Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with thyme?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with thyme most disproportionately are marjoram (×12.2 chance, n=349), savory (×10.2 chance, n=70), rosemary (×10.0 chance, n=1082), sage (×8.6 chance, n=451), bay (×6.4 chance, n=539), bay leaf (×6.3 chance, n=88), okra (×5.1 chance, n=36) and veal (×5.0 chance, n=60). 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. marjoram — PPMI 2.50 · ×12.2 chance · n=349 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
2. savory — PPMI 2.32 · ×10.2 chance · n=70 (savory itself appears in 128 recipes)
3. rosemary — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=1082 (rosemary itself appears in 2,014 recipes)
4. sage — PPMI 2.15 · ×8.6 chance · n=451 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
5. bay — PPMI 1.86 · ×6.4 chance · n=539 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
6. bay leaf — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.3 chance · n=88 (bay leaf itself appears in 262 recipes)
7. okra — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=36 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
8. veal — PPMI 1.62 · ×5.0 chance · n=60 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Minestra Di Fagioli (Bean Soup) — with rosemary, sage, bay
• Southern Gumbo — with rosemary, bay, okra
• Axoa de Veau — with bay, bay leaf, veal
• Birria de Chivo Tatemada — with marjoram, bay, bay leaf
• Coniglio con Olive Taggiasche — with rosemary, bay, bay leaf
• Gardiane de Taureau — with rosemary, bay, bay leaf

How this was measured

thyme appears in 3,418 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.