Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with lamb?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with lamb most disproportionately are saffron (×11.4 chance, n=27), mint (×9.6 chance, n=96), cardamom (×6.6 chance, n=23), rosemary (×6.1 chance, n=107), red wine (×5.4 chance, n=69), feta cheese (×5.2 chance, n=31), yogurt (×4.9 chance, n=49) and beef broth (×4.8 chance, n=40). 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. saffron — PPMI 2.44 · ×11.4 chance · n=27 (saffron itself appears in 273 recipes)
2. mint — PPMI 2.26 · ×9.6 chance · n=96 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
3. cardamom — PPMI 1.89 · ×6.6 chance · n=23 (cardamom itself appears in 403 recipes)
4. rosemary — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=107 (rosemary itself appears in 2,014 recipes)
5. red wine — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=69 (red wine itself appears in 1,475 recipes)
6. feta cheese — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=31 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
7. yogurt — PPMI 1.60 · ×4.9 chance · n=49 (yogurt itself appears in 1,146 recipes)
8. beef broth — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.8 chance · n=40 (beef broth itself appears in 956 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Rogan Josh — with cardamom, yogurt
• Instant Pot® Irish Stew — with rosemary, beef broth
• Kale And Feta Stuffed Roast Leg Of Lamb — with rosemary, feta cheese
• Lamb Loin Chops With Greek Salad And Yogurt-Lemon Sauce Recipe — with feta cheese, yogurt
• Rosemary Lamb Stew — with rosemary, red wine
• Grilled Lamb Kebabs with Mint Yogurt — with mint, yogurt

How this was measured

lamb appears in 551 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.