Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with vegetable oil?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with vegetable oil most disproportionately are chive (×2.9 chance, n=719), cucumber (×2.8 chance, n=971), thai pepper (×2.4 chance, n=60), lovage (×2.4 chance, n=62), okra (×2.2 chance, n=54), fenugreek (×2.2 chance, n=378), crab (×2.2 chance, n=231) and lettuce (×2.2 chance, n=509). 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
- chive — PPMI 1.08 · ×2.9 chance · n=719 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
- cucumber — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=971 (cucumber itself appears in 1,908 recipes)
- thai pepper — PPMI 0.87 · ×2.4 chance · n=60 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
- lovage — PPMI 0.87 · ×2.4 chance · n=62 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
- okra — PPMI 0.80 · ×2.2 chance · n=54 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
- fenugreek — PPMI 0.78 · ×2.2 chance · n=378 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
- crab — PPMI 0.78 · ×2.2 chance · n=231 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
- lettuce — PPMI 0.78 · ×2.2 chance · n=509 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use vegetable oil with one of its measured partners:
- Vietnamese Beef Wraps — with cucumber, lettuce
- Falafel Bowls with Tzatziki — with cucumber, lettuce
- Louisiana Seafood Gumbo — with okra, crab
- Seafood Gumbo with Okra and Crab — with okra, crab
- Gyoza (餃子) — with chive
- Tostadas de Tinga — with lettuce
How this was measured
vegetable oil appears in 11,671 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.