Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with marjoram?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with marjoram most disproportionately are sage (×31.2 chance, n=255), rosemary (×15.4 chance, n=258), thyme (×12.2 chance, n=349), white bread (×8.1 chance, n=25), celery (×7.8 chance, n=270), turkey (×6.2 chance, n=50), chicken broth (×4.1 chance, n=138) and black pepper (×3.6 chance, n=324). 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
- sage — PPMI 3.44 · ×31.2 chance · n=255 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
- rosemary — PPMI 2.73 · ×15.4 chance · n=258 (rosemary itself appears in 2,014 recipes)
- thyme — PPMI 2.50 · ×12.2 chance · n=349 (thyme itself appears in 3,418 recipes)
- white bread — PPMI 2.09 · ×8.1 chance · n=25 (white bread itself appears in 371 recipes)
- celery — PPMI 2.05 · ×7.8 chance · n=270 (celery itself appears in 4,170 recipes)
- turkey — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=50 (turkey itself appears in 963 recipes)
- chicken broth — PPMI 1.42 · ×4.1 chance · n=138 (chicken broth itself appears in 3,993 recipes)
- black pepper — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.6 chance · n=324 (black pepper itself appears in 10,870 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use marjoram with one of its measured partners:
- Erbsensuppe (Split Pea Soup) — with celery, black pepper
- Grochówka — with celery, black pepper
- Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Lettuces — with thyme, black pepper
- Kielbasa (Polish Smoked Sausage) — with black pepper
- Flaczki (Tripe Soup) — with celery
- Kiszka (Blood Sausage / Black Pudding) — with black pepper
How this was measured
marjoram appears in 531 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.