Postgraduate Researchers

PhD Research Student - School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology

Title of Research Project: Is that an Irish Recipe? Applying Knowledge Graphs to Recipes in Irish Cookbooks 1850–2000 

Project Abstract:

Barbara Ketchum Wheaton suggests that by ‘using many recipes from a particular time and place one can acquire an idea of the work patterns and of the resultant character of the style of cooking’. The project will apply Wheaton’s structured approach of reading cookbooks and expand upon it to explore and analyse recipes found in Irish cookbooks from the post-Famine period to the end of the 20th century.   

The project will use data analysis and AI tools to organise and analyse the diverse styles of recipe text formats from Irish cookbooks published over the 150-year period.  An Irish Recipe database will be used to categorise recipes, identify trends in ingredients, and methods over time, and trace the publication and republication of recipes through time. An Irish Recipe knowledge graph will be used to integrate the recipe database with sources of Irish culinary domain knowledge in order to analyse existing and novel inter-relationships between the recipes, ingredients, authors and cookery techniques found across the cookbooks.  The research will be the first quantitative analysis of Irish cookbooks’ recipes on a large scale and will examine the role that Irish cookbooks have played in the preservation of traditional recipes and the introduction of novel recipes, ingredients and cooking methods. 

Supervisory Team:  

Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, School of Culinary Arts & Food Technology, TU Dublin 

Dr Dorothy Cashman, Independent Scholar 

Dr Bojan Božic, School of Computer Science, TU Dublin