Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with vinegar?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with vinegar most disproportionately are celery oil (×7.7 chance, n=1008), tamarind (×7.4 chance, n=1612), cider (×6.7 chance, n=984), red wine (×4.5 chance, n=855), beet (×4.2 chance, n=135), wasabi (×4.1 chance, n=71), chicory (×3.6 chance, n=74) and tabasco pepper (×3.6 chance, n=458). 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. celery oil — PPMI 2.04 · ×7.7 chance · n=1008 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
  2. tamarind — PPMI 2.00 · ×7.4 chance · n=1612 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
  3. cider — PPMI 1.90 · ×6.7 chance · n=984 (cider itself appears in 1,135 recipes)
  4. red wine — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=855 (red wine itself appears in 1,475 recipes)
  5. beet — PPMI 1.43 · ×4.2 chance · n=135 (beet itself appears in 250 recipes)
  6. wasabi — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=71 (wasabi itself appears in 135 recipes)
  7. chicory — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=74 (chicory itself appears in 157 recipes)
  8. tabasco pepper — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=458 (tabasco pepper itself appears in 977 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

vinegar appears in 8,238 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.