Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with black pepper?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with black pepper most disproportionately are lovage (×5.9 chance, n=142), marjoram (×3.6 chance, n=324), sage (×3.0 chance, n=496), bay (×3.0 chance, n=791), enokidake (×2.9 chance, n=52), season salt (×2.6 chance, n=188), rosemary (×2.5 chance, n=868) and allspice (×2.5 chance, n=42). 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 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=142 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
2. marjoram — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.6 chance · n=324 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
3. sage — PPMI 1.09 · ×3.0 chance · n=496 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
4. bay — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=791 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
5. enokidake — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=52 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
6. season salt — PPMI 0.97 · ×2.6 chance · n=188 (season salt itself appears in 417 recipes)
7. rosemary — PPMI 0.93 · ×2.5 chance · n=868 (rosemary itself appears in 2,014 recipes)
8. allspice — PPMI 0.90 · ×2.5 chance · n=42 (allspice itself appears in 100 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Stifado — with bay, season salt, allspice
• Freekeh Soup (Shorbet Freekeh) — with bay, season salt, allspice
• Erbsensuppe (Split Pea Soup) — with marjoram, bay, season salt
• Bigos (Hunter's Stew) — with bay, season salt, allspice
• Kapuśniak (Cabbage Soup) — with bay, season salt, allspice
• Grochówka — with marjoram, bay, season salt

How this was measured

black pepper appears in 10,870 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.