and new opportunities. It makes sense that this creativity would also act on new plants. It is part of their genius. The map is a way to show this.

Rene Redzepi and Alfred W. Crosby

Yarrow (Gerarde 1597)

To most people the common yarrow will be a weedy roadside plant best kept out of the garden. It is easy to overlook that this humble plant was a witness to all of the 'Rise of the West' (McNeill). Its botanical name refers to Achilles who purportedly took it along as an antibiotic on his travels, the Norse introduced it to Greenland about 1000AD and it is now common in large parts of the world.

Yarrow also features as a foraged green in Rene Redzepi's NOMA kitchen where it is a common ingredient. It is also included several times in Redzepi's tome: 'Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine' (2010). Out of thin air, despite its generalist cosmopolitanism, Yarrow (or bloodwort or milfoil) was made to stand as a symbol of environmental awareness, hyper-regionality and creative idealism, a pawn in the battle for global food security and Michelin Stars. Yes the yarrow is local but it is local to, back of the envelope calculation, everybody living in the temperate zone. This is a pattern, not just a particular aspect of yarrow which is actually a very bad example as the new world already possessed yarrow, a variation with a genetic link so close that it continues to baffle taxonomists. 

The foraging locavore (from Euell Gibbons to Richard Mabey) is almost always subsisting on plants that have long ago left their natural boundaries and gone global. Yarrow, nettle, dandelion, cowslip, garlic mustard, chickweed and sorrel, all used at NOMA, are all extremely hardy and thrive on human disturbance. These are plants that were introduced to the Americas and Australia as a consequence of European farming practices, as so well described by Alfred W. Crosby in The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986).

The ironies are several. Regionality is celebrated by making use of plants that have gone global (making it possible for a cook in New Zealand to reproduce a Nordic recipe). The chef who made his stake claiming that at least one third of his ingredients was foraged is relying heavily on plants associated with farming to do so. The plants that are used to make his food 'distinct' are some of the commonest plants on earth. The dandelion, after all, is the plant on which the sun never sets (Crosby).

Redzepi is famous for not using olive oil as the token symbol of him turning his back on the high tradition of French cuisine. When running the entire ingredient list of the NOMA book through Map Your Recipe you would expect a large part of the plant-ingredients to be domesticated in the Euro-Siberia center. A relatively small center missing from the original scheme proposed by Vavilov but added by his students. It is the origin of such plants as kale and kohlrabi. It has those but the book includes ingredients originally domesticated in every global center of diversity bar Tropical Africa and Australia, just like the Big Mac:

Earlier I already reported that food pairing visualizations may suggest that Redzepi still thinks like a classical (read French) chef. The abundance of plants domesticated in the Mediterranean also confirms this.
I am not a geo-food fundamentalist; there is no cuisine in the world that does not make use of globalized plant resources (perhaps only apart from the one you find in the Eskimo Cookbook). Cooking is culture not nature and the concept of an evasive plant makes no culinary sense. This is not meant to detract from Redzepi's project, which I continue to find admirable, but it is meant to remind us of the fact that in a globalized, anthropogenic landscape every claim made about regionality needs to be understood and evaluated against a backdrop of global environmental transformation.


World history weighs in on every locality on the planet, plants tells that story.

Big Ma(c)pped!

This is a paper right up my street: "Plant Diversity in the Human Diet: Weak Phylogenetic Signal Indicates Breadth" (2008; Procheş Şerban, John R. U. Wilson, Jana C. Vamosi and David M. Richardson). After noting that "it is often argued that globalization leads to uniformity in human diets" the paper continues:

The ingredients of a Big Mac hamburger are considered varied enough to make the price of a Big Mac relevant in economic comparisons between countries ("the Big Mac index"). We therefore thought it would be interesting to list the plant species that go into a McDonald's meal. A typical McDonald's meal——a Big Mac accompanied by french fries and coffee——contains at least 19 plant species from 12 families (table above). These species originate in all of the eight global centers of cultivated plant diversity identified by Vavilov (1926) and largely confirmed by more recent reviews, which means that a Big Mac is quite an apt symbol of globalization. That a single meal contains about 20 species is impressive, given that some human societies——those that are largely unaffected by current globalization trend——commonly include only 50 to 100 plant species in their entire diet.

The paper does not include a map but Map Your Recipe can provide one. MyR is using an updated scheme developed by students of Vavilov and instead of recognizing foodstuffs from eight centers of domestication it is counting eleven. Not all ingredients will be present in every Big Mac. Sugarcane may be domesticated in New Guinea but that is probably not where the sugar in your sauce came from. If you want see who are the top producers of these crops today Foodmap has a tool for that too. Eat your BigMac with some Macadamia nuts (Australia) and Lemon (West Africa) and you can bring the number of food regions up to the absolute maximum of 13.

