Why there is no model in this yet

The obvious way to turn a cookbook into structured data is to hand pages to a language model and ask for JSON. This release deliberately does not, and the reason is not cost.

A parser establishes the bar

Escoffier structured his own book. Every preparation is numbered, titled, and placed in a sequence, and he states his five mothers in a sentence you can point at. A regular expression recovers 124 sauce preparations and links 50 of them to a base.

That number is the bar. Any model applied to this source has to beat 50, and until a parser has been run, nobody knows what "beating it" would mean. A model that recovers 35 looks impressive in isolation and is nearly worthless next to free.

Skipping this step is how projects end up unable to say whether their model is adding anything.

Errors that look like successes

A schema validates shape, not truth. A model asked for JSON will return well-formed JSON, with a plausible parent for every preparation, including the 74 where the source states none. Those outputs pass validation, read correctly, and are wrong.

The parser cannot produce that failure. It resolves a parent only where the opening paragraph names exactly one, so parent is None on 74 entries. Unresolved is a visible, countable state. Confidently wrong is not.

The unresolved entries are the finding

74 of 124 preparations do not state a base in their opening paragraph. That is not parser weakness — it is what the source is like. Escoffier assumed a reader who already knew that a Bordelaise is built on a reduction and finished with an Espagnole, so he did not write it down.

Recovering knowledge an author assumed is exactly the work a model can do and a parser cannot. That is the case for adding one — and it is a case that can only be made by having run the parser first.

What this constrains later

Three decisions here are load-bearing:

Terms are tagged, never translated. The 1907 translator left espagnole and velouté in French because they are proper nouns for preparations. A pipeline that normalises everything to English destroys distinctions it will later need, and the further the corpus moves from Europe, the more it destroys.

Every claim carries a source reference. entry 32, line 1656 can be checked by hand. Once a model is producing claims, provenance stops being a nicety.

None means unresolved. Not "no parent". A later stage may fill it; a stage that cannot distinguish "unknown" from "none" will fill it wrongly and silently.