Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with olive?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with olive most disproportionately are pimento (×14.0 chance, n=124), feta cheese (×7.9 chance, n=155), cured pork (×6.8 chance, n=61), artichoke (×6.2 chance, n=71), caraway (×4.8 chance, n=32), provolone cheese (×4.7 chance, n=25), tuna (×4.1 chance, n=59) and oregano (×3.6 chance, n=352). 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. pimento — PPMI 2.64 · ×14.0 chance · n=124 (pimento itself appears in 312 recipes)
2. feta cheese — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=155 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
3. cured pork — PPMI 1.92 · ×6.8 chance · n=61 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
4. artichoke — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=71 (artichoke itself appears in 403 recipes)
5. caraway — PPMI 1.57 · ×4.8 chance · n=32 (caraway itself appears in 235 recipes)
6. provolone cheese — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=25 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
7. tuna — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=59 (tuna itself appears in 510 recipes)
8. oregano — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=352 (oregano itself appears in 3,429 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Greek-Style Grilled Tuna Steaks with Lemon-Oregano Oil — with feta cheese, tuna, oregano
• Horiatiki (Greek Village Salad) — with feta cheese, oregano
• Arroz con Pollo — with pimento, oregano
• Provoleta — with provolone cheese, oregano
• Mediterranean Eggplant Steaks and Orzo Salad with Walnuts, Oregano and Tomatoes — with feta cheese, oregano
• Greek Pasta Salad — with feta cheese, artichoke

How this was measured

olive appears in 1,810 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.