Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with scallion?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with scallion most disproportionately are chinese cabbage (×9.8 chance, n=133), enokidake (×7.6 chance, n=63), sesame oil (×7.3 chance, n=1050), kelp (×6.6 chance, n=93), radish (×6.3 chance, n=276), soybean (×5.6 chance, n=526), shiitake (×5.6 chance, n=262) and sake (×5.4 chance, n=289). 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. chinese cabbage — PPMI 2.29 · ×9.8 chance · n=133 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
2. enokidake — PPMI 2.02 · ×7.6 chance · n=63 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
3. sesame oil — PPMI 1.98 · ×7.3 chance · n=1050 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
4. kelp — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.6 chance · n=93 (kelp itself appears in 180 recipes)
5. radish — PPMI 1.85 · ×6.3 chance · n=276 (radish itself appears in 555 recipes)
6. soybean — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=526 (soybean itself appears in 1,192 recipes)
7. shiitake — PPMI 1.72 · ×5.6 chance · n=262 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
8. sake — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=289 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Lo Mein (捞面) — with sesame oil, soybean, shiitake
• Hot and Sour Soup with Tofu — with sesame oil, soybean, shiitake
• Gingery Vegetable Wonton Soup — with sesame oil, soybean, shiitake
• Shabu-Shabu (しゃぶしゃぶ) — with radish, shiitake
• Ssamjang (쌈장) — with sesame oil, soybean
• Galbitang (갈비탕) — with sesame oil, radish

How this was measured

scallion appears in 5,001 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.