  Food is an essential part of civilization, with a scope that ranges from the
biological to the economic and cultural levels. Here we study the statistics of
ingredients and recipes taken from Brazilian, British, French, and Medieval
cookbooks. We find universal distributions with scale invariant behavior. We
propose a copy-mutate process to model culinary evolution that fits very well
our empirical data. We find a cultural founder effect produced by the
nonequilibrium dynamics of the model. Both the invariant and idiosyncratic
aspects of culture are accounted by our model, which may have applications in
other kinds of evolutionary processes.
