Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with tarragon?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with tarragon most disproportionately are shallot (×8.1 chance, n=102), chive (×5.6 chance, n=61), asparagus (×5.3 chance, n=22), white wine (×5.1 chance, n=96), salmon (×5.0 chance, n=25), dill (×3.1 chance, n=30), parsley (×3.0 chance, n=148) and lettuce (×2.9 chance, n=30). 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
- shallot — PPMI 2.09 · ×8.1 chance · n=102 (shallot itself appears in 1,548 recipes)
- chive — PPMI 1.72 · ×5.6 chance · n=61 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
- asparagus — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=22 (asparagus itself appears in 508 recipes)
- white wine — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=96 (white wine itself appears in 2,312 recipes)
- salmon — PPMI 1.61 · ×5.0 chance · n=25 (salmon itself appears in 610 recipes)
- dill — PPMI 1.11 · ×3.1 chance · n=30 (dill itself appears in 1,207 recipes)
- parsley — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=148 (parsley itself appears in 6,142 recipes)
- lettuce — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=30 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use tarragon with one of its measured partners:
- Cervelle de Canut — with shallot, chive, white wine, parsley
- Jambon Persillé de Bourgogne — with shallot, white wine, parsley
- Béarnaise Sauce — with shallot, white wine
- Koofteh Tabrizi (Giant Stuffed Meatballs) — with dill, parsley
- Easter Lamb Stew (Chakapuli) — with white wine, parsley
- French-Style Shrimp Salad — with parsley, lettuce
How this was measured
tarragon appears in 519 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.