Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with rosemary?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with rosemary most disproportionately are marjoram (×15.4 chance, n=258), sage (×11.7 chance, n=364), thyme (×10.0 chance, n=1082), porcini (×7.2 chance, n=24), cured pork (×6.5 chance, n=65), oregano (×6.2 chance, n=674), lamb (×6.1 chance, n=107) and basil (×5.7 chance, n=743). 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. marjoram — PPMI 2.73 · ×15.4 chance · n=258 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
2. sage — PPMI 2.46 · ×11.7 chance · n=364 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
3. thyme — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=1082 (thyme itself appears in 3,418 recipes)
4. porcini — PPMI 1.97 · ×7.2 chance · n=24 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
5. cured pork — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=65 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
6. oregano — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=674 (oregano itself appears in 3,429 recipes)
7. lamb — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=107 (lamb itself appears in 551 recipes)
8. basil — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.7 chance · n=743 (basil itself appears in 4,153 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Rosemary Lamb Stew — with sage, thyme, oregano, lamb
• Shepherd's Pie — with thyme, lamb
• Minestra Di Fagioli (Bean Soup) — with sage, thyme
• Instant Pot® Irish Stew — with thyme, lamb
• Kale And Feta Stuffed Roast Leg Of Lamb — with lamb, basil
• Ribollita — with thyme

How this was measured

rosemary appears in 2,014 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.