Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with salmon?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with salmon most disproportionately are dill (×10.9 chance, n=126), tarragon (×5.0 chance, n=25), lemon (×3.3 chance, n=105), chive (×3.3 chance, n=42), shallot (×2.9 chance, n=43), lemon juice (×2.5 chance, n=135), white wine (×2.5 chance, n=56) and lime juice (×2.2 chance, n=37). 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. dill — PPMI 2.39 · ×10.9 chance · n=126 (dill itself appears in 1,207 recipes)
2. tarragon — PPMI 1.61 · ×5.0 chance · n=25 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)
3. lemon — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=105 (lemon itself appears in 3,291 recipes)
4. chive — PPMI 1.19 · ×3.3 chance · n=42 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
5. shallot — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=43 (shallot itself appears in 1,548 recipes)
6. lemon juice — PPMI 0.94 · ×2.5 chance · n=135 (lemon juice itself appears in 5,530 recipes)
7. white wine — PPMI 0.93 · ×2.5 chance · n=56 (white wine itself appears in 2,312 recipes)
8. lime juice — PPMI 0.77 · ×2.2 chance · n=37 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Poached Salmon With Dill Horseradish Sauce Recipe — with dill, lemon, chive, lemon juice, white wine
• Lemon Butter Salmon Pasta — with lemon, shallot, lemon juice, white wine
• Cedar Plank Grilled Salmon — with dill, lemon, lemon juice
• Crispy Skin Salmon with Lemon Butter — with lemon, lemon juice, white wine
• Salmon Burgers with Dill Yogurt Sauce — with dill, lemon, lemon juice
• Salmon Chowder with Dill and Potatoes — with dill, lemon, lemon juice

How this was measured

salmon appears in 610 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.