Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages: Corpus, Analysis, Visualisation CoReMA

Cooking traditions, local and continental, are one of the most recognizable items of European culture, and a large part of European identities. During the last decades, research arrived at two important conclusions on these issues. First, there are no quantitative studies on the origin and formation of regional cuisines in Europe. Second, substantial evidence, namely manuscripts containing thousands of cookery recipes, first appears in the Middle Ages, which can be thus regarded as the birth of modern European cuisines. On the European continent Latin, Middle French and Early New High German recipes provide the majority of culinary transmission. This project aims at realizing the cross-cultural research of medieval cooking recipes and their interrelation applying an interdisciplinary focus. The project will prepare the cooking recipe transmission of France and the German speaking countries, which sums up to more than 80 manuscripts and ca. 8000 recipes, for the analysis of their origin, their relation, and their migration through Europe. The comparison of French and German food history is especially suited for this task as France ever had a culturally formative influence on German speaking peoples! The partners from the Laboratoire CESR (Centre dEtudes Supérieures de la Renaissance), at the University of Tours and the Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and the Department of Medieval German Studies at the University of Graz provide the expertise to collect, to edit according to scholarly and digital standards, and to analyze these multilingual texts following up-to-date quantitative and qualitative research methodology. For machine aided analysis the recipe corpus and its metadata are edited and modelled according to international standards using XML/TEI, semantic web technologies and a research infrastructure that is laid out for digital preservation of research assets. All recipes are enriched through ontologies for ingredients, cooking processes, and food historically relevant data (e.g. on religious, cultural, or medical aspects). Within and across languages the projects analysis will reveal concurring or deviating eating habits, text migration as well as the influence of neighboring countries on their respective cuisine. The research data will be the basis for spatial and temporal visualization and statistical evaluation, which will foster new approaches towards interpretation of the historical and cultural assets. The research of the CoReMA project will not only provide a general model for the integration of further language collections into the research infrastructure but also add to the curricula of the respective disciplines medieval and early modern history, food history, and digital humanities. The project team also aims at science to public dissemination strategies to foster the awareness of food history and eating habits.

CoReMA - Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages (I 3614) The project focuses on the question of the origin, transmission and migration of medieval recipe texts. The text corpus to be studied comprises the handwritten recipe tradition of the German-speaking countries and holds 66 recipe collections with over 6000 German-language recipe texts. For the computer-aided analysis, the texts and their metadata were modeled with XML/TEI and Semantic Web technologies. All recipes have been enriched with historical and modern metadata relevant to cultural history. The research area of historical culinary arts with a focus on the Middle Ages, which as an epoch spans 1000 years or more, combines a wide range of sub-disciplines from historic and German studies. This expertise provides the parameters for recipe comparison. It includes knowledge of Early High German in grammar (text type, sentence structure) and vocabulary (kitchen terms), historical writing (late Gothic bastarda, cursive) and writing practice (abbreviations), religion (dietary laws and prohibitions), festivals and fasting (food orders, table manners), medicine (dietetics as basic health care), economic and trade history (spice trade), climate history (keyword: 'Little Ice Age'), agricultural history (production methods and yield), architectural history (kitchen and kitchen utensils), etc. This makes it possible to analyze the texts across dialect and language boundaries. Exemplary analyses focus on the taste profile of the historical recipes, as well as the genesis, and semantic order of the recipe collections. In the project, the historical recipes were researched for the first time with the help of methods from the digital humanities. The first step was the transcription of the source texts on the basis of digital images. The texts were edited in the sense of modern editorial standards and thus formed the basis for the semi-automatic semantic XML-based annotation of text structure and semantic aspects. All categories were enriched with the Wikidata ID - the texts are thus available as Linked Open Data and ready for connecting to the Semantic Web. With the help of digital analysis and visualisation methods (faceted search, graphs, maps, statistical processing), relevant metadata such as time, region and place of origin the extensive corpus of recipes can be examined in relation to the research questions. The digital edition of the recipes, their transmission and historical background as well as the underlying digital research methods were largely responsible for the success and broad international dissemination of this research project. With this project, a very large task in the research of German-language culinary history has been dealt with successfully for the first time. The project results and the research methods developed for it prepare the ground for further, more detailed research into historical culinary history. The project results are available open access at https://gams.uni-graz.at/corema.