Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with chive?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with chive most disproportionately are cucumber (×14.4 chance, n=579), mustard (×7.2 chance, n=644), parsley (×5.9 chance, n=758), tarragon (×5.6 chance, n=61), leek (×3.8 chance, n=39), goat cheese (×3.7 chance, n=23), scallop (×3.5 chance, n=22) and cream (×3.3 chance, n=712). 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. cucumber — PPMI 2.67 · ×14.4 chance · n=579 (cucumber itself appears in 1,908 recipes)
2. mustard — PPMI 1.98 · ×7.2 chance · n=644 (mustard itself appears in 4,243 recipes)
3. parsley — PPMI 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=758 (parsley itself appears in 6,142 recipes)
4. tarragon — PPMI 1.72 · ×5.6 chance · n=61 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)
5. leek — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=39 (leek itself appears in 487 recipes)
6. goat cheese — PPMI 1.32 · ×3.7 chance · n=23 (goat cheese itself appears in 293 recipes)
7. scallop — PPMI 1.24 · ×3.5 chance · n=22 (scallop itself appears in 302 recipes)
8. cream — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=712 (cream itself appears in 10,243 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Pan-Roasted Fish With Mediterranean Tomato Sauce — with mustard, parsley, tarragon
• Potato and Mushroom Gratin — with parsley, leek, cream
• Wurstsalat (Sausage Salad) — with mustard, parsley
• Chłodnik (Cold Beet Soup) — with cucumber, cream
• Kaszinótojás (Hungarian Devilled Eggs) — with mustard, cream
• Leek and Potato Soup — with leek, cream

How this was measured

chive appears in 1,338 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.