Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with sherry?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with sherry most disproportionately are crab (×4.5 chance, n=29), smoke (×4.5 chance, n=23), shallot (×4.3 chance, n=74), soy sauce (×4.0 chance, n=187), sesame oil (×3.1 chance, n=64), vinegar (×3.1 chance, n=285), ginger (×3.1 chance, n=164) and chicken broth (×3.0 chance, n=132). 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. crab — PPMI 1.51 · ×4.5 chance · n=29 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
2. smoke — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=23 (smoke itself appears in 463 recipes)
3. shallot — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=74 (shallot itself appears in 1,548 recipes)
4. soy sauce — PPMI 1.38 · ×4.0 chance · n=187 (soy sauce itself appears in 4,263 recipes)
5. sesame oil — PPMI 1.14 · ×3.1 chance · n=64 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
6. vinegar — PPMI 1.14 · ×3.1 chance · n=285 (vinegar itself appears in 8,238 recipes)
7. ginger — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=164 (ginger itself appears in 4,775 recipes)
8. chicken broth — PPMI 1.09 · ×3.0 chance · n=132 (chicken broth itself appears in 3,993 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Hunan Chicken — with soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, ginger, chicken broth
• Cashew Chicken — with soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, chicken broth
• Ground Pork and Green Bean Stir-Fry — with soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, chicken broth
• Chinese Chicken — with soy sauce, vinegar, ginger
• Beef and Broccoli Stir-Fry — with soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger
• Beef and Broccoli Lo Mein — with soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger

How this was measured

sherry appears in 706 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.