Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with dill?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with dill most disproportionately are salmon (×10.9 chance, n=126), beet (×5.5 chance, n=26), feta cheese (×4.3 chance, n=56), horseradish (×4.1 chance, n=33), yogurt (×3.7 chance, n=80), cucumber (×3.5 chance, n=127), sour cream (×3.2 chance, n=23) and tarragon (×3.1 chance, n=30). 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. salmon — PPMI 2.39 · ×10.9 chance · n=126 (salmon itself appears in 610 recipes)
2. beet — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=26 (beet itself appears in 250 recipes)
3. feta cheese — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=56 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
4. horseradish — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=33 (horseradish itself appears in 425 recipes)
5. yogurt — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=80 (yogurt itself appears in 1,146 recipes)
6. cucumber — PPMI 1.26 · ×3.5 chance · n=127 (cucumber itself appears in 1,908 recipes)
7. sour cream — PPMI 1.17 · ×3.2 chance · n=23 (sour cream itself appears in 376 recipes)
8. tarragon — PPMI 1.11 · ×3.1 chance · n=30 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Chłodnik (Cold Beet Soup) — with beet, yogurt, cucumber, sour cream
• Beet and Herring Salad (Sillsallad) — with beet, cucumber, sour cream
• Poached Salmon With Dill Horseradish Sauce Recipe — with salmon, horseradish, sour cream
• Chicken Gyro Bowls with Rice and Tzatziki — with feta cheese, yogurt, cucumber
• Greek Chicken Meatball Bowls with Lemon Rice — with feta cheese, yogurt, cucumber
• Greek Pork Souvlaki Pita Wraps — with feta cheese, yogurt, cucumber

How this was measured

dill appears in 1,207 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.