Data study
What 14 cuisines actually share
Every dish on eatmundo is stored as a structured ingredient list, which lets us ask a question cookbooks rarely answer directly: measured by what actually goes in the pot, how close are the world's cuisines to each other? Here is what the whole corpus says.
Last updated: 2026-07-30
The cuisines that overlap most
Raw counts would just reward the cuisines with the most dishes, so each pair is scored as the share of all possible dish pairings that turned out to share a substantial part of their ingredients. Greece and Türkiye come out on top — a result most cooks in either country would find unsurprising, and one the rest of the table puts in context.
| Cuisine pair | Overlap | Distance apart |
|---|---|---|
| 🇬🇷 Greece·🇹🇷 Turkey | 1,122 km | |
| 🇩🇪 Germany·🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 877 km | |
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom·🇺🇸 USA | 6,952 km | |
| 🇫🇷 France·🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 934 km | |
| 🇩🇪 Germany·🇫🇷 France | 809 km | |
| 🇪🇸 Spain·🇬🇷 Greece | 2,226 km | |
| 🇫🇷 France·🇺🇸 USA | 7,668 km | |
| 🇩🇪 Germany·🇺🇸 USA | 7,811 km | |
| 🇬🇷 Greece·🇮🇹 Italy | 908 km | |
| 🇪🇸 Spain·🇫🇷 France | 826 km |
Distance predicts almost nothing
If shared ingredients simply tracked geography, neighbours would dominate and far-apart cuisines would vanish from the list. They do not. These pairs sit thousands of kilometres apart and still overlap as much as some neighbours — mostly through shared colonial-era and trade-era pantries rather than proximity.
| Cuisine pair | Overlap | Distance apart |
|---|---|---|
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom·🇺🇸 USA | 6,952 km | |
| 🇫🇷 France·🇺🇸 USA | 7,668 km | |
| 🇩🇪 Germany·🇺🇸 USA | 7,811 km | |
| 🇹🇷 Turkey·🇺🇸 USA | 10,109 km | |
| 🇮🇹 Italy·🇺🇸 USA | 8,571 km | |
| 🇪🇸 Spain·🇺🇸 USA | 7,641 km |
Desserts travel further than main courses
This is the sharpest pattern in the data. Main courses are built around a local protein, a local fat and local aromatics, so they diverge. Desserts are built from a much smaller and far more portable set — flour, sugar, milk, eggs, butter — so the same dessert idea surfaces independently across the map.
The ingredients everyone uses
Only a handful of ingredients appear in all of the cuisines we cover. Everything else — including things that feel universal, like butter or lemon — is missing from at least one.
The ingredients only one cuisine uses
The mirror image: ingredients that appear repeatedly in exactly one cuisine and nowhere else in the corpus. These are the flavours that make a dish immediately placeable.
| Ingredient | Cuisine | Dishes |
|---|---|---|
| Palm sugar | 🇹🇭 Thailand | 17 |
| Fish sauce | 🇹🇭 Thailand | 14 |
| Dashi | 🇯🇵 Japan | 12 |
| Caraway seed | 🇩🇪 Germany | 10 |
| Pandan leaf | 🇹🇭 Thailand | 9 |
| Beef suet | 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 8 |
| Chorizo | 🇪🇸 Spain | 8 |
| Marjoram | 🇩🇪 Germany | 8 |
| Sumac | 🇹🇷 Turkey | 8 |
| Shaoxing wine | 🇨🇳 China | 8 |
| Mustard seeds | 🇮🇳 India | 7 |
| Vanilla sugar | 🇩🇪 Germany | 6 |
How this was measured
Every recipe on the site carries a structured ingredient list, normalised so that the same ingredient written different ways counts as one. Two dishes are linked when they come from different countries, sit in the same course, and share a substantial part of that normalised list. All figures on this page are recomputed daily from the live database.
One honest caveat: this describes our corpus, not world cuisine. Coverage is deeper for some countries than others, and a cuisine with fewer dishes here has fewer chances to link. Read the table as a statement about these 1,196 dishes.
Every link behind these numbers is browsable — open any dish to see what it shares with the rest of the world.