Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with chicken?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with chicken most disproportionately are cream mushroom soup (×3.4 chance, n=60), fenugreek (×3.3 chance, n=309), turmeric (×3.0 chance, n=440), lemongrass (×2.9 chance, n=76), marjoram (×2.8 chance, n=147), corn flake (×2.7 chance, n=64), cashew (×2.7 chance, n=65) and cornstarch (×2.6 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
- cream mushroom soup — PPMI 1.23 · ×3.4 chance · n=60 (cream mushroom soup itself appears in 174 recipes)
- fenugreek — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.3 chance · n=309 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
- turmeric — PPMI 1.10 · ×3.0 chance · n=440 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
- lemongrass — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=76 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
- marjoram — PPMI 1.01 · ×2.8 chance · n=147 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
- corn flake — PPMI 1.01 · ×2.7 chance · n=64 (corn flake itself appears in 233 recipes)
- cashew — PPMI 0.98 · ×2.7 chance · n=65 (cashew itself appears in 242 recipes)
- cornstarch — PPMI 0.96 · ×2.6 chance · n=42 (cornstarch itself appears in 160 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use chicken with one of its measured partners:
- Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani) — with fenugreek, cashew
- Kai Yang (Grilled Chicken) — with turmeric, lemongrass
- Rfissa — with fenugreek, turmeric
- Sate Ayam (Chicken Satay) — with turmeric, lemongrass
- Ayam Goreng (Indonesian Fried Chicken) — with turmeric, lemongrass
- Ayam Betutu (Balinese Stuffed Chicken) — with turmeric, lemongrass
How this was measured
chicken appears in 6,397 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.