Jani me Fasule - an Albanian soup

Last Saturday night, I ran into my supervisor on one of the many random bridges in Amsterdam. I told him about the long-overlooked study of formal cooking, and was glad to hear that his envisioned range of possibilities and research avenues for this emerging field coincided with my own. Which isn’t so surprising, since I must've gotten these ideas somewhere, and since he has been applying the (linguistic) modeling approach he’s been working on for some two decades to other domains, like music and reasoning.

So what can you do with formalized and hierarchically structured recipes? Well, you can generate new recipes and parse ingredients to form recipes. Let’s start this week with the idea of generating recipes. Suppose you have a large number or recipes, in tree diagrams, and you’ve formalized and uniformized all ingredients, appliances and cooking procedures. What you can do then, is extract parts of the recipe-trees, and combine them, possibly in completely novel ways, with other extracted tree-parts. Formally, a context-free grammar should be able to deal with this (hence the trees -- and I welcome discussion on whether cooking is context-free or maybe only regular or even context-sensitive). 

Next, we can see how likely certain combinations are. Frying the water and soaking the celery overnight doesn’t sound like a likely way to make soup. Frying onions and soaking beans overnight more so. But the model can find larger sub-recipes that occur across recipes too: frying onions, adding spices, adding vegetables, adding water seems like a very common string of operations where the result of the previous operation is combined with another ingredient. So we can assume that the cook has Gestalt principles and stores this ordered set of operations, or 'sub-recipe' as a whole, in order to make the computing more efficient.

Enough theory for now, after all: theory without her data is nothing. Next week I’ll say some more about how you can parse ingredients to make a soup with whatever you have lingering around in the cupboard. Informally, of course, because the algorithm has to be patented and made into an app so I can fund my own post-doc.

This week, we add to the corpus of soups the next in the list of souvereign states, Albania. It’s again a bean soup, from this site. I promise I won’t always add bean soups; that would skew the sample and be boring. I also promise I won’t always follow the alphabetical list. I already got some good suggestions for yummy soups that will break this emerging pattern, and I’m happy to do so.

Interesting about this soup is (again) its bi-componential nature, where you cook things on the one hand (in this case, beans, carrots and onion), and make a paste of other ingredients, by frying, on the other. Here, the paste does not revolve around the mint and coriander, as in the last recipe, but contains bell pepper, oregano and some flour to give the soup it's gravy-like texture. The procedure is pretty much the same otherwise. Notice how the flour is baked with the paste here, instead of being added to the whole of the soup later on (which I recall from other soups). Also notice that, as opposed to the Afghan soup, we boil some vegetables (carrot & onion) with the beans, giving a richer taste to the beans, which remain clearly the head of this group. Perhaps we can think of the carrot and onions as modifiers. Yes. That’s a nice thought. They modify the beans, and apparently the Afghan cuisine allows bare, unadorned bean-phrases (BPs) whereas the example of Albanian cuisine shows a richer BP. We’ll see in future soups how this issue of complexity works out for other soups containing BPs.

The other day, I had lunch with my Macedonian colleague. When I mentioned that I had an Albanian bean soup on the menu for this week, she started talking about a Macedonian soup her mother makes. Interested in the possibility of Kochbund-effects, known for the Balkan-region, I decided to do some elicitation. Not completely to my surprise, it was nearly the same recipe, but with slight variations. The pepper is cooked with the beans, rather than added to the fried paste, and (and this one I really loved) the paste has to make a sizzling sound when you add it to the BP, otherwise it’s not hot enough (feature checking or something similar, mayhaps?). She continued about a Macedonian liver soup, which sounds totally delicious and like something I should make on one of those cold winter days ahead of us.