Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with potato?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with potato most disproportionately are parsnip (×5.4 chance, n=52), turnip (×4.7 chance, n=55), kale (×4.3 chance, n=33), leek (×3.8 chance, n=116), sausage (×3.6 chance, n=79), carrot (×3.5 chance, n=939), savory (×2.8 chance, n=22) and bacon (×2.7 chance, n=410). 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. parsnip — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=52 (parsnip itself appears in 154 recipes)
2. turnip — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.7 chance · n=55 (turnip itself appears in 189 recipes)
3. kale — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.3 chance · n=33 (kale itself appears in 124 recipes)
4. leek — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=116 (leek itself appears in 487 recipes)
5. sausage — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=79 (sausage itself appears in 353 recipes)
6. carrot — PPMI 1.26 · ×3.5 chance · n=939 (carrot itself appears in 4,268 recipes)
7. savory — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=22 (savory itself appears in 128 recipes)
8. bacon — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=410 (bacon itself appears in 2,417 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Erwtensoep (Snert) — with leek, sausage, carrot
• Stamppot Boerenkool met Rookworst (Kale Mash with Smoked Sausage) — with kale, sausage, bacon
• Caldo Verde — with kale, sausage
• Finnish Salmon Soup (Lohikeitto) — with leek, carrot
• Sałatka Jarzynowa — with parsnip, carrot
• Cozido à Portuguesa — with turnip, carrot

How this was measured

potato appears in 3,962 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.