Data study
What 26 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: 2026-09-16
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. Ethiopia and Philippines come out on top, and the rest of the table puts that result in context.
| Cuisine pair | Overlap | Distance apart |
|---|---|---|
| 🇪🇹 Ethiopia·🇵🇭 Philippines | 5.9% | 8,993 km |
| 🇪🇹 Ethiopia·🇮🇷 Iran | 5.5% | 2,912 km |
| 🇵🇱 Poland·🇷🇺 Russia | 5.4% | shared border |
| 🇪🇹 Ethiopia·🇲🇦 Morocco | 4.3% | 5,330 km |
| 🇮🇩 Indonesia·🇲🇾 Malaysia | 4.1% | shared border |
| 🇪🇸 Spain·🇵🇹 Portugal | 3.8% | shared border |
| 🇩🇪 Germany·🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 3.1% | 877 km |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico·🇵🇭 Philippines | 2.9% | 13,844 km |
| 🇬🇷 Greece·🇹🇷 Turkey | 2.9% | shared border |
| 🇮🇷 Iran·🇲🇦 Morocco | 2.9% | 5,489 km |
The pairs distance cannot explain
Distance does most of the work here: the closest quarter of cuisine pairs overlap almost four times as much as the farthest quarter, and that gradient holds even once neighbouring countries are set aside. The interesting part is the tail. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 🇪🇹 Ethiopia·🇵🇭 Philippines | 5.9% | 8,993 km |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico·🇵🇭 Philippines | 2.9% | 13,844 km |
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom·🇺🇸 USA | 2.8% | 6,952 km |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico·🇵🇱 Poland | 2.6% | 9,905 km |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico·🇵🇹 Portugal | 2.4% | 8,731 km |
| 🇪🇬 Egypt·🇲🇽 Mexico | 2.3% | 12,507 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Dashi | 🇯🇵 Japan | 29 |
| Niter kibbeh (spiced butter) | 🇪🇹 Ethiopia | 20 |
| Ginger garlic paste | 🇮🇳 India | 13 |
| Shaoxing wine | 🇨🇳 China | 12 |
| Mustard seeds | 🇮🇳 India | 11 |
| Sweet soy sauce | 🇮🇩 Indonesia | 11 |
| Mustard oil | 🇮🇳 India | 10 |
| Serrano pepper | 🇲🇽 Mexico | 10 |
| Gochugaru | 🇰🇷 South Korea | 9 |
| Berbere spice blend | 🇪🇹 Ethiopia | 9 |
| Candlenut | 🇮🇩 Indonesia | 9 |
| Beef suet | 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 8 |
Where the numbers came from
Three of the connections in this dataset turned out to have a story behind them worth telling in full — a shared ancestry, a colonial-era route, or a coincidence that survives inspection.
The Bitter Solution: Convergent Evolution in Honey Ferments
How Ethiopia's tej and Russia's medovukha independently solved the problem of cloying sweetness using local botanicals.
Historical connectionLayers of History: The Custard Pastries of the Aegean
Exploring the shared lineage and distinct signatures of Laz Böreği, Bougatsa, and Galaktoboureko, three iconic Mediterranean custard pastries.
Historical connectionFish-Shaped Delights: Exploring the History of Taiyaki and Bungeoppang
Discover the fascinating intersection of history and flavor behind the iconic fish-shaped cakes known as taiyaki in Japan and bungeoppang in Korea.
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 thing to be clear about: the dishes are real, well-known dishes, but their ingredient lists were written by a language model and checked by a second model pass, not transcribed from cookbooks. So this measures how a model represents these cuisines — which is what makes the comparison consistent across 26 countries, and also what you should keep in mind before reading it as ethnography.
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 1,956 dishes.
The data behind this page
Every figure here comes from one file, and that file is public. It carries one row per cuisine pair: dish counts, linked dish pairs, overlap share, centroid distance and whether the two countries share a land border.
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Please cite as:
Acar, Alper (2026). World Cuisine Ingredient Overlap (26 Cuisines, 7 Languages). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22272521
Also published, with a citable DOI, on:
Every link behind these numbers is browsable — open any dish to see what it shares with the rest of the world.