Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with crab?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with crab most disproportionately are lovage (×41.1 chance, n=53), shrimp (×7.9 chance, n=139), clam (×6.9 chance, n=32), horseradish (×6.7 chance, n=26), tabasco pepper (×6.2 chance, n=55), tamarind (×5.6 chance, n=86), bay (×5.5 chance, n=79) and swiss cheese (×5.4 chance, n=29). 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
- lovage — PPMI 3.71 · ×41.1 chance · n=53 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
- shrimp — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=139 (shrimp itself appears in 1,931 recipes)
- clam — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=32 (clam itself appears in 509 recipes)
- horseradish — PPMI 1.91 · ×6.7 chance · n=26 (horseradish itself appears in 425 recipes)
- tabasco pepper — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=55 (tabasco pepper itself appears in 977 recipes)
- tamarind — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=86 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
- bay — PPMI 1.71 · ×5.5 chance · n=79 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
- swiss cheese — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=29 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use crab with one of its measured partners:
- Arroz a la Tumbada — with shrimp, clam, bay
- Shrimp Gumbo(Club Member: Lee Ann Mcraney) — with shrimp, bay
- Louisiana Seafood Gumbo — with shrimp, bay
- Seafood Gumbo with Okra and Crab — with shrimp, bay
- Classic Crab Cakes with Remoulade — with bay
- Chilli Crab (Mud Crab in Tomato and Sambal Gravy) — with tamarind
How this was measured
crab appears in 579 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.