COQ AU VIN and steak-and-kidney pudding may not bring to mind the principles of evolution. Yet evolutionary mechanisms may well be reflected in recipes for these tried-and-tested dishes.

Physicist Antonio Roque of the University of São Paulo in Brazil and colleagues analysed thousands of recipes (arxiv.org/abs/0802.4393v1) drawn from the French Larousse Gastronomique, the British New Penguin Cookery Book, three editions of the Brazilian Dona Benta spanning nearly 60 years, and a medieval cookbook. When they looked at how often ingredients appeared in recipes and ranked them accordingly, they saw a precise mathematical relationship across the board between an …