Abstract
Food is an everyday expression of culture and bears the traces of a country’s history. With the widespread use of the internet and the rise of network science over the past two decades it has become possible to examine large sets of recipes and their ingredients, and to compare countries’ recipes and ingredient combinations. Many studies abroad have already investigated ingredient recipe networks from the perspective of network theory, and among other things have shown that different countries and cultures use unique ingredient combinations in their recipes. However, no previous network studies have investigated South African recipes. The present study joins such studies and examines the ingredient recipe network in Afrikaans recipes. For this, the occurrence of 196 ingredients in 6 863 Afrikaans recipes were investigated. Recipes were used that were posted on Maroela Media, RSG, Afrikaans.com and Boerekos.com. It is shown which ingredients are most often found in Afrikaans recipes and which ingredients are most often found together with other ingredients, and an investigation is carried out into how foods are combined.
It was found that there are an average of 10 ingredients per recipe, with salt, egg, oil, pepper, butter, water, sugar, cheese, milk and cream appearing in the largest number of recipes. The ingredients that appeared in most recipes belong to the spices category, followed by dairy, plant products, vegetables and meat. Nuts, alcoholic drinks and seafood occurred in the smallest number of recipes.
When the bipartite ingredient recipe network for Afrikaans recipes is projected on to a single-mode ingredient-ingredient co-occurrence network, the network consists of 196 nodes (n) (ingredients) and 12 398 edges (m) (co-occurrences). The average degree is 126,51, which means that each ingredient occurs on average with 126,51 other ingredients. The ingredients that co-occurred with the highest number of other ingredients are egg, salt, water, oil, pepper, butter and cheese. Spices were found to occur most often with other foods, followed by vegetables and dairy, while meat occurs less frequently with other foods, but more frequently than seafood. Spices occur most often with seasonings and second most often with vegetables; vegetables occur most frequently with seasonings and second most frequently with spices; and dairy occurs most frequently with seasonings and second most frequently with spices. In other words, spices occupy an important position in this network.
Finally, the Louvain method was used to identify communities of ingredients in the Afrikaans ingredient-ingredient co-occurrence network, and the network was viewed at a higher and a lower level. At the higher level the ingredient-ingredient co-occurrence network for Afrikaans recipes divides into two groups, namely sweet and savoury, with salt being placed in the sweet category and sweet potatoes being placed in the savoury category. Viewed at a lower level, it is shown that groups of dishes can be distinguished, for example baked goods (with ingredients such as eggs, butter, sugar, cream, milk, condensed milk, chocolate and brandy), main courses (with ingredients such as garlic, tomato, onions, potato, meat, red wine, chakalaka and turmeric), fish dishes (with ingredients such as oil, lemon, olive oil, fish, honey, avocado, hake, and lobster), chicken dishes (with ingredients such as pepper, chicken, black pepper, parsley, mushroom, mustard, thyme and white wine), and sandwiches (with ingredients such as cheese, bread, cheddar (specified), bacon, ham, salami, gouda and mozzarella). A few interesting occurrences are also highlighted, for example that snoek, prawns and mussels are found with main courses together with the abovementioned ingredients rather than with other seafood; that the seafood group contains many ingredients that are also found in salads; that Marmite is found with main courses, while Bovril is found with sandwiches; and that a small group was distinguished where pineapple was grouped with beer.
The study concludes with suggestions for further research.
Keywords: South African cuisine; Afrikaans recipes; ingredient recipe networks; complex networks; modularity; recipes
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Wat eet Afrikaners? ’n Verkenning van die bestanddeel-resep-netwerk in Afrikaanse resepte