Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with parsley?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with parsley most disproportionately are chive (×5.9 chance, n=758), porcini (×4.6 chance, n=47), cucumber (×4.0 chance, n=730), veal (×3.9 chance, n=83), mussel (×3.9 chance, n=72), romano cheese (×3.4 chance, n=96), white wine (×3.2 chance, n=712) and clam (×3.0 chance, n=146). 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
- chive — PPMI 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=758 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
- porcini — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=47 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
- cucumber — PPMI 1.38 · ×4.0 chance · n=730 (cucumber itself appears in 1,908 recipes)
- veal — PPMI 1.35 · ×3.9 chance · n=83 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)
- mussel — PPMI 1.35 · ×3.9 chance · n=72 (mussel itself appears in 193 recipes)
- romano cheese — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=96 (romano cheese itself appears in 293 recipes)
- white wine — PPMI 1.16 · ×3.2 chance · n=712 (white wine itself appears in 2,312 recipes)
- clam — PPMI 1.09 · ×3.0 chance · n=146 (clam itself appears in 509 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use parsley with one of its measured partners:
- Cioppino-Style Seafood Stew — with mussel, white wine, clam
- Seafood Cioppino — with mussel, white wine, clam
- Curanto en Olla (Pulmay) — with mussel, white wine, clam
- Moules Marinières — with mussel, white wine
- Cazuela de Mariscos — with mussel, white wine
- Beef Braciole Roll-Ups with Marinara — with veal, romano cheese
How this was measured
parsley appears in 6,142 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.