Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with sage?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with sage most disproportionately are marjoram (×31.2 chance, n=255), rosemary (×11.7 chance, n=364), thyme (×8.6 chance, n=451), turkey (×7.5 chance, n=111), celery (×6.3 chance, n=405), white bread (×6.1 chance, n=35), brown rice (×5.1 chance, n=30) and cured pork (×4.9 chance, n=24). 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 3.44 · ×31.2 chance · n=255 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
2. rosemary — PPMI 2.46 · ×11.7 chance · n=364 (rosemary itself appears in 2,014 recipes)
3. thyme — PPMI 2.15 · ×8.6 chance · n=451 (thyme itself appears in 3,418 recipes)
4. turkey — PPMI 2.01 · ×7.5 chance · n=111 (turkey itself appears in 963 recipes)
5. celery — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=405 (celery itself appears in 4,170 recipes)
6. white bread — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=35 (white bread itself appears in 371 recipes)
7. brown rice — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=30 (brown rice itself appears in 383 recipes)
8. cured pork — PPMI 1.60 · ×4.9 chance · n=24 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Minestra Di Fagioli (Bean Soup) — with rosemary, thyme, celery
• Rosemary Lamb Stew — with rosemary, thyme, celery
• Cornbread Dressing with Sage and Giblet Gravy — with thyme, turkey, celery
• Phil Vickery’S Pot Roast Pork Belly With Bramley Apples And Celery — with celery
• Butternut Squash Soup With Seared Radicchio — with thyme
• Crostini Neri di Fegatini — with celery

How this was measured

sage appears in 981 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.