RecipeScape: An interactive tool for analyzing cooking instructions at scale

Abstract

For cooking professionals and culinary students, understanding cooking instructions is an essential yet demanding task. Common tasks include categorizing different approaches to cooking a dish and identifying usage patterns of particular ingredients or cooking methods, all of which require extensive browsing and comparison of multiple recipes. However, no existing system provides support for such in-depth and atscale analysis. We present RecipeScape, an interactive system for browsing and analyzing the hundreds of recipes of a single dish available online. We also introduce a computational pipeline that extracts cooking processes from recipe text and calculates a procedural similarity between them. To evaluate how RecipeScape supports culinary analysis at scale, we conducted a user study with cooking professionals and culinary students with 500 recipes for two different dishes. Results show that RecipeScape clusters recipes into distinct approaches, and captures notable usage patterns of ingredients and cooking actions.