Guestimate the cuisine ingredients mapped.

My personal favorite feature of Map your Recipe is the Guesstimate function that from the ingredients of a recipe will guess/estimate the cuisine it represents. It is far from perfect and only knows a limited number of cuisines but I find it amazing that it manages to produce results that are relatively often decent. Having produced the above network of the ingredients (click to enlarge) it looks for however it looks all wrong, almost like a parody on national cuisines.

Dry Cooking with nine Filipino recipes

The Philippines were an important half-way station between China and the west, both for those coming from Europe and from Spanish South America. Trade station, pirate hide-out, smuggling capital and, inevitable also, a hotspot for culinary fusion. The Filipino recipes I found at AllRecipes do indeed look unusual to me (much soy sauce and Mediterranean herbs, rice and pasta, tropical fruits and (according to another source) Spanish sausages). From Map your Recipe (using 9 recipes, which might be based on what you can buy in US supermarkets) I got a 83.3% use of old world ingredients, which is a number common for most cuisines. The Cuisine guestimation I think nicely sums up the fusion/uniqueness of Filipino food.

To see if it would be possible for the program to recognize Filipino cuisine I fed the same recipes to a new tool (Compare your Recipe) that takes up to 10 recipes simultaneously and compares occurrence, frequency and type of ingredients. The radar graph below shows what ingredients were used and in how many recipes. I am struggling to find the unique combination but will try again later with more recipes. I have added the recipes to the example section so you can see for yourself. 

 

With thanks to Rachel Laudan (earlier) for making the suggestion.

Some Vavilov updates [non-centers of food domestication]

The food hearth theory of  Nikolai Vavilov is obviously outdated. In searching for later insights I stumbled on the Dictionary of cultivated plants and their centres of diversity (1975) by a student of Vavilov, PM Zhukovsky together with AC Seven. The book lists domesticated plants (for food as well as fodder, industrial and medicinal uses) using a centers of origin list expanded on that suggested by Vavilov. The differences can be seen above, for South America three centers are contracted into one, the Chinese center incorporates Japan, the Ethiopian center has disappeared in a vast African one and Australian, North-American and Euro-Siberian centers are added.

The entire Vavilovian system came under criticism from JR Harlan who in Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters (1971) argues for three separate origins of agriculture and three non-centers (spanning 5000 to 10.000 km) where domestication took places in dispersed areas. Resulting in the map below. Note that the three temperate climate centers (Mexico, Near East China) are all matched by a tropical non center, and that the three centers are all thought to have independently developed writing. Very Neat.

The Islami-Mex Mole on the Map

Recently I have been enjoying several pieces by food historian Rachel Laudan. Her recent book I have not yet read but here is an interview. She writes in praise of fast food and about the origin of our diet. The latter is especially interesting for the historic perspective it brings to our modern love for freshness. You can also take her to a supermarket near you. An older piece is The Mexican Kitchen's Islamic Connection that contains the following: 

When Mexico’s leading writer, Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz, arrived in New Delhi in 1962 to take up his post as ambassador to India, he quickly ran across a culinary puzzle. Although Mexico and India were on opposite sides of the globe, the brown, spicy, aromatic curries that he was offered in India sparked memories of Mexico’s national dish, mole (pronounced MO-lay). Is mole, he wondered, “an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce?” How could this seeming coincidence of “gastronomic geography” be explained?

...

Paz was right to point out that mole resembled curry, he was wrong to imagine that Mexican cooks had created mole as imitation curry, or that Indian cooks composed curries in an effort to emulate mole. He would have done better to picture both moles and curries as vestiges of the cuisine of medieval Islam, a cuisine that was enjoyed from southern Spain in the west to northern India in the east.

...

In the early 16th century, as the Spaniards were introducing their version of Muslim cuisine to Mexico, the Mughals conquered northern India half a world away. They came by way of Persia, which had become the cultural and culinary center of the region since the Mongols had ruined Baghdad more than 200 years earlier. It was this Persian version of Muslim cuisine that their cooks adapted to Indian circumstances, creating the sophisticated Mughal cuisine of New Delhi. By the mid-16th century, then, a belt of high cuisine could be traced from northern India westward to Mexico. Although in every area it had been adapted to include local ingredients, the basic techniques and the basic dishes of medieval Islam continued to form the basis of all the local variants.

