Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with red wine?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with red wine most disproportionately are veal (×7.0 chance, n=36), beef broth (×6.3 chance, n=139), lamb (×5.4 chance, n=69), beet (×4.8 chance, n=28), bay (×4.6 chance, n=168), vinegar (×4.5 chance, n=855), blue cheese (×3.7 chance, n=35) and bay leaf (×3.5 chance, n=21). 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. veal — PPMI 1.95 · ×7.0 chance · n=36 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)
2. beef broth — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=139 (beef broth itself appears in 956 recipes)
3. lamb — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=69 (lamb itself appears in 551 recipes)
4. beet — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.8 chance · n=28 (beet itself appears in 250 recipes)
5. bay — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=168 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
6. vinegar — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=855 (vinegar itself appears in 8,238 recipes)
7. blue cheese — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.7 chance · n=35 (blue cheese itself appears in 414 recipes)
8. bay leaf — PPMI 1.24 · ×3.5 chance · n=21 (bay leaf itself appears in 262 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Asado Negro — with bay, vinegar, bay leaf
• Barszcz (Beet Soup / Borscht) — with beet, bay
• Beef Bourguignon — with beef broth, bay
• Classic Beef Stew with Potatoes and Carrots — with beef broth, bay
• Greek-Style Braised Short Ribs with Cinnamon and Tomato — with beef broth, bay
• Lamb Ragu over Pappardelle — with lamb, bay

How this was measured

red wine appears in 1,475 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.