Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with oregano?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with oregano most disproportionately are basil (×6.3 chance, n=1407), rosemary (×6.2 chance, n=674), cured pork (×5.2 chance, n=89), mozzarella cheese (×5.2 chance, n=418), thyme (×4.5 chance, n=837), feta cheese (×4.4 chance, n=165), provolone cheese (×4.1 chance, n=41) and kidney bean (×4.1 chance, n=113). 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. basil — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=1407 (basil itself appears in 4,153 recipes)
2. rosemary — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=674 (rosemary itself appears in 2,014 recipes)
3. cured pork — PPMI 1.66 · ×5.2 chance · n=89 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
4. mozzarella cheese — PPMI 1.66 · ×5.2 chance · n=418 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)
5. thyme — PPMI 1.51 · ×4.5 chance · n=837 (thyme itself appears in 3,418 recipes)
6. feta cheese — PPMI 1.49 · ×4.4 chance · n=165 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
7. provolone cheese — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=41 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
8. kidney bean — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=113 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Roast Cherry Tomatoes And Feta — with basil, thyme, feta cheese
• Greek Moussaka — with basil, feta cheese
• Crawfish and Andouille Sausage Pizza — with basil, mozzarella cheese
• Rosemary Lamb Stew — with rosemary, thyme
• Baked Feta Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes — with basil, feta cheese
• Baked Orzo with Feta, Tomatoes, and Chickpeas — with basil, feta cheese

How this was measured

oregano appears in 3,429 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.