Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with carrot?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with carrot most disproportionately are parsnip (×8.8 chance, n=91), turnip (×8.3 chance, n=105), lentil (×5.6 chance, n=101), cabbage (×5.2 chance, n=405), celery (×5.0 chance, n=1411), barley (×4.9 chance, n=90), cauliflower (×4.8 chance, n=119) and leek (×4.7 chance, n=153). 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. parsnip — PPMI 2.18 · ×8.8 chance · n=91 (parsnip itself appears in 154 recipes)
2. turnip — PPMI 2.12 · ×8.3 chance · n=105 (turnip itself appears in 189 recipes)
3. lentil — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=101 (lentil itself appears in 267 recipes)
4. cabbage — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=405 (cabbage itself appears in 1,166 recipes)
5. celery — PPMI 1.62 · ×5.0 chance · n=1411 (celery itself appears in 4,170 recipes)
6. barley — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.9 chance · n=90 (barley itself appears in 276 recipes)
7. cauliflower — PPMI 1.57 · ×4.8 chance · n=119 (cauliflower itself appears in 368 recipes)
8. leek — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.7 chance · n=153 (leek itself appears in 487 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Pot-au-Feu — with turnip, celery, leek
• Widow’S Soup (Soppa T’Al Armla) — with cabbage, celery, cauliflower
• Escudella i Carn d'Olla — with turnip, cabbage, celery
• Kig ha Farz — with turnip, cabbage, leek
• Soup Joumou — with turnip, cabbage, celery
• Minestrone — with cabbage, celery

How this was measured

carrot appears in 4,268 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.