Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with turkey?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with turkey most disproportionately are sage (×7.5 chance, n=111), smoke (×7.1 chance, n=50), marjoram (×6.2 chance, n=50), white bread (×4.1 chance, n=23), swiss cheese (×3.9 chance, n=35), kidney bean (×3.7 chance, n=29), brown rice (×3.6 chance, n=21) and lettuce (×3.6 chance, n=70). 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. sage — PPMI 2.01 · ×7.5 chance · n=111 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
  2. smoke — PPMI 1.97 · ×7.1 chance · n=50 (smoke itself appears in 463 recipes)
  3. marjoram — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=50 (marjoram itself appears in 531 recipes)
  4. white bread — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=23 (white bread itself appears in 371 recipes)
  5. swiss cheese — PPMI 1.37 · ×3.9 chance · n=35 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)
  6. kidney bean — PPMI 1.31 · ×3.7 chance · n=29 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
  7. brown rice — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=21 (brown rice itself appears in 383 recipes)
  8. lettuce — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=70 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

turkey appears in 963 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.