Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with starch?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with starch most disproportionately are oyster (×5.3 chance, n=96), shiitake (×4.4 chance, n=114), peanut oil (×4.3 chance, n=67), rhubarb (×4.0 chance, n=29), sake (×3.9 chance, n=114), soy sauce (×3.8 chance, n=702), sesame oil (×3.4 chance, n=273) and blackberry (×3.3 chance, n=24). 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. oyster — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=96 (oyster itself appears in 422 recipes)
2. shiitake — PPMI 1.49 · ×4.4 chance · n=114 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
3. peanut oil — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=67 (peanut oil itself appears in 363 recipes)
4. rhubarb — PPMI 1.38 · ×4.0 chance · n=29 (rhubarb itself appears in 169 recipes)
5. sake — PPMI 1.36 · ×3.9 chance · n=114 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)
6. soy sauce — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=702 (soy sauce itself appears in 4,263 recipes)
7. sesame oil — PPMI 1.24 · ×3.4 chance · n=273 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
8. blackberry — PPMI 1.21 · ×3.3 chance · n=24 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Chicken Karaage — with sake, soy sauce, sesame oil
• Braised Sea Cucumber with Scallions (Cong Shao Hai Shen) — with oyster, peanut oil, soy sauce
• Di San Xian (Three Earthly Treasures) — with oyster, peanut oil, soy sauce
• Fish-Fragrant Aubergine (Yu Xiang Qie Zi) — with peanut oil, soy sauce, sesame oil
• Karaage (唐揚げ) — with sake, soy sauce
• Dale Taldes Slippery Lemongrass Pork Noodles — with oyster, sesame oil

How this was measured

starch appears in 2,738 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.