Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with cabbage?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cabbage most disproportionately are caraway (×7.0 chance, n=30), turnip (×6.1 chance, n=21), carrot (×5.2 chance, n=405), sausage (×5.0 chance, n=32), beet (×4.4 chance, n=20), cider (×4.3 chance, n=90), peanut oil (×4.2 chance, n=28) and sesame oil (×4.0 chance, n=136). 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
- caraway — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=30 (caraway itself appears in 235 recipes)
- turnip — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.1 chance · n=21 (turnip itself appears in 189 recipes)
- carrot — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=405 (carrot itself appears in 4,268 recipes)
- sausage — PPMI 1.60 · ×5.0 chance · n=32 (sausage itself appears in 353 recipes)
- beet — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=20 (beet itself appears in 250 recipes)
- cider — PPMI 1.47 · ×4.3 chance · n=90 (cider itself appears in 1,135 recipes)
- peanut oil — PPMI 1.44 · ×4.2 chance · n=28 (peanut oil itself appears in 363 recipes)
- sesame oil — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=136 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use cabbage with one of its measured partners:
- Kielbasa and Cabbage Stew — with caraway, carrot, cider
- Spring Rolls (春卷) — with carrot, sesame oil
- Couscous with Seven Vegetables (Couscous Bidawi) — with turnip, carrot
- Borscht (Борщ) — with carrot, beet
- Cozido à Portuguesa — with turnip, carrot
- Chinese Chicken Salad With Sesame Peanut Vinaigrette — with peanut oil, sesame oil
How this was measured
cabbage appears in 1,166 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.