The article provides a brief glimpse into the way food-cultures wander, how tradition incorporates new ingredients without losing integrity, but also how incoming styles of food become naturalized and localized. Food history as study of the way old dishes are created from new and new dishes from old. By placing such processes in the context of state-making and empire building Laudan can write about cuisine-formation (what a word) within an evolutionary framework. 

Within evolutionary biology sits is the study of biogeography, the study of the geographical distribution of life, its most famous case study is the recolonization of Krakatau after its explosion. So if such a thing as gastrogeography can exist within the History of Food what would be its Krakatau? The introduction of the potato in the diet of the old world? The patenting of Coca-Cola? The release of Islamic cuisine in the new world? Or perhaps we should look at islands like biogeography has done since the time of Wallace and Darwin. Lauden provided for that too with her earlier book The Food of Paradise, Exploring Hawaii's Culinary Heritage which tells the story of Hawaiian gastrogenesis (yeah!) from three different cuisines meeting on the culinary clean slate of Hawaii.

If you would want to take this one step further you could look to formalize and describe events of cuisination (read cuisine speciation, the process of cuisine formation), cuisine radiation (the splitting of a cuisine into several cuisines), cuisine revolution (the sudden and drastic change of a cuisine), cuisine decay (the process of a cuisine losing its coherence), cuisine collapse (the complete annihilation of a cuisine).

Map your Recipe is my way to address these things and what else could I do but get a recipe for Mole and feed it to the program. The resulting map is above. In terms of food regions it brings together the two Indian and Mediterranean centers, the lateral extremities of the the Islamic empire, but there is also a very strong presence of new world ingredients as the graph below shows. It is extremely rare to find a recipe that exceeds the 50% use of new world ingredients and for this achievement alone I find Mole impressive.

I was how wondering how Map your Recipe would guestimate the Mole, would it recognize it as Mexican or maybe (also) as Indian or Indonesian or Moroccan. After a little adjustment it now recognizes Mole as Mexican.

Guestimate the Cuisine / The Jamie Oliver Switch [map your recipe]

Last weekend I started to experiment with a new function in Map your Recipe. 

The new option is called 'Guestimate the Cuisine' and as you would expect it tries to work out the culinary style of the recipe. Is it Italian or Chinese? Mexican or Moroccan? French or Indonesian? It works by comparing the ingredients in the recipe against the essential ingredients of ten types of cuisine. The result is expressed in a percentage of style. There is some obvious overlap in ingredients (many different cuisines rely on coriander and garlic) and some cuisines are more alike then others even though the actual recipe will taste completely different. 

I will be adding new cuisines (suggestions welcome) and tweaking the parameters but already I am quite surprised that it seems to work with a certain amount of reliability: it does distinguish Chinese from Italian food. For some recipes it gives several guestimates and these I think are a useful way to understand relations between cuisines. An Thai dish recognized as partly Indonesian makes more sense than a Greek dish recognized as 40% Mexican.

 Like everybody else I greatly admire the works of Jamie "whack it all in there, absolutely delish" Oliver. Map your Recipe reveals many of his recipes to be all over the place both geographically according the scheme of Vavilov as in taste. I created an evaluation function that based on the outcome of the cuisine guestimation will determine if a recipe could have come from Jamie Oliver. Remarkably the first recipe I tried, a "Thai chicken laksa mildly spiced noodle squash broth" produced the above result. Or in the words of the great bard: "yeah!?"

Iraqi recipes on the map

Annia Ciezadlo is the author of this recent article on targeted attacks by the Assad regime on bakeries as a method to subdue the Syrian population. It is well worth your attention. 

In an older article "They Remember Home" (PDF, 2008) on the food culture of a group of Iraqi refugees in Lebanon she includes recipes for the Iraqi dishes Kabset Baitenjan and Tashreeb Dijaaj. Of course I could not resist running them through Map you Recipe. 

Now remember that Map Your Recipe displays where the vegetable ingredients of a recipe were first domesticated according to the 'food hearth' theory proposed by the Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov.  

The recipe above resulted in the map below.  


Canola is made from rapeseed and therefore 'Mediterranean'. Sumac is a large family of shrubby trees that also include the American cashew, the type here suggested as optional is sumac spice typical for Middle eastern cooking. 

The Kabset Baitenjan results in this map:

As said before: Map you Recipe makes no claims about originality and does not endorse food crop nationalism. But what immediately strikes me about these two recipes is a total absence of ingredients associated with the Middle East that includes staples like barley, figs, lentils, alfalfa, pomegranates, quinces and fenugreek. 

If you take an Italian or Indian or Chinese or Ethiopian dish you will nearly always find an ingredient associated with the region apart from the source of carbohydrates (wheat/rice/potatoes). But not here. 

