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A Grammar of Cooking

January 23, 2023

In 1985, Nobel Physics Laureate, Richard Feynman (1918-1988), published his autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman![1] This book, written in collaboration with Ralph Leighton (b. 1949), son of physicist, Robert B. Leighton (1919-1997), recalls the humorous incident that inspired the book's title. As a new Princeton University graduate student, Feynman was invited to a tea party at the home of the Dean. When he entered, he was asked by the Dean's wife whether he would prefer cream or lemon in his tea. Scientists are not as socially adept as other professionals, and he had never before been invited to a tea. He asked for both.

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Cover of my copy of the 1985 paperback edition of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Feynman developed a reputation as a safe-cracker while working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. His facility in opening safes was based on experiment and observation.

After World War II, he expanded his safecracking ability by social engineering. He engaged in friendly conversations with a locksmith in charge of maintaining the Los Alamos safes and mechanical calculators.

One important piece of information that he learned was that safes were shipped with a default combination that was sometimes not changed. It's like someone on the Internet using "password" or "12345" as their password.

Feynman easily found the 20% of safes for which the default combination was not changed.

(Click for larger image.)

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Lemon juice will curdle milk and cream, and the curdling is more rapid at high temperatures, as in hot tea. My maternal grandmother's house was a very short distance from my high school, and I would often visit her after school. At times, I would have tea there with lemon and honey; and, once, I added some milk. I could claim that this is an example of great minds thinking alike, but it's likely an example of the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

One solace I had during social distancing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was watching cooking programs on television. I had viewed a few before then, notably Lidia'a Kitchen, but I was amazed at how many cooking programs I found. My wife is our resident chef, she creates some amazing gluten-free meals for me, and my prior cooking experience had been only barbecue, pancakes, and the occasional fried egg. However, my culinary knowledge suddenly expanded to the point at which I could successfully modify recipes without disaster. This shouldn't be surprising, since cooking is not unlike doing a synthesis in a chemical laboratory - Just mind the reagents, their proportions, and the temperature.

Although some aspects of culinary science, such as sous vide, have been overblown in importance, there is much essential science in cooking. Foremost is the idea that cooking acts as a means of predigesting food, since the heat breaks down the cells of meat and plants to release their nutrients. The heat also acts as a means of killing pathogens.

Yeast is used as a leavening agent in baking with the yeast bacteria releasing carbon dioxide to expand dough. In cases for which a yeasty taste should be avoided, as in cakes, the alternative is reactions that release carbon dioxide upon heating. These chemical leavening agents include baking powder and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). For baking soda, the reaction is

2NaHCO₃ -> Na₂CO₃ + H₂O + CO₂

The Maillard reaction, named after French chemist, Louis Camille Maillard (1878-1936), is another significant chemical reaction exploited in cooking. In 1912, Maillard discovered this reaction that browns food rapidly at temperatures about 28-330 °F) (140 to 165 °C). This chemical reaction between amino acids and sugars imparts flavor to toasted bread, roasted marshmallows, cookies, breads and seared steaks. The Maillard reaction is accelerated in an alkaline environment, so lye is applied to pretzels. The mechanism for the Maillard reaction was discovered by U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist, John Hodge (1914-1996), in the early 1950s, many decades after Maillard's observation.[2]

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Pretzels are my favorite Maillard reaction product, and they are now available as a gluten-free food.

April 26th was declared "National Pretzel Day" in 2002 by Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell (b. 1944).

The United States per capita pretzel consumption is a considerable two pounds per year, but the estimated per capita rate for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is more than ten pounds per year. My personal consumption is about that of a Philadelphian.

(Wikimedia Commons image by Willis Lam)

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Cooking recipes have evolved along with humans, and an organizing principle in the study of evolution is taxonomy in which cladograms are created to describe phylogenetic trees. These trees show the evolutionary relationships among members based upon similarities and differences in characteristics. A recent arXiv paper by Ganesh Bagler of the Department of Computational Biology of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT, New Delhi, India), incorporates similar tree diagrams in the construction of a grammar of cooking.[3] The paper introduces a fundamental cooking unit, the cubit (culinary bit).[3]

