Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with beef?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with beef most disproportionately are tomato juice (×5.1 chance, n=98), tomato sauce (×4.4 chance, n=91), kidney bean (×4.2 chance, n=193), enokidake (×3.9 chance, n=37), celery oil (×3.9 chance, n=351), veal (×3.9 chance, n=77), ketchup (×3.9 chance, n=44) and chinese cabbage (×3.7 chance, n=56). 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
- tomato juice — PPMI 1.62 · ×5.1 chance · n=98 (tomato juice itself appears in 217 recipes)
- tomato sauce — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=91 (tomato sauce itself appears in 233 recipes)
- kidney bean — PPMI 1.43 · ×4.2 chance · n=193 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
- enokidake — PPMI 1.37 · ×3.9 chance · n=37 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
- celery oil — PPMI 1.36 · ×3.9 chance · n=351 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
- veal — PPMI 1.36 · ×3.9 chance · n=77 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)
- ketchup — PPMI 1.36 · ×3.9 chance · n=44 (ketchup itself appears in 127 recipes)
- chinese cabbage — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=56 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use beef with one of its measured partners:
- Pastitsio — with tomato sauce
- Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding — with veal
- Martin'S Minestrone — with kidney bean
- You Gotta Love Spaghetti and Meatballs — with ketchup
- Macaroni Beef — with tomato juice
- Quick Enchilada Sauce — with tomato sauce
How this was measured
beef appears in 5,670 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.
Curious how these flavors fit your palate — take the short taste test →
Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.