Figure 1

Flavor network.

(A) The ingredients contained in two recipes (left column), together with the flavor compounds that are known to be present in the ingredients (right column). Each flavor compound is linked to the ingredients that contain it, forming a bipartite network. Some compounds (shown in boldface) are shared by multiple ingredients. (B) If we project the ingredient-compound bipartite network into the ingredient space, we obtain the flavor network, whose nodes are ingredients, linked if they share at least one flavor compound. The thickness of links represents the number of flavor compounds two ingredients share and the size of each circle corresponds to the prevalence of the ingredients in recipes. (C) The distribution of recipe size, capturing the number of ingredients per recipe, across the five cuisines explored in our study. (D) The frequency-rank plot of ingredients across the five cuisines show an approximately invariant distribution across cuisines.