The cubits represent the descriptive words of the fundamental parts of a recipe description, and these culinary words are joined together to create sentences in a recipe. There's an analogy between words being grammatically joined to form sentences and cubits being joined to form a recipe. There are five types of cubits, as follow: I cubits (ingredients), P cubits (processing), U cubits (utensils), Q cubits (quantities and units), and F cubits (forms). Short lists of examples of each type of cubit are shown in the following tables, as extracted from the supplementary information of ref. 3, in itself extracted from ref. 5.[3-5]

Table I. A few ingredients from the complete list of 18,599 ingredients. These are I cubits.

salt	onion	butter	water
garlic clove	olive oil	sugar	egg
tomato	black pepper	garlic	milk
pepper	salt pepper	cumin	vegetable oil
cinnamon	parsley	lemon juice	cilantro
ginger	carrot	soy sauce	flour
parmesan cheese	purpose flour	cream	oregano
beef	green onion	oil	potato
basil	brown sugar	lime juice	extra virgin olive
chicken broth	chicken breast	lemon	white sugar

Table II. A few processing actions. These are P cubits.

add	heat	cook	stir
place	mix	cover	remove
serve	boil	simmer	bake
stirring	sprinkle	cool	preheat
cut	combine	drain	pour
set	season	beat	spread
transfer	whisk	smooth	top
blend	refrigerate	put	fry
melt	fold	reduce	dry
slice	coat	cream	chop

Table III. A few utensils. These are U cubits.

bowl	pan	oven	skillet
pot	saucepan	cup	dish
sheet	processor	fork	knife
plate	tablespoon	mixer	container
spatula	spoon	cooker	whisk
board	microwave	platter	sieve
boiler	jar	casserole	masher
skewer	frypan	cutter	strainer
stockpot	ladle	shaker	crockpot
peeler	crock	tray	blender

Table IV. A few quantities and units. These are Q cubits.

cup	teaspoon	tablespoon	ounce
can	lb	package	clove
pinch	slice	gm	pound
bunch	dash	pods	jar
stalks	ml	quart	sprig
halved	piece	inch	pint
box	bag	bottle	loaf
packet	drop	envelope	kg
sheet	fluid ounce	leaves	head
cubes	carton	gallon	stick

Table V. A few of the 1299 forms. These are F cubits.

chopped	ground	minced	sliced
diced	grated	cut	shredded
crushed	dried	sour	beaten
cooked	divided	drained	melted
softened	unsalted	crumbled	uncooked
cubed	sweet	peeled	peeled/chopped
toasted	ground lean	granulated	peeled cut
peeled/sliced	seeded/chopped	skinless/boneless	quartered
low fat	mixed	rinsed drained	canned
boiling	boneless	unsweetened	drained/rinsed

Although it's not addressed in the arXiv paper, having recipes broken down into cubits would allow an easy transformation of two recipes into another. As an example, with apologies to mathematicians for usurping their real number symbol, if you like Chicken Tikka Masala (ℝ₁) and you want to create a variant recipe for Sweet Potato Tikka Masala ℝ₃ using a recipe (ℝ₂) for boiled or steamed cubes of sweet potatoes, you can create the new recipe using a transformation function,

ℝ₃ = T(ℝ₁, ℝ₂)

The function T would be non-commutative; otherwise, you might get boiled chicken and have chicken soup instead.

References:

1. Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton , "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character, W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (February 6, 2018), 400 pp., ISBN 978-0393355628 (via Amazon).
2. J. E. Hodge, "Dehydrated Foods, Chemistry of Browning Reactions in Model Systems," J. Agric. Food Chem., vol. 1, no. 15 (October 1, 1953), pp. 928-943, https://doi.org/10.1021/jf60015a004. The American Chemical Society is notoriously stingy with its assets; so, this 1953 article is paywalled.
3. Ganesh Bagler, "A generative grammar of cooking," arXiv, October 12, 2022, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.09059.
4. Devansh Batra, Nirav Diwan, Utkarsh Upadhyay, Jushaan Singh Kalra, Tript Sharma, Aman Kumar Sharma, Dheeraj Khanna, Jaspreet Singh Marwah, Srilakshmi Kalathil, Navjot Singh, Rudraksh Tuwani, and Ganesh Bagler, "RecipeDB: A resource for exploring recipes," Database (Oxford) 2020 (Nov 25, 2020), pp. 1-10, doi: 10.1093/database/baaa077. Supplimentary information available as a zip file here.
5. RecipeDB - A resource for exploring recipes, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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