Data

Scans

St. Mary’s Romanian Orthodox Church, Cleveland Ohio cookbook. An absolute gem of a cookbook. Has a mix of wonderful old world cooking.

— Redditor: TerriblePokemon

r/OldRecipes Reddit post

Tables

image source: Writing Clear Science

PyTesseract

!pip install pytesseract pillow

import pytesseract
from PIL import Image

recipe_3_file = "recipe_3.png"
recipe_3_image = Image.open(recipe_3_file)
recipe_3_text = pytesseract.image_to_string(recipe_3_image)
with open("recipe_3.txt", "w") as output_file:
    output_file.write(recipe_3_text)

adapted from a blog post by Hulya Masharipov

DINNER F.OR 5.0.0

Roast chicken Bread Stuffed cabbage ’ Coffee Pilaf Pie

Salad Ice Cream

what to order:

75 heads of cabbage

35 # onions

175 chickens, cut in halves

weighing approximately 500 to 530 lbs.

Plus 1/2 of the legs and necks from chickens 30 # rice - Uncle Bens

75 # ground pork 15 # ground beef 8 # pork hocks 65 Apple pies 6 # picnic ham 500 slices ice cream 2 cases lettuce 2 baskets tomatoes

12 bunches celery h bunches parsley

3 # lard

1 gal. vinegar 2 qts. salad oil or Wishbone dressing

15 cucumbers

3 carrots 5 # salt

3 # butter 5 # sugar 8 to 10 # coffee

5 loaves bread

cans sauerkraut

2 baskets pepper - 1/2 green - 1/2 pimento

pepper, paprika, garlic salt

Process:

Approximately 1 to 2 weeks prior to the dinner, de- pending on whether it is cold or warm out, the cab- bage must be put to sour. Clean outer leaves and core heads of cabbage. Place several at a time in large pot of boiling water and allow to boll about 10 min. or until limp. Remove leaves, thin off heayy white vein on each leaf and pile them into piles of ten leaves. Salt each pile thoroughly, place in a 15 ~ 20 qt. crock or in several smaller ones, place dill and summer savory in each eraeks cover with salted water and weight down the ee bage by placing a plate over it and on top of pla place a rock or a bottle filled with water, Cover

SSE ie SE es L41

Continued

Dinner for 500 =

crock with clean cloth tied around securely. Make certain that cabbage remains covered with salt water. If water evaporates yeplace with more. Let stand

til sour. Th ‘ for stuffing or that

The leaves that are not good the crocks

break can be chopped up and placed in with the rest of the cabbage.

The day pefore: chickens from ice, place on table to drain well, remove wing tips, then singe thoroughly. Wash in at least 2 washings and clean insides of all lungs, etc. Dry off well. Mix salt, pepper, paprika and garlic salt together. Salt chickens with this mixture inside and out. Place in large pans and refrigerate well.

Unpack

Glean legs and necks and gizzards. Refrigerate. of onions very fine, together

Chop about 12 - 15 # Saute in lard. Mix pork

with 6 bunches of celery. and beef, salt and pepper to taste, add the sauteed

onions and celery and 12# of rice. Use Uncle Ben rice. Mix thoroughly. Remove cabbage leaves from crocks and place a heaping tablespoon of the meat mixture, more or less depending on size of leaf, in the center of leaf. Fold one edge of leaf over meat mixture, roll one turn, fold over side edge, roll, fold over other side, finish rolling and tuck loose end in. For best results the cabbage rolls must be very compactly rolled. When all the leaves have

been finished, should be approximately 1250 rolls, they are ready to be placed in pans. For best results use a 12 qt. pan, as low and squat as can be bought. Take one 1b. of lard and mix it well with several pounds of chopped onions. Grease pans with this mixture. If your butcher gave you the bones from the beef, use these to line pans. Place sauer=- kraut on bottom of pan, line rolls carefully several deep, place thick slices of ham on top, more rolls, pork hocks, kraut, etc., until pan is about 3/4 full.

Cover with water.

If dinner is to be served late in the afternoon of the following day, refrigerate cabbage until next morning. If meal is to be served at noon the cabbage can be placed on fire until it reaches a boil and then gas turned off and left until the following morning. A total of about 6 to 7 hrs. will be need-

ed to cook cabbage.

142

Continued

Dinner for 500 =

Day of Dinner?

If at all possible, have a baker roast chickens, Because they have facilities that most halls do not have, a much better job is done by them, However,

if it is necessary to do your own roasting, chickens should be put on shallow pans, dotted with severa L pounds of butter and oleo and roasted in a mode rate oven for the lenghth of time necessary to make them brown and crusty, probably 1 to 1-1/2 hrs. per tray.

