Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with olive oil?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with olive oil most disproportionately are endive (×4.3 chance, n=88), porcini (×3.8 chance, n=71), grape juice (×3.8 chance, n=551), red wine vinaigrette (×3.6 chance, n=65), feta cheese (×3.6 chance, n=438), cured pork (×3.5 chance, n=198), chicory (×3.5 chance, n=97) and goat cheese (×3.4 chance, n=177). 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. endive — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=88 (endive itself appears in 115 recipes)
2. porcini — PPMI 1.32 · ×3.8 chance · n=71 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
3. grape juice — PPMI 1.32 · ×3.8 chance · n=551 (grape juice itself appears in 824 recipes)
4. red wine vinaigrette — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=65 (red wine vinaigrette itself appears in 101 recipes)
5. feta cheese — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.6 chance · n=438 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
6. cured pork — PPMI 1.26 · ×3.5 chance · n=198 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
7. chicory — PPMI 1.24 · ×3.5 chance · n=97 (chicory itself appears in 157 recipes)
8. goat cheese — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=177 (goat cheese itself appears in 293 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Roasted Green Beans With Greek Dressing — with red wine vinaigrette, feta cheese
• Grilled New Potato and Green Bean Salad with Feta and Olives — with red wine vinaigrette, feta cheese
• Greek Chicken Souvlaki Salad Bowls — with red wine vinaigrette, feta cheese
• Salade Niçoise — with red wine vinaigrette
• Gazpacho Andaluz — with red wine vinaigrette
• Spanakopita — with feta cheese

How this was measured

olive oil appears in 11,350 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.