Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with shallot?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with shallot most disproportionately are lemongrass (×14.8 chance, n=95), fish sauce (×11.0 chance, n=32), endive (×9.7 chance, n=27), porcini (×9.3 chance, n=24), tarragon (×8.1 chance, n=102), dry white wine (×6.7 chance, n=21), heavy cream (×6.2 chance, n=25) and scallop (×5.9 chance, n=43). 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. lemongrass — PPMI 2.69 · ×14.8 chance · n=95 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
2. fish sauce — PPMI 2.40 · ×11.0 chance · n=32 (fish sauce itself appears in 120 recipes)
3. endive — PPMI 2.27 · ×9.7 chance · n=27 (endive itself appears in 115 recipes)
4. porcini — PPMI 2.23 · ×9.3 chance · n=24 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
5. tarragon — PPMI 2.09 · ×8.1 chance · n=102 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)
6. dry white wine — PPMI 1.90 · ×6.7 chance · n=21 (dry white wine itself appears in 129 recipes)
7. heavy cream — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=25 (heavy cream itself appears in 166 recipes)
8. scallop — PPMI 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=43 (scallop itself appears in 302 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Béarnaise Sauce — with tarragon, dry white wine
• Com Tam (Broken Rice with Grilled Pork) — with lemongrass, fish sauce
• Bun Cha (Grilled Pork with Vermicelli) — with lemongrass, fish sauce
• Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lemongrass, fish sauce
• Dale Taldes Slippery Lemongrass Pork Noodles — with lemongrass, fish sauce
• Creamy Chinese Celery Soup — with dry white wine, heavy cream

How this was measured

shallot appears in 1,548 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.