What’s for Dinner? A Novel Approach to European Luxury Foodstuff Consumption, C. 1500-1850

Paul Götz, University of Zürich

This paper explores the evolution of luxury foodstuff consumption in Western Europe from 1500 to 1850, analyzing the interplay between culinary trends and broader socio-economic and cultural dynamics. Utilizing historical culinary literature as its primary source, the paper uses production-grade large language models to digitize and structure data from diverse texts. Techniques such as topic modeling and ingredient diffusion analysis uncover patterns in the adoption of colonial groceries and changing culinary practices. By contextualizing these findings within the wider literature on the economic and cultural history of the period, the research highlights the transformative potential of computational tools in historical analysis and offers new insights into the cultural and economic shifts that shaped European cuisine during this period.

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 Presented in Session 1. Economics