Cooking the books

This article analyzes Jamie Oliver's 5-ingredient cookbook by typing all 675 ingredients into a spreadsheet to find 239 unique ones. It explores how to order ingredient purchases to maximize the number of possible recipes as a function of ingredients purchased. The author compares different ranking strategies—popularity, reverse-popularity, and random—plotting cumulative recipe coverage curves. The goal is to find an optimal ordering that minimizes the number of ingredients needed to make many recipes, using concepts similar to the Gini coefficient. This is a data-driven, algorithmic approach to a culinary problem, relevant to optimization and data analysis in IT/technology.