Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with feta cheese?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with feta cheese most disproportionately are olive (×7.9 chance, n=155), chickpea (×6.2 chance, n=31), artichoke (×6.0 chance, n=26), mint (×5.8 chance, n=72), lamb (×5.2 chance, n=31), lettuce (×4.7 chance, n=65), grape juice (×4.5 chance, n=40) and oregano (×4.4 chance, n=165). 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. olive — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=155 (olive itself appears in 1,810 recipes)
2. chickpea — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=31 (chickpea itself appears in 465 recipes)
3. artichoke — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=26 (artichoke itself appears in 403 recipes)
4. mint — PPMI 1.75 · ×5.8 chance · n=72 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
5. lamb — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=31 (lamb itself appears in 551 recipes)
6. lettuce — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=65 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
7. grape juice — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=40 (grape juice itself appears in 824 recipes)
8. oregano — PPMI 1.49 · ×4.4 chance · n=165 (oregano itself appears in 3,429 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Lamb Loin Chops With Greek Salad And Yogurt-Lemon Sauce Recipe — with olive, lamb, oregano
• Baked Orzo with Feta, Tomatoes, and Chickpeas — with olive, chickpea, oregano
• Greek Eggplant and Chickpea Skillet — with olive, chickpea, oregano
• Greek-Style Stuffed Peppers with Herbed Rice, Pine Nuts, and Raisins — with olive, mint, oregano
• Greek Turkey and Rice Stuffed Peppers — with olive, mint, oregano
• Greek Braised Lamb and Orzo One-Pot — with olive, lamb, oregano

How this was measured

feta cheese appears in 689 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.