I would say that it gets a bit more complex than that.
some recipes can produce multiple related dishes, and some ingredients can have multi-step substitutions. So Graph would be a better representation.
you could join multiple dishes into final 'abstract' dish to force it into tree-esque shape with some shuffling hopefully, but i think that's unnecessary limitation - especially if you consider that some recipes give you some compound ingredients(stocks for example) as side-output that you might want to use in future!
This is a great case for using that information for planning future dishes you could cook for free.
some recipes can produce multiple related dishes, and some ingredients can have multi-step substitutions. So Graph would be a better representation.
you could join multiple dishes into final 'abstract' dish to force it into tree-esque shape with some shuffling hopefully, but i think that's unnecessary limitation - especially if you consider that some recipes give you some compound ingredients(stocks for example) as side-output that you might want to use in future!
This is a great case for using that information for planning future dishes you could cook for free.