Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with horseradish?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with horseradish most disproportionately are beet (×12.0 chance, n=20), crab (×6.7 chance, n=26), celery oil (×6.7 chance, n=45), tabasco pepper (×5.4 chance, n=35), tamarind (×5.2 chance, n=58), mustard (×4.7 chance, n=133), dill (×4.1 chance, n=33) and ham (×3.0 chance, n=28). 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
- beet — PPMI 2.48 · ×12.0 chance · n=20 (beet itself appears in 250 recipes)
- crab — PPMI 1.91 · ×6.7 chance · n=26 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
- celery oil — PPMI 1.90 · ×6.7 chance · n=45 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
- tabasco pepper — PPMI 1.68 · ×5.4 chance · n=35 (tabasco pepper itself appears in 977 recipes)
- tamarind — PPMI 1.64 · ×5.2 chance · n=58 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
- mustard — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=133 (mustard itself appears in 4,243 recipes)
- dill — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=33 (dill itself appears in 1,207 recipes)
- ham — PPMI 1.10 · ×3.0 chance · n=28 (ham itself appears in 1,396 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use horseradish with one of its measured partners:
- Pot-au-Feu — with mustard, ham
- Ogórki Kiszone (Salt-Brined Dill Cucumbers) — with mustard, dill
- Chrzan (Prepared Horseradish Sauce) — with beet
- Poached Salmon With Dill Horseradish Sauce Recipe — with dill
How this was measured
horseradish appears in 425 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.