Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with asparagus?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with asparagus most disproportionately are leek (×5.4 chance, n=21), tarragon (×5.3 chance, n=22), parmesan cheese (×3.9 chance, n=112), ham (×3.8 chance, n=42), pea (×3.7 chance, n=38), grape juice (×3.5 chance, n=23), shallot (×2.8 chance, n=34) and white wine (×2.7 chance, n=50). The score behind the ranking is positive pointwise mutual information — how many times more often a pair shares a recipe than random combination would predict — and n is the number of recipes containing both ingredients. Nothing is published below a floor of 20 recipes per pair and 100 per ingredient. Co-occurrence records what recipe authors actually do — it conflates deliciousness with popularity and tradition — so read it as ethnography, not judgment.

The measured partners — PPMI · ×chance · n

  1. leek — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=21 (leek itself appears in 487 recipes)
  2. tarragon — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=22 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)
  3. parmesan cheese — PPMI 1.35 · ×3.9 chance · n=112 (parmesan cheese itself appears in 3,628 recipes)
  4. ham — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=42 (ham itself appears in 1,396 recipes)
  5. pea — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=38 (pea itself appears in 1,294 recipes)
  6. grape juice — PPMI 1.25 · ×3.5 chance · n=23 (grape juice itself appears in 824 recipes)
  7. shallot — PPMI 1.01 · ×2.8 chance · n=34 (shallot itself appears in 1,548 recipes)
  8. white wine — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=50 (white wine itself appears in 2,312 recipes)

Cook the pairing

Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use asparagus with one of its measured partners:

How this was measured

asparagus appears in 508 of the 63,696 recipes counted (5,296 parsed + 1,081 hand-curated + 57,319 from the dataset published with Ahn et al., 2011). PPMI = max(0, ln(count(A,B)·N / (count(A)·count(B)))), all counts over the same N; lift = e^PMI, which reads directly as "×chance." Staples (salt, sugar, flour, water) are excluded because sources under-record them, and pairs where one name contains the other are excluded as near-duplicates.

Read the numbers with their limits: the corpus is Western-skewed (90% of it is the largely North American and European recipe dataset published with Ahn et al.'s 2011 paper), so the absence of a pairing here proves nothing except who wrote the recipes down. PPMI favors the rare end even above the floor — a niche pair at n=22 can outrank a workhorse pair seen thousands of times, because common ingredients' huge counts divide the score down — so read PPMI and n together.

The full reference — 150 ingredients, top 8 partners each — lives at What actually goes with X.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.