Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with fennel?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with fennel most disproportionately are savory (×22.1 chance, n=43), pork sausage (×20.0 chance, n=416), cured pork (×13.6 chance, n=65), provolone cheese (×9.1 chance, n=26), anise (×9.1 chance, n=32), saffron (×7.5 chance, n=31), mussel (×6.8 chance, n=20) and romano cheese (×5.4 chance, n=24). 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. savory — PPMI 3.10 · ×22.1 chance · n=43 (savory itself appears in 128 recipes)
2. pork sausage — PPMI 2.99 · ×20.0 chance · n=416 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
3. cured pork — PPMI 2.61 · ×13.6 chance · n=65 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
4. provolone cheese — PPMI 2.21 · ×9.1 chance · n=26 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
5. anise — PPMI 2.21 · ×9.1 chance · n=32 (anise itself appears in 231 recipes)
6. saffron — PPMI 2.01 · ×7.5 chance · n=31 (saffron itself appears in 273 recipes)
7. mussel — PPMI 1.92 · ×6.8 chance · n=20 (mussel itself appears in 193 recipes)
8. romano cheese — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=24 (romano cheese itself appears in 293 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Bouillabaisse — with saffron, mussel
• Sellou (Sfouf) — with anise
• Aquavit (Akvavit) — with anise
• Cioppino-Style Seafood Stew — with mussel
• Seafood Cioppino — with mussel
• Fuqi Feipian (Beef and Offal Slices in Red Oil) — with anise

How this was measured

fennel appears in 968 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.