Detecting Changing Culinary Trends Through Historical Recipes (2025)

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.

## introduction globalisation and advanced production methods make our current food environment one of seemingly unlimited choice. however, what we eat has historically been dictated by availability of foodstuffs and socio-cultural traditions @xcite . historical food traditions were not static, for example colonisation has provided access to new, faraway flavours that found their way into local dishes @xcite . additionally, societal events could influence the availability of certain goods, requiring cooks to adapt their recipes @xcite . in this paper, we compare dutch recipe sets from different points in time to detect changes in culinary trends. we do so by comparing different editions of dutch housekeeping school manuals as well as recipes extracted from newspapers. while we do not know exactly which recipes were cooked most, these resources were widely read and used. we hypothesise that a possible indicator of a recipe or ingredient's declining popularity could be its absence (or decrease) from more recent recipe collections. our contributions are: 1) a structured dataset of ingredients by year and recipe for dutch historical housekeeping cookbooks, and 2) a diachronic analysis of dutch culinary trends for the period 1910-1995. the remainder of this paper is organised as follows. in section 2, we discuss related work on historical recipe extraction and analysis. in section 3, we describe the datasets and the data processing, followed by our analyses (section 4) and future directions (section 5). our code and data can be found at: https://github.com/trifecta-project/ dutch-historical-recipe-trends 2 related work there is a fair body of research on analysing contemporary recipes for a variety of tasks such as personalised food recommendations (e.g. @xcite @xcite or ingredient substitutions (e.g. @xcite . many of these approaches rely on existing recipe datasets such as the recipe1m+ dataset @xcite or exploit semantic markup in recipe websites that allows for easy extraction of ingredients and other types of information @xcite . historians have a long tradition of analysing historical recipes using qualitative methods rather than automated, quantitative ones @xcite . efforts such as the feeding america -the historic american cookbook project have aimed to close this gap @xcite . in this project, 76 cookbooks were manually annotated with information on ingredients, cooking methods and additional categorisations per recipe. advances in language technology and the large-scale digitisation of collections have made automatic historical recipe analysis possible @xcite . in this work, we combine and extend @xcite to automatically extract ingredients and other characteristics from historical recipes and show how their changing over time illustrates changing culinary tastes. abbr. year abbr. @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite ## data and preprocessing in this section, we describe the datasets used and the preprocessing steps we employed to refine and organise them for analysis. ## analysis and discussion to examine shifts in culinary trends, we analysed possible changes in ingredient usage over time. we focused on four key aspects: 1) recipe categories, 2) ingredient usage patterns, 3) recipe complexity, and 4) seasonal usage. ## conclusions and future work this study provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of the evolution of culinary trends in dutch recipes, highlighting how ingredient usage, recipe complexity, and culinary categories changed throughout the 20th century. our findings indicate a trend toward increased recipe complexity in terms of larger number of ingredients, while still adhering to traditional culinary practices such as the use of seasonal ingredients. by releasing our dataset, we aim to support further research into culinary trends, which could be compared with other resources indicating ingredient availability due to economic factors or rationing constraints, as well as technological and climatological changes that may influence crop yields. additionally, future work could refine our analyses by considering, for instance, variables beyond time as predictors for ingredient usage trends, as well as improving ingredient extraction methodologies to address ocr challenges, while expanding our dataset. as demonstrated by our preliminary experiments, the integration of llms could enhance the structural parsing of historical recipes, providing deeper insights into the evolution of culinary practices over time. in the future, we plan to address these outstanding points to further investigate culinary trends as a way of advance our understanding on the shaping of food and nutrition identity in dutch society. this study has highlighted the importance of specific datasets and quantitative methods to investigate dutch culinary trends, prompting the need for tailored methodologies to address domain-specific historical texts. the potential of llms to address this need has proved particularly promising, paving the way for future directions in this research.