European Historical Cooking Recipes

This dataset was produced as part of RELISH (Reframing European Gastronomy Legacy through Innovation, Sustainability and Heritage), a Horizon Europe research project (Grant Agreement No. 101177427) that explores how traditional European recipes can serve as tools for cultural heritage transmission, social cohesion, and sustainable food practices. RELISH brings together institutions across Europe, including Durham University, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Fundació Alícia, the University of Gastronomic Sciences, the University of Milan, University College Cork, and the Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon), among others. The dataset is a curated, multilingual collection of 6,024 cooking recipes drawn from digitised European cookbooks spanning from the 1st century Roman Empire to the present day. It covers sources in over a dozen languages — including Latin, Old German, Old French, Middle Dutch, Old Danish, Catalan, Italian, and Early Modern English — all translated into modern English and enriched with structured annotations. Each recipe record includes the full translated text, source metadata (title, year, place, original language), and automatically extracted culinary entities: ingredients, cooking tools, and cooking actions, each with normalised names, contextual surface forms, and NER confidence scores. In total, the dataset contains 6,621 unique ingredient types, 1,864 unique tool types, and 643 unique action types. Source materials were collected from openly available digital archives, including the CoReMA corpus (CC BY 4.0), Project Gutenberg, the University of Giessen Historical Cookbooks collection, Fundació Alícia, and other publicly accessible repositories. Translations were produced using the Gemma 3–27B large language model deployed on the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer at the BSC. Entity extraction was performed with a ModernBERT-base NER model trained on the RISeC dataset. Ongoing human validation is being conducted through a dedicated open-source labelling tool. The dataset is distributed as a single JSON file and is intended to support research on the evolution of European culinary culture across time and geography, including the study of ingredient diffusion, technique change, and cross-cultural culinary influence — contributing to RELISH's broader goal of enhancing gastronomy as a fundamental element of an inclusive European identity. For more information about the RELISH project, visit https://relisheu.org.