What the world cooks: 588 traditional dishes, measured

How this was measured

These figures describe Copper's corpus: 588 traditional dishes from 196 countries, each with a structured ingredient list and a cooking time. They are not a census of world cuisine — no such census exists. Where a country is represented by three dishes, it is represented by three dishes, and we say so rather than extrapolate.

Every number is recomputed from the data at each build, so this page and the recipes can never drift apart.

The onion is the most universal ingredient we found

Of 445 distinct ingredients, one appears almost everywhere: onion, in traditional dishes from 172 countries — more than twice the reach of anything except tomato.

But most ingredients belong to one place only

270 of 445 ingredients — 61 % — appear in the traditional dishes of a single country. Cooking is far less globalised than a supermarket aisle suggests.

A median of 1 hour, an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes

The gap between the two is the whole story: a handful of dishes that ferment, cure or smoke for days pull the average far above what anyone actually cooks on a weeknight.

Which cuisines take the longest

Average across every dish we documented, for the 196 countries where we have at least three.

Using these figures

Free to reuse, including commercially, with a link to this page. The full set is downloadable as CSV and JSON under CC-BY — 588 dishes across 196 countries, with cooking times and normalised ingredient lists.

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