We documented 586 traditional dishes from 198 countries and measured them. Onion appears in dishes from 169 of those countries. 700 of 1108 ingredients are used in a single country.
These figures describe Copper's corpus: 586 traditional dishes from 198 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.
Of 1108 distinct ingredients, one appears almost everywhere: onion, in traditional dishes from 169 countries, ahead of garlic and tomato; everything else reaches fewer than half as many.
| Ingredient | Countries | |
|---|---|---|
| onion | 169 | |
| garlic | 141 | |
| tomato | 104 | |
| egg | 74 | |
| butter | 54 | |
| potato | 51 | |
| carrot | 48 | |
| chicken | 47 | |
| lime | 42 | |
| sugar | 39 | |
| ginger | 39 | |
| beef | 39 |
700 of 1108 ingredients — 63 % — appear in the traditional dishes of a single country. Cooking is far less globalised than a supermarket aisle suggests.
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.
Average across every dish we documented, for the 191 countries where we have at least three.
| 🇸🇿 Eswatini | 2 days and 17 hours |
| 🇵🇱 Poland | 2 days and 11 hours |
| 🇳🇦 Namibia | 1 day and 13 hours |
| 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe | 1 day and 10 hours |
| 🇧🇼 Botswana | 1 day and 10 hours |
| 🇹🇬 Togo | 1 day and 3 hours |
| 🇪🇷 Eritrea | 1 day and 3 hours |
| 🇬🇾 Guyana | 22 hours and 7 minutes |
| 🇺🇾 Uruguay | 40 minutes |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 40 minutes |
| 🇺🇸 United States | 42 minutes |
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | 42 minutes |
| 🇲🇻 Maldives | 43 minutes |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | 48 minutes |
| 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea | 48 minutes |
| 🇮🇸 Iceland | 48 minutes |
Paste either one anywhere. They keep working if our numbers change, and they credit the source automatically — that is the whole deal.
Prefer a static image or a different cut of the data? Write to coppersupport0@gmail.com and we will produce it.
Free to reuse, including commercially, with a link to this page. The full set is downloadable as CSV and JSON under CC-BY — 586 dishes across 198 countries, with cooking times and normalised ingredient lists.
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