Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with oyster?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with oyster most disproportionately are shiitake (×19.5 chance, n=77), peanut oil (×10.0 chance, n=24), sake (×10.0 chance, n=45), sesame oil (×9.7 chance, n=118), soybean (×7.0 chance, n=55), soy sauce (×6.9 chance, n=195), clam (×6.8 chance, n=23) and shrimp (×5.5 chance, n=70). 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. shiitake — PPMI 2.97 · ×19.5 chance · n=77 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
2. peanut oil — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=24 (peanut oil itself appears in 363 recipes)
3. sake — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=45 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)
4. sesame oil — PPMI 2.27 · ×9.7 chance · n=118 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
5. soybean — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=55 (soybean itself appears in 1,192 recipes)
6. soy sauce — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=195 (soy sauce itself appears in 4,263 recipes)
7. clam — PPMI 1.92 · ×6.8 chance · n=23 (clam itself appears in 509 recipes)
8. shrimp — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=70 (shrimp itself appears in 1,931 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Spring Rolls (春卷) — with shiitake, sesame oil, soy sauce, shrimp
• Lo Mein (捞面) — with shiitake, sesame oil, soybean, soy sauce
• Shrimp and Broccoli Stir-Fry — with sesame oil, soybean, soy sauce, shrimp
• Shrimp and Snow Pea Stir-Fry — with sesame oil, soybean, soy sauce, shrimp
• Glossy Shrimp and Vegetable Udon Stir-Fry — with sesame oil, soybean, soy sauce, shrimp
• Singapore Noodles — with sesame oil, soybean, soy sauce, shrimp

How this was measured

oyster appears in 422 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.