Application of flavor network principle of food pairing to Assamese cuisine from North East India

Abstract

Network theory-based analysis of food pairing behaviour, a recent research trend on food preference based on flavour was applied to examine the food recipes from the state of Assam, India, being called Assamese cuisine. The analysis was implemented based on recipes data, ingredients, and corresponding flavour compound to examine the food pairing behaviour of ingredients in recipes, in term of their co-occurrence with flavouring compounds. A total of 401 recipes from the cuisine were collected from cookbooks and online repositories and were characterized in terms of recipe size distribution and frequency rank plot, which yielded a uniform power-law distribution with the power-law fitting of k−0.75. Analysis of the extracted backbone of the flavour network indicated black mustard seed oil, an edible oil, to be the most prevalent ingredient in the Assamese cuisine, concurring with a reported trend of having an edible oil as the most prevalent ingredient in various other cuisines from India, except in Mughlai sub-cuisine. Analysis of the computed food pairing behaviour in the recipes and of the cuisine revealed a negative food pairing pattern with ingredients namely black mustard seed oil, onion, and turmeric, as the most influential ingredients contributing to the negative pairing. Most of the prevalent ingredients in the cuisine belong to the spice category, conforming to earlier reports, for other Indian sub cuisines, on spices being responsible for negative food-pairing.