Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with mushroom?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with mushroom most disproportionately are porcini (×7.9 chance, n=49), enokidake (×5.6 chance, n=35), egg noodle (×4.9 chance, n=119), brown rice (×4.4 chance, n=100), shiitake (×4.3 chance, n=149), oyster (×3.5 chance, n=88), beef broth (×3.2 chance, n=182) and swiss cheese (×3.2 chance, n=110). 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
- porcini — PPMI 2.06 · ×7.9 chance · n=49 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
- enokidake — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=35 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
- egg noodle — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=119 (egg noodle itself appears in 412 recipes)
- brown rice — PPMI 1.49 · ×4.4 chance · n=100 (brown rice itself appears in 383 recipes)
- shiitake — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.3 chance · n=149 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
- oyster — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.5 chance · n=88 (oyster itself appears in 422 recipes)
- beef broth — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.2 chance · n=182 (beef broth itself appears in 956 recipes)
- swiss cheese — PPMI 1.16 · ×3.2 chance · n=110 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use mushroom with one of its measured partners:
- Lo Mein (捞面) — with egg noodle, shiitake, oyster
- Spring Rolls (春卷) — with shiitake, oyster
- Beef Stroganoff with Egg Noodles — with egg noodle, beef broth
- Beef Sukiyaki Hot Pot — with shiitake, beef broth
- Creamy Wild Mushroom Soup — with shiitake, beef broth
- Hot and Sour Soup with Tofu — with shiitake, beef broth
How this was measured
mushroom appears in 3,746 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.