saucier

Structured procedure extraction from culinary sources.

Reads a cookbook and returns a catalogue. Each preparation carries its names, the language of each name, the parent it derives from, and the source line the claim came from. No model runs. Every output is traceable to the text.

Try it

No GPU, no API key, no database, no network. Both source texts are committed.

$ git clone https://github.com/Alberto-Codes/saucier
$ cd saucier && uv sync
$ uv run saucier parse
escoffier-1909  New and Revised Edition, January 1909 (impression: January 1920)
                transcription of Project Gutenberg 71395
                mothers: bechamel, espagnole, hollandaise, tomato, veloute
                124 sauces, 50 derived, 74 unresolved
escoffier-1907  no edition stated, copyright 1907
                ocr of Internet Archive cu31924000610117
                mothers: bechamel, espagnole, hollandaise, tomato, veloute
                115 sauces, 36 derived, 79 unresolved

The five mothers were not supplied. Escoffier names them in his own text, and the parser reads them out of it.

Neither is the edition supplied. Each source states its own printing history on its own title page, and the id is built from that reading. See ADR-0009.

$ uv run saucier tree espagnole
BROWN SAUCE OR ESPAGNOLE  [espagnole]
├── LENTEN ESPAGNOLE  (fr)
│   └── GENEVOISE SAUCE  (en)
├── ORDINARY POIVRADE SAUCE  (en)
│   └── REFORM SAUCE  (en)
└── POIVRADE SAUCE FOR VENISON  (en)

A parent may be any catalogued preparation, not only a mother. Marrow Sauce resolves to Bordelaise, and Bordelaise itself states no base. A derivation tree can therefore root in an unresolved sauce.

The interesting number is 74

74 of 124 preparations never state what they are built on. Escoffier wrote for a reader who already knew, so he did not write it down. That gap is the point: it is the measured bar that anything cleverer has to beat. See why there is no model in this yet.

The catalogue holds 124 entries, not every sauce in the book. An entry gets in when its own heading says "sauce", or when it names a mother inside a chapter Escoffier titles as sauces. Both tests read the source. Neither guesses.

Two witnesses, and a diff that names its causes

The corpus holds two texts of one book. One is proofread and one is a raw scan, so every difference between them has two explanations.

$ uv run saucier diff escoffier-1907 escoffier-1909
...
  9 unmatched, 18 parent-changed, 35 ocr-suspected
  entries read  2679 of escoffier-1907, 2963 of escoffier-1909, a blind spot of 284

QENEVOISE SAUCE is GENEVOISE SAUCE with one letter misread, and the diff says so rather than reporting a removal it cannot support.

It reports no additions at all. The 1907 witness is a scan and 284 of its entries are unread. So a concept found in one witness and not the other is unmatched rather than added. No editorial difference between the two printings has been confirmed. Every candidate so far has been the scanner or the reader.

Documentation

The rendered site is https://alberto-codes.github.io/saucier/. Its API reference is generated from the docstrings, so it cannot drift from the code.

• Tutorial — clone it and print a family tree
• How-to — point it at a different book
• Reference — commands and data model
• Explanation — why a parser comes first
• Decisions — the fourteen records, and what each one accepted

Licence

MIT for the code.

corpus/escoffier-1909.txt is Project Gutenberg ebook #71395, public domain, redistributed with its licence wrapper intact. It transcribes the January 1920 impression of the New and Revised Edition of January 1909.

corpus/escoffier-1907.txt is Internet Archive item cu31924000610117, the Cornell University Library copy of the 1907 first printing. Cornell records no known United States copyright restrictions on the text, and a 1907 publication date puts it in the public domain.

No third-party corpus is shipped in the published package.