Cuisine as Language: Culinary Grammar

Study Notes

Cuisine is a system of combining culinary concepts, similar to how language uses words.
The basic building blocks of cuisine are "cubits", analogous to words and are combined by rules which creates culinary sentences, or recipes.
The origins of this concept trace back to the Sanskrit grammarian Panini, who lived in the 5th century BC.
This combinatorial system of culinary concepts allows an immense number of distinct recipes to be created from a small inventory.
This system enables the creation of an endless variety of dishes.
This grammar framework allows for the creation of new and imaginative recipes.

Human language employs distinctive sounds (phonemes) with no inherent meaning. These phonemes can be arranged in countless ways to create words and sentences. New words can be easily created.
Humans can communicate about abstract, remote, or imaginary things not currently happening in their environment.
Animal communication is mostly context driven, reacting to stimuli or indexes.
Animal communication has limited messages as the number of combinations is constrained because the sounds/signs are not arbitrary. Animals must evolve to change their ways of communication.
Certain animal communications are specific to gender, while humans can use their language irrespective of gender.
Human language is symbolic; it uses a set number of sounds (phonemes) and characters (alphabet), allowing for the preservation of ideas through recording.
Animal communication is not symbolic and can not retain ideas from the past.
Human language has an infinite variety and capacity of meaning - recognized as discrete infinity.
Animal communication is limited in the number of combinations used to communicate.
Human language is based on biological structures of the human voice box and tongue, while other animals use varying biological structures to communicate.
Human language features multiple meanings for words and symbols.

The crucial distinction between human and animal language lies in the flexibility and complexity of human communication, including the capability of abstract thinking and displacement.

Parse tree: A graphical representation used to demonstrate a grammatical structure of the recipe
A recipe has many linguistic characteristics of sentences, the elements of language (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.)
Culinary concepts similar to Words (IP), Quantity and unit (Q), Form (F), Processing action (P), Utensil (U).
Syntax (rules for forming phrases and sentences)
Morphology (rules for forming complex words, including irregular words).
Phonology (rules that define the sound patterns of a language).
Semantics (meaning expressed through language).