Palate

A measured tool

The spice-kit optimizer

Most spice racks grow one recipe at a time, and end up with three jars for one dish and nothing for a whole hemisphere. Tick what you own below and the page will tell you what it already opens, what one more jar would open, and what a rack built on purpose would hold.

The signatures are counted, not curated. For each of 23 cuisines, we measured which spices and herbs turn up in its recipes far more often than in cooking generally, across 55,097 cuisine-labelled recipes.

In one paragraph

Spice-and-herb signatures measured over 55,097 cuisine-labelled recipes give each of 23 cuisines a weighted set of up to 8 jars, scored as prevalence within the cuisine times its over-representation against the corpus as a whole. Solving greedy weighted set-cover over those signatures, with every cuisine counted once, a 12-jar rack reaches 72% of the total signature weight: cayenne, cumin, cilantro, parsley, thyme, cinnamon, dill, black pepper, nutmeg, bay leaf, coriander, oregano. The first jar alone, cayenne, reaches 11%.

What’s on your rack

30 jars, ordered by how often they turn up in cooking. Tick the ones you own. Nothing is sent anywhere; the rack is remembered on this device only.

What your rack unlocks

An empty rack covers none of them. Tick a jar above and the list reorders.

  • American0 of 4 · n=40,924

    Missing vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, rosemary

  • Italian0 of 8 · n=3,250

    Missing basil, parsley, oregano, fennel…

  • Mexican0 of 6 · n=2,390

    Missing cayenne, cumin, cilantro, oregano…

  • French0 of 8 · n=1,264

    Missing thyme, bay leaf, parsley, tarragon…

  • Indian0 of 8 · n=598

    Missing turmeric, cumin, coriander, fenugreek…

  • British & Irish0 of 3 · n=572

    Missing nutmeg, thyme, parsley

  • Chinese0 of 4 · n=442

    Missing cayenne, star anise, cilantro, black pepper

  • Spanish & Portuguese0 of 8 · n=416

    Missing saffron, parsley, bay leaf, cayenne…

The one jar that opens the most

Buy cayenne next. It raises your coverage from 0% to 11%, the largest single step available to your rack as it stands.

It does the most for Mexican (49% of its signature), Southwestern (40% of its signature), Chinese (33% of its signature).

The answer changes as the rack fills. That is the point of the arithmetic: a jar is worth what it adds to what you already have, not what it is worth on its own.

The 12-jar starter kit

Built from an empty rack, one jar at a time, always taking whichever jar raises coverage across all 23 cuisines the most. It ends at 72% of the total signature weight.

  1. 1.cayenne11%
  2. 2.cumin20%
  3. 3.cilantro28%
  4. 4.parsley35%
  5. 5.thyme41%
  6. 6.cinnamon46%
  7. 7.dill51%
  8. 8.black pepper56%
  9. 9.nutmeg60%
  10. 10.bay leaf64%
  11. 11.coriander68%
  12. 12.oregano72%

Notice how much the first four do and how little the twelfth adds. Struck-through jars are already yours. Greedy set-cover is not guaranteed to find the perfect kit; the exact problem is NP-hard. But the objective is submodular, which puts a floor under greedy: this kit reaches at least 63% of whatever the best possible 12 jars would.

And by the kind of dish

The same measurement run against dish forms instead of cuisines, on Palate’s own 3,018-recipe corpus. They do not drive the kit above, because a second corpus should not quietly get a vote in it. They are here because a rack is judged on a Tuesday, not on a map.

  • hearty main0 of 7 · n=407

    black pepper, parsley, cayenne, oregano, thyme, coriander, mint

  • stew0 of 8 · n=327

    bay leaf, thyme, black pepper, parsley, cumin, oregano, saffron, cilantro

  • soup0 of 8 · n=298

    bay leaf, parsley, marjoram, thyme, dill, mint, cilantro, nutmeg

  • dessert0 of 5 · n=216

    vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom, rosemary, nutmeg

  • rice dish0 of 8 · n=171

    saffron, cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, bay leaf, dill, coriander, cilantro

  • appetizer0 of 8 · n=169

    dill, parsley, coriander, bay leaf, mint, nutmeg, turmeric, thyme

  • pasta0 of 5 · n=155

    black pepper, basil, parsley, nutmeg, oregano

  • salad0 of 5 · n=129

    mint, cilantro, basil, parsley, coriander

  • curry0 of 8 · n=122

    turmeric, cumin, coriander, cilantro, cayenne, fenugreek, basil, cardamom

  • taco/wrap0 of 8 · n=107

    cumin, cilantro, oregano, black pepper, dill, cayenne, coriander, cinnamon

  • main (other)0 of 3 · n=91

    cayenne, black pepper, cumin

  • drink0 of 3 · n=80

    cinnamon, cardamom, mint

  • casserole/bake0 of 8 · n=75

    black pepper, parsley, cinnamon, basil, nutmeg, oregano, thyme, cumin

How this was measured

A jar earns a place in a cuisine’s signature by being both common in it and unusual outside it. The score is P(jar | cuisine) × log( P(jar | cuisine) / P(jar) ): prevalence times over-representation. Pure over-representation surfaces flukes; pure prevalence surfaces salt. The product surfaces what a cook would recognise. The top 8 are kept and normalised so each cuisine’s weights sum to one.

A jar must appear in at least 8 of a cuisine’s recipes and in at least 3% of them to be published at all, and a cuisine needs 100 recipes before it gets a signature. Which spices and herbs count as jars is decided by the same role classifier the recommender uses, not by hand.

The kit is greedy weighted set-cover over those signatures, maximising the mean coverage — so every cuisine counts once, no matter how many recipes it has. That choice matters: American is 74% of this corpus, and weighting by recipe count would have let it pick the kit by itself.

What this can’t tell you

  • The corpus is lopsided. American holds 40,924 of its 55,097 labelled recipes. Equal weighting keeps that out of the kit, but it cannot fix the vocabulary or the recipe writing underneath.
  • The rack holds whole spices and herbs, not blends. The ingredient vocabulary this is measured in is compound-derived, so chili powder, garam masala and five-spice are not in it and cannot be on the rack. Cayenne stands for ground red chile throughout.
  • Some kitchens don’t live in jars. Korean (799 recipes) and Japanese (320 recipes) clear the recipe floor and still earn no signature: fewer than 3 of their characteristic ingredients are spices or herbs at all. Their grammar is in fermented pastes, oils and fresh aromatics, which no spice rack can hold.
  • Cuisines below the floor are not published. 8 of them fall under 100 recipes, including Vietnamese (95), Filipino (43), Dutch (32). A signature from that few recipes is one cook’s habit wearing a decimal point.
  • Signatures describe convention, not necessity. They say what recipe writers do, which is not the same as what a cuisine requires, and it is emphatically not a shopping list any cook is obliged to agree with.

A rack tells you what you can cook.

What you’d actually enjoy is a different measurement. Twenty-five questions, and you see your result before anyone asks you to sign up.

Take the taste test →

Cite this

Palate, “The spice-kit optimizer,” https://palate.kitchen/spice-kit — include the date you accessed it.

The measurements on this page are free to quote with attribution to Palate. The downloadable 250-dish sample dataset on /data is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.