I am not saying it means anything but I would like to offer the theory, 98% in jest, that in the deep past these dishes started out as foreign food and became naturalized. What would be Nebuchadnezzar equivalent to Jane Austen's curry? Think of it as Babylonian fusion food enriched with the later and inescapable potato.

Charting the geographical and numerical spread of ingredients from 29 historic cookbooks

 
From various places (Gutenberg, Archive, Bit-Torrent) I have collected the full text of 29 cookbooks published between 1390 and 2010.

I will not bother you here with the full list, but the earliest is the Forme of Cury (1390) and the latest is the Paleo Diet cookbook (2010). In between there are classics like The Book of Household Management by Mrs. Beeton (1859), A guide to modern cookery by Auguste Escoffier (1907) and the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver (1999). I have tried to find books evenly spaced through the years and have cleared them as best as I could from non-intentional ingredients. Book by book I fed all of them into Map you Recipe and collected the raw numbers that are used to make the graph above.

It maps the number of ingredients (vertical axis) for 29 books identified by year of publication (horizontal axis). The green top line tracks total number of ingredients recognized, two lines track how many of those are from the old or the new world and one line indicated from how many of the 15 food categories Map your Recipe uses ingredients are drawn from. 

Here are some observations that I think are fascinating. 

- Over time cookbooks have an increasing list of potential ingredients.  

- The big change comes about 1600 when the number of ingredients sharply rises. 

- It takes to about 1650 when produce from the Americas start to be seriously introduced to the larder.

- The food stuffs from the Americas on there own or not enough to explain the sudden increase in 17th century.

- From 1700 onwards the total use of ingredients goes up (130 max) and down (61 min) but it never goes down enough to come near the level of 1658 (41 ingredients) which at that time is the record.  

- The first cookbook with more than a hundred ingredients dates from 1851, but this remains an exceptional number for a long time.

- The Paleo-diet cookbook has the highest total number of ingredients. It is ironic that a so-called 'caveman diet' seems intent on using as much agricultural crops at it can.

- Nigella Lawson in 2007 uses 29 more ingredients than J. Oliver in 1999.

There are a few caveats. In an earlier post I did the same for 15 books searching only for those fruits and vegs that Vavilov was able to trace to a specific food hearth. In the mean time I have also added many other food stuffs that are known to originate from the old or the new world but without the specificness of the Vavilov list. The problem with the additional list is that it is in potential infinite. This is even true when you exclude meat and fish as Map you Recipe does. So you don't know what is missing even though I expect it to pick up 99% of the most common ingredients. 

This graph is not intended to be the final word nor does it make claims for extreme precision. It is meant as an illustration for general trends in food over time and I think it is very revealing. 

Alex Atala's Amazonian recipes mapped [UPDATED with commentary from Amazonia]

Alex Atala is a Brazilian chef whose is renowned for his championing of Brazilian (read Amazonian) ingredients. He has got a book out called 'Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients' that I have not seen but which I will. 

A book on Ka'apor ethnobiology (William Balee's Footprints of the Forest) has a list containing hundreds of names of plants used for food by this one Amazonian tribe. So there is a food world to win out there and Atala's work, if anything, shows that the discovery of America is not yet over. 

Map your Recipe is undergoing some essential work at the moment. It used to recognize only those fruits and vegetables identified as belonging to a Vavilov food hearth. I have now added the categories Old world and New World to incorporate products of which the exact place of domestication is only broadly known. The potential names on these two lists are near infinite (everything that is not poisonous can after be all used by an adventurous cook) but I am trying to find those ingredients that would capture all vegetable ingredients in 99.5% of the recipes.

The five recipes of Atala that I found online (here, here, here, here, (with this included 6)) did not make it easy for me. There were a number of ingredients that I never heard of. Jambu which is from the old world but grown extensively in South America. For pimentos de cheiro I have added 'red pepper' but I do not know if that is correct. Priprioca a plant that Atala self-handedly introduced as a food plant with a scientific description.

The resulting geographical spread of the ingredients of these 5 recipes is shown above. I do not know how representative these recipes are for the full Atala menu and use of local meat and fish will also add significantly to the uniqueness of his dishes. But despite these caveats I find that from 42 ingredients recognized a 19.5% use of new world ingredients is almost a 19th century proportion. Especially as those 8 new world ingredients are from two food hearths only. 

As said it is not representative but if it will turn out to be than Mr Atala suffers from a strange kind of myopia where he will plunder the Euro-Asian larder at will while ignoring large parts of the American continent. 