Early in the morning make a broth of the chicken legs and necks using whole carrots and all the other

vegetables necessary to make a good rich soup,

Place balance of rice (18 #) in three wide mouthed pans. Chop and saute balance of onions, celery and pimento peppers. Boil gizzards and chop fine. Divide onions and gizzards into three parts putting 1/3 in each pan over rice. Cover rice with soup stock and butter, place in oven to bake. Before

completely finished, chop up carrots that had been boiled in the soup and add to the rice. Bake until

Gone about 1-1/2 to 2 hrs.

Wash and clean remaining vegetables. Cut into proper size for salad. Season. Toss with the oil and enough vinegar to suit taste.

When ready to serve, start by dishing out the cabbage rolls first. They must be removed from

pans very carefully.

If serving family style, cut chicken halves in three parts. Place on platters and garnish with

curly parsley.

Pies can be cut into 8 pieces. After eating chicken, rice and a half dozen “sarmale”, 1/8 of a pie looks

big.

About 50 cups of coffee can be made from 1 # of good restaurant coffee, and 32 servings of cream can be obtained from a quart of milk or cream.

POFTA BUNA

143

“POFTA BUNA” is “Good appetite” in Romanian

Treatment’ Baseline’

Contraceptive 2 weeks 14 weeks 20 weeks

Recovery phase

FSH° IU/L 44+0.5

2.3+04 2.0+0.9” 1.8+0.5”

46+£08

Hormones” LH IU/L 0.60 + 0.10

0.10+0.02° 0.08 + 0.02° 0.29+0.12> 0.66 +0.11

Testosterone nmol/L 860.8 + 309.4

134.0 + 22.6 56.3 + 10.8° 94.8 + 23.37

578.8 + 291.3

PaddleOCR

Installer

At the moment, I used the stand-alone installer made by timminator

Python package dependencies were tough
heard through Reddit

CLI

point to image file
pick language (e.g. English)
use_angle_cls
- true: allows for rotated text (e.g. 90, 180, or 270 degrees)
- false: faster performance

paddleocr --image_dir recipe_3.png --lang en --use_angle_cls true

Workflow

Caution: this workflow is not optimal; it’s just what I did here in early explorations

navigate to image directory (to reduce CLI code)
run CLI command(s)
copy-and-paste output into a text file
- find-and-replace timestamps/line numbers with nothing
load output text file into Python and process with cv2

Output

This procedure scans an image and produces (for each group of text)

bounding box
the text
a confidence score

[[[296.0, 170.0], [751.0, 174.0], [750.0, 208.0], [296.0, 204.0]], ('DINNERFORSOO', 0.9840278625488281)]
 [[[87.0, 241.0], [179.0, 233.0], [181.0, 263.0], [89.0, 271.0]], ('MENU:', 0.9722374081611633)]
 [[[189.0, 262.0], [429.0, 262.0], [429.0, 290.0], [189.0, 290.0]], ('Roast chicken', 0.9721485376358032)]
 [[[604.0, 260.0], [701.0, 260.0], [701.0, 290.0], [604.0, 290.0]], ('Bread', 0.9978684186935425)]
 [[[191.0, 290.0], [463.0, 290.0], [463.0, 318.0], [191.0, 318.0]], ('Stuffed cabbage', 0.979429304599762)]

Results

import ast
import cv2
import numpy as np

image_path = "recipe_2.png"
result_path = "recipe_2_paddle.txt"
boxed_image_path = "recipe_2_boxes.png"

with open(result_path, "r") as file:
    result = [line.strip() for line in file]
n = len(result)

boxes = [ast.literal_eval(result[line])[0] for line in range(n)]
txts = [ast.literal_eval(result[line])[1][0] for line in range(n)]
scores = [ast.literal_eval(result[line])[1][1] for line in range(n)]

img = cv2.imread(image_path)
for coords in boxes:
    # Draw closed polygon, green color (0, 255, 0), thickness of 2 px
    cv2.polylines(img, pts = [np.array(coords, np.int32)], isClosed = True, color = (0, 255, 0), thickness = 2)
cv2.imwrite(boxed_image_path, img)

Agentic OCR

Adding AI Tools

topic modeling
- combine lines into paragraphs (even across pages)
- distinguish asides
retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
- ask database of scans
- maintain data privacy
research assistant
- scan PDFs and their tables
- summarize quantities and results

Other projects stemming from PaddleOCR can be found in their GitHub repositories.

Thanks!

Derek Sollberger

Lecturer of Data Science
Princeton University
- Center for Statistics and Machine Learning
dsollberger[at]princeton[dot]edu

Session Info

sessionInfo()

R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19045)

Matrix products: default
  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

time zone: America/New_York
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] htmlwidgets_1.6.4 compiler_4.5.2    fastmap_1.2.0     cli_3.6.5        
 [5] tools_4.5.2       htmltools_0.5.8.1 rstudioapi_0.17.1 rmarkdown_2.29   
 [9] knitr_1.50        jsonlite_2.0.0    xfun_0.52         digest_0.6.37    
[13] rlang_1.1.6       evaluate_1.0.4