Culinary precisions as a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue

The world of food and cooking is full of specifications on how to perform tasks and occasionally why one should adhere to this advice. Many of these specifications are rooted in tradition, while others are more recent, and these sometimes appear to us like modern urban myths. Some are rooted in the long experience of kitchen professionals or home cooks, and some originate from science. Such culinary ‘claims’, ‘instructions’, ‘specifications’ or ‘precisions’ (various terms have been used) are the shared common knowledge of societies about the techniques and practices of food and cooking. Often they are shared orally as knowledge is handed down through generations, or in written form, for example, as part of recipes. As described previously [1], this knowledge may come in the form of hints, advice, ‘tricks’, or ‘old wives’ tales’. In this paper, we use the term ‘culinary precisions’ to describe the technical or procedural information present in a recipe (oral or written), which provides added value in terms of improved quality and greater chance of a successful product, although, to our knowledge, this term has not yet been adopted as a formal term in the international scientific community. A typical example of a culinary precision is ‘When preparing beurre blanc sauce, butter should be added as ice-cold cubes’. The understanding that temperature affects the structure and taste of the sauce has probably developed through generations of skillful chefs making thousands of beurre blanc sauces collecting their experiences and sharing best practice. If the claim is studied scientifically, phenomena such as melting, emulsion, droplet size, and water/fat solubility can be taken under the scope of research, science education, and science dissemination. Culinary precisions are already being collected and studied by scientists as well as food professionals and devotees. The widest collection is in France, where Hervé This has collected around 25,000 culinary precisions, some of