donderdag 17 oktober 2013

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.

vrijdag 11 oktober 2013

Mosh Awa - an Afghan soup

Where to start? Maybe with the first nation in this list, Afghanistan. I found a recipe for a bean soup on www.aayisrecipes.com.


So, yeah, you all have to cope with my left-handedness, the fact that I'm not a native speaker (the vocabulary for cooking methods and utensils varies quite a bit between Dutch and English) and my liberal use of measures (everything is 'to taste' to my mind).

I'd say this soup has two major constituents: the beans and the paste of tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, and spices. I fried that set of ingredients for two hours - the paste it turned into after that time already was quite yummy. The ingredients for that paste can be further split into the root/bulby things, the spices and the fresh fruit/leaflike bits. Interesting was the fact that the tomatoes go into this sorta 'bumbu'-like paste early on rather than being added later (which is something I've done in a lot of other recipes). Low attachment of tomatoes, eh? We obviously have to await further soup sampling before we can make bolder claims about Afghan Tomato-attachment.

An optional element, the adjunct of the soup, would be to add some yoghurt when you serve it.

And for today's background music while cooking:

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.