Detecting Changing Culinary Trends Through Historical Recipes

Gauri Bhagwat, Marieke van Erp, Teresa Paccosi, Rik Hoekstra


Abstract
Culinary trends evolve in response to social, economic, and cultural influences, reflecting broader historical transformations. We present an exploration into Dutch culinary trends from 1910 to 1995 by analysing recipes from housekeeping school cookbooks and newspaper recipe collections. Using computational techniques, we extract and examine ingredient frequency, recipe complexity, and shifts in recipe categories to identify trends in Dutch cuisine from a quantitative point of view. Additionally, we experimented with Large Language Models (LLMs) to structure and extract recipes’ features, demonstrating their potential for historical recipe parsing.
Anthology ID:
2025.ldk-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Naples, Italy
Editors:
Mehwish Alam, Andon Tchechmedjiev, Jorge Gracia, Dagmar Gromann, Maria Pia di Buono, Johanna Monti, Maxim Ionov
Venue:
LDK
SIG:
Publisher:
Unior Press
Note:
Pages:
43–49
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ldk-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gauri Bhagwat, Marieke van Erp, Teresa Paccosi, and Rik Hoekstra. 2025. Detecting Changing Culinary Trends Through Historical Recipes. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge, pages 43–49, Naples, Italy. Unior Press.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Changing Culinary Trends Through Historical Recipes (Bhagwat et al., LDK 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ldk-1.5.pdf