Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with celery?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with celery most disproportionately are marjoram (×7.8 chance, n=270), sage (×6.3 chance, n=405), bay leaf (×5.5 chance, n=94), carrot (×5.0 chance, n=1411), parsnip (×5.0 chance, n=50), bay (×4.5 chance, n=461), okra (×4.1 chance, n=35) and lentil (×4.0 chance, n=70). 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. marjoram — PPMI 2.05 · ×7.8 chance · n=270 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
2. sage — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=405 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
3. bay leaf — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=94 (bay leaf itself appears in 262 recipes)
4. carrot — PPMI 1.62 · ×5.0 chance · n=1411 (carrot itself appears in 4,268 recipes)
5. parsnip — PPMI 1.60 · ×5.0 chance · n=50 (parsnip itself appears in 154 recipes)
6. bay — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=461 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
7. okra — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=35 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
8. lentil — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=70 (lentil itself appears in 267 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Erbsensuppe (Split Pea Soup) — with marjoram, carrot, bay
• Flaczki (Tripe Soup) — with marjoram, carrot, bay
• Grochówka — with marjoram, carrot, bay
• English Ham — with bay leaf, carrot, bay
• Kare-Kare With Beans, Baby Bok Choy, And Eggplant — with bay leaf, carrot, bay
• Minestra Di Fagioli (Bean Soup) — with sage, carrot, bay

How this was measured

celery appears in 4,170 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.