Figure 3
Testing the food pairing hypothesis.
Schematic illustration of two ingredient pairs, the first sharing many more (A) and the second much fewer (B) compounds than expected if the flavor compounds were distributed randomly. (C,D) To test the validity of the food pairing hypothesis, we construct 10,000 random recipes and calculate ΔNs . We find that ingredient pairs in North American cuisines tend to share more compounds while East Asian cuisines tend to share fewer compounds than expected in a random recipe dataset. (E,F) The distributions P(Ns ) for 10,000 randomized recipe datasets compared with the real values for East Asian and North American cuisine. Both cuisines exhibit significant p-values, as estimated using a z-test. (G,H) We enumerate every possible ingredient pair in each cuisine and show the fraction of pairs in recipes as a function of the number of shared compounds. To reduce noise, we only used data points calculated from more than 5 pairs. The p-values are calculated using a t-test. North American cuisine is biased towards pairs with more shared compounds while East Asian shows the opposite trend (see SI for details and results for other cuisines). Note that we used the full network, not the backbone shown in Fig. 2 to obtain these results. (I,J) The contribution and frequency of use for each ingredient in North American and East Asian cuisine. The size of the circles represents the relative prevalence 
. North American and East Asian cuisine shows the opposite trends. (K,L) If we remove the highly contributing ingredients sequentially (from the largest contribution in North American cuisine and from the smallest contribution in East Asian cuisine), the shared compounds effect quickly vanishes when we removed five (East Asian) to fifteen (North American) ingredients.
