Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with leek?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with leek most disproportionately are turnip (×15.2 chance, n=22), bay (×5.8 chance, n=69), asparagus (×5.4 chance, n=21), chicken broth (×5.2 chance, n=159), thyme (×4.8 chance, n=126), carrot (×4.7 chance, n=153), white wine (×4.4 chance, n=78) and potato (×3.8 chance, n=116). 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. turnip — PPMI 2.72 · ×15.2 chance · n=22 (turnip itself appears in 189 recipes)
2. bay — PPMI 1.75 · ×5.8 chance · n=69 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
3. asparagus — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=21 (asparagus itself appears in 508 recipes)
4. chicken broth — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=159 (chicken broth itself appears in 3,993 recipes)
5. thyme — PPMI 1.57 · ×4.8 chance · n=126 (thyme itself appears in 3,418 recipes)
6. carrot — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.7 chance · n=153 (carrot itself appears in 4,268 recipes)
7. white wine — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=78 (white wine itself appears in 2,312 recipes)
8. potato — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=116 (potato itself appears in 3,962 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Baeckeoffe — with bay, thyme, carrot, potato
• Creamy Chinese Celery Soup — with chicken broth, white wine, potato
• Potato and Mushroom Gratin — with bay, thyme, potato
• Kig ha Farz — with turnip, bay, carrot
• Porrusalda — with bay, carrot, potato
• Poulet DG — with bay, thyme, carrot

How this was measured

leek appears in 487 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.