Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with shrimp?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with shrimp most disproportionately are chinese cabbage (×21.9 chance, n=114), squid (×13.3 chance, n=96), scallop (×11.0 chance, n=101), mussel (×10.8 chance, n=63), lovage (×9.3 chance, n=40), clam (×8.6 chance, n=133), kelp (×8.2 chance, n=45) and crab (×7.9 chance, n=139). 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
- chinese cabbage — PPMI 3.08 · ×21.9 chance · n=114 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
- squid — PPMI 2.59 · ×13.3 chance · n=96 (squid itself appears in 238 recipes)
- scallop — PPMI 2.40 · ×11.0 chance · n=101 (scallop itself appears in 302 recipes)
- mussel — PPMI 2.38 · ×10.8 chance · n=63 (mussel itself appears in 193 recipes)
- lovage — PPMI 2.23 · ×9.3 chance · n=40 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
- clam — PPMI 2.15 · ×8.6 chance · n=133 (clam itself appears in 509 recipes)
- kelp — PPMI 2.11 · ×8.2 chance · n=45 (kelp itself appears in 180 recipes)
- crab — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=139 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use shrimp with one of its measured partners:
- Char Kway Teow (Stir-Fried Flat Rice Noodles) — with chinese cabbage, clam
- Cioppino-Style Seafood Stew — with mussel, clam
- Seafood Cioppino — with mussel, clam
- Arroz a la Tumbada — with clam, crab
- Yosenabe (Gathered Hot Pot of Fish, Shellfish and Winter Vegetables) — with chinese cabbage, clam
- Bouillabaisse — with mussel
How this was measured
shrimp appears in 1,931 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.