Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with bay?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with bay most disproportionately are lovage (×40.1 chance, n=140), veal (×6.6 chance, n=36), thyme (×6.4 chance, n=539), okra (×6.2 chance, n=20), lentil (×6.1 chance, n=40), beef broth (×6.0 chance, n=142), leek (×5.8 chance, n=69) and turnip (×5.6 chance, n=26). 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. lovage — PPMI 3.69 · ×40.1 chance · n=140 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
2. veal — PPMI 1.89 · ×6.6 chance · n=36 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)
3. thyme — PPMI 1.86 · ×6.4 chance · n=539 (thyme itself appears in 3,418 recipes)
4. okra — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=20 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
5. lentil — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=40 (lentil itself appears in 267 recipes)
6. beef broth — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.0 chance · n=142 (beef broth itself appears in 956 recipes)
7. leek — PPMI 1.75 · ×5.8 chance · n=69 (leek itself appears in 487 recipes)
8. turnip — PPMI 1.72 · ×5.6 chance · n=26 (turnip itself appears in 189 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• French Onion Soup (Soupe à l'oignon) — with thyme, beef broth
• Flaczki (Tripe Soup) — with beef broth, leek
• Gumbo — with thyme, okra
• Grillades and Grits — with thyme, beef broth
• Potato and Mushroom Gratin — with thyme, leek
• Southern Gumbo — with thyme, okra

How this was measured

bay appears in 1,568 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.