Here is the challenge Mr Atala! Can you or have you created a dish with only fruits and vegs from your side of the pond? 

That would be a dish that would look different on the map.

Of course: I am being light hearted. Just because the tomato was domesticated in Mexico thousands of years ago does not make the pizza anything less Italian. 

UPDATE,here is a a comment worth quoting:

Actually, jambu – to which Alex Atala's recipe refers - is Acmella oleracea, whose leaves cause very peculiar sensations in the taste buds and are widely used in the cuisine of the state of Pará, in the brazilian amazon. Instead, Syzygium cumini is known in Terra Brasilis as jamelão or jambolão, never as jambu.

"Pimentas de cheiro" is a category composed of several varieties of Capsicum chinense, with varying degrees of spiciness, but all of them have accented flavor and smell as common characteristic. They're usually - but not always - yellow.

Thanks for that! The Jambu exists in two spellings, for 'red pepper' I should have used 'capsicum' for better precision.

Food etymology

As an additional window on the history of our most basic foodstuffs I have compiled a list of etymological first-use. 

It was here but I now have placed it here where it is easier to maintain and edit.

My main interest is in the geographical origins and spread of crops and I wanted to see if pulling dates from the Online Etymology Dictionary would give insight in the historicity of everyday supermarket products. Etymology is not an exact science and dates are for modern English and especially for older dates it does not mean that the thing named was not known before that. It does allow to see the way new foods from the Americas and elsewhere are introduced to the European menu as trade networks start to span the globe from 1400 onwards and after 1500 especially.

These etymological word maps also contain much food names.

Carl Sauer's maps on agricultural origins

Carl Sauer, cultural geographer, author of the brilliant New Spanish Main on the Spanish landnam of America after Columbus, also wrote one the origin and spread of food crops and domesticated animals. Vavilov suggested a number of centres of origin, the so-called hearths. Sauer preferred to talk about Centres of Dispersal. Sauer came later but Vavilov is still the better known name. I have no clue what the current scientific validity is of both theories but it is certain helps that Sauer's Agricultural Origins And Dispersals (1952) is available on Archive.

Great maps, click to enlarge.    

Mapping Raymond Blanc with Map Your Recipe [more recepimatics]

In the last post I ran 21 recipes of BBC's James Martin through Map your Recipe and exclaimed how surprised I was with the variety of ingredients and their original source. 

This evoked the comment from a reader that UK food is not so much 'open minded' as I said but the result of an imperialist heritage which was anything but open-minded.     

I do not necessarily disagree with pointing to British colonialism as a source of current food diversity in the UK as presented on TV, but I do doubt that imperialism is the only or the most important reason. 

Instead I think that the diversity of the ingredients in Martin's set of 21 recipes is the result of contemporary food culture and its ingrained values of curiosity, experimentalism and, practically, the fact that virtually every ingredient from any place and any cuisine in the world is now for sale everywhere. 

We could argue about this until the microwave explodes but I have come up with an experiment to verify the colonialist-hypothesis. France was one of the great imperialist nations of Europe with colonies in Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia and Oceania. But French cuisine is not known for its eclecticism and the French themselves have never taken up a food habit similar to the UK's fondness for Indian food. 

So I have taken 21 recipes from Raymond Blanc, Frenchman in the UK, presenter of my favourite BBC cooking program. Surely this will show that culture (French chauvinism) not imperialism (England's dreaming) is the defining factor.

Well.... there goes my theory. I still believe that culture not landgrabbing is the key but Raymond Blanc is incorporating the produce of the world with even more enthusiasm than Martin does.

Martin uses 32 ingredients from 9 centres of origin. 

Blanc uses 37 ingredients from 11 centres.
  
Interestingly, ingredients from Ethiopia (sesame, barley) are entirely absent.

Needless to say this a random selection of recipes and Blanc's nor Martin's food can stand for the general cooking in their respective countries.  

Food Map of Britain in Map your Recipe [Meta-recipematics]

More Meta-recipematics with Map your Recipe. 

James Martin, tv-chef and presenter of BBc's Saturday Kitchen Live, has a new program called "Food Map of Britain". I haven't seen it but I have taken the ingredients of all 21 recipes given at the website and fed them into Map your Recipe. 

It helps that the list includes mains and desserts but the range of ingredients is really quite spectacular. I think it is a good illustration of the open-minded attitude of contemporary British food and its willingness to incorporate ingredients and flavours from all known cuisines. 

The only major area missing is the Brazil-Paraguay centre from which things like manioc, peanuts and pineapple originate. 

I wonder if a list of recipes from someone like Heston Blumenthal would show an equal amount of diversity.