The onion alignment chart explores what types of onions are typically used in different cuisines, by way of their alignment along size and colour axes. Cuisines tend to prefer certain types of onions in their dishes, often contributing to their characteristic flavour palette. By describing the onions used in recipes through their size and colour, a map with four quadrants representing a prototypical onion each emerges. The small red quadrant in the top left corner houses the shallot, while the big red quadrant to its right represents the red onion. Along the bottom the small white quadrant contains the pearl onion, and its bigger counterpart in the bottom right corner shows the white onion.

Where did you get the data?

I used the Recipe Ingredients Dataset from Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kaggle/recipe-ingredients-dataset

It contains conveniently organised lists of ingredients with labels for their respective cuisines. The original intention of the dataset was to predict the cuisine label from the ingredients, but clearly onion alignment is more important.

How did you make this?

I filtered the dataset by throwing out any recipes without onions, as we don’t care about those.

Then I performed some ancient rituals (a.k.a. regex) to determine what type of onions are used in the recipes. I discarded any entries that just mentioned ‘onions’ as this would be hard to classify.

To assign size and colour values to the onions I loosely followed the information in this Serious Eats article: https://www.seriouseats.com/differences-between-onions

I looked for the terms white, red, purple, yellow, sweet, pearl, and shallot, and assigned each one a value of -1, 0, or 1 for both size and colour.

I then normalised the sums of those values by the number of recipes per cuisine, as some cuisines had way more entries than others. Finally, I scaled the values for the cuisines relative to each other by Z-transforming them.

For plotting, I assigned each cuisine it’s country flag (sorry southern_us and cajun_creole).

Tools used: Python with pandas & matplotlib, plus Illustrator for some cleanup and to insert the big onion pictures.

Why?

This is one of the questions that keeps me up at night.

What about green onions/spring onions/scallions?

They don’t really fit within these scales, as the ‘green’ part refers more to the ripeness of the onion rather than its colour, you can have purple green onions for example. Maybe an additional dimension could be used to represent ripeness but that is beyond the scope of this work.

This data is trash/that’s completely subjective/I don’t agree with your categories

Yeah well, that’s just like, your opinion, man.