Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with mustard?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with mustard most disproportionately are lovage (×14.8 chance, n=140), chive (×7.2 chance, n=644), cucumber (×6.1 chance, n=772), celery oil (×5.5 chance, n=368), horseradish (×4.7 chance, n=133), tamarind (×4.5 chance, n=508), chicory (×4.3 chance, n=45) and cider (×4.0 chance, n=303). 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. lovage — PPMI 2.69 · ×14.8 chance · n=140 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
2. chive — PPMI 1.98 · ×7.2 chance · n=644 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
3. cucumber — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.1 chance · n=772 (cucumber itself appears in 1,908 recipes)
4. celery oil — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=368 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
5. horseradish — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=133 (horseradish itself appears in 425 recipes)
6. tamarind — PPMI 1.51 · ×4.5 chance · n=508 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
7. chicory — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=45 (chicory itself appears in 157 recipes)
8. cider — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=303 (cider itself appears in 1,135 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Deviled Eggs — with chive, cider
• Ogórki Kiszone (Salt-Brined Dill Cucumbers) — with cucumber, horseradish
• Salade Niçoise — with cucumber
• Pot-au-Feu — with horseradish
• Naengmyeon (냉면) — with cucumber
• Sambar — with tamarind

How this was measured

mustard appears in 4,243 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.