Preserving Culinary Heritage Through AI: Sustainable Digitisation of Granny Josie’s Notebooks

Granny Josie’s Notebooks are salvaged notebooks written in 1946–1947 during a rural domestic science course for girls. This study aims to extract historically valuable information on the culinary heritage of post-war Poland and the housekeeping role attributed to women, with a specific focus on assessing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in corpus analysis. The research began with an inquiry into the historical context of the notebooks. Three notebooks were digitised and stored in data repositories, then converted into editable vector text. The corpus was analysed with AI, and the results were compared with a text profile prepared by qualified linguists. According to the AI, the texts’ characteristic features are descriptions of nearly ritual food preparation, serving, and table setting. Women appear as central figures in post-war Polish housekeeping, acting as guardians of the hearth and planners and preparers of meals. However, AI’s interpretations were often overly idealised, with embellished descriptions that did not fully reflect the actual text. The digitisation and analysis of Granny Josie’s Notebooks provided new information about the culinary heritage of post-war Poland and preserved these materials from oblivion, while offering insights into the potential application of LLMs in corpus analysis.