misallocated resources

so i made a big thing of mac and cheese for the house the other day, discovering as i was halfway through that i didn't have enough sour cream for the amount of macaroni i was cooking. it wasn't really a lot under, so i let it slide and added a bit more milk instead, and it came out tasty as usual. it did get me thinking though, because with certain recipes, there is very little wiggle room with the quantity and proportion of ingredients, whereas with others it's pretty hard to botch the job unless you're really way off and add a tub of salt to the lamb stew or something.

i admit that i know little to nothing about gastronomic science, but following on from that observation, it seems that there must be a way to ascertain a some kind of variance component associated what each ingredient is doing to a dish (including any interactions it may have with other ingredients), so that you get some kind of a beta coefficient for changes in flavor, mouthfeel, etc -- this would also presumably have some sort of a temporal dimension (how fast it's added, at what point in the preparation). this could all go into a gigantic multiple regression (or perhaps some sort of canonical equation if you want to take into account that taste is not objective, and that there will be an element of interaction between product and taster), which would then tell you the exact amount of X (ceteris paribus) one would need to create the perfect macaroni and cheese, a process that could be iterated until one had a complete and flawless recipe.

meanwhile, the people with the supercomputers continue to use to them to calculate larger and larger prime numbers. talk about misplaced priorities. i think perfect mac and cheese would be one of the most awesome creations of humanity ever.