Ok, there we go. I love grammar, and I love soup. This blog combines these by taking the most common graphical representation of grammatical structure, the tree, and apply it to soup recipes.

Why, you may wonder. Several weeks ago I was trying to make a Mole (yes, that's a dish that deserves to be capitalized). I was following a recipe, but with 40+ ingredients and 4 or so parallel cooking processes, a linear, narrative representation of a recipe is inconvenient. I decided to write the whole thing as a flow chart, but what emerged was more like a tree than a flow chart. And my linguistic interest was aroused. Some friends commented on the usefulness of this method, and when I made the soup that's featuring in the next post, I decided to do the same. And then I thought: why not share this particular intersection of interests with the rest of the world.

As I make soup about every week, and variation is the spice of life & all, the soups will form a typologically diverse sample. Perhaps we can find universals (I dare to postulate water as one - but who knows, maybe we find the Pirahã among the soups), perhaps we can define constituency structures or maybe correlates of word order (first the spices, then the veggies or the other way around?). Who knows. We'll see. I'll try to do some analysis as I go.