Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with white wine?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with white wine most disproportionately are mussel (×11.3 chance, n=79), scallop (×8.4 chance, n=92), clam (×6.4 chance, n=118), saffron (×6.3 chance, n=62), veal (×5.5 chance, n=44), porcini (×5.5 chance, n=21), tarragon (×5.1 chance, n=96) and shallot (×4.5 chance, n=253). 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
- mussel — PPMI 2.42 · ×11.3 chance · n=79 (mussel itself appears in 193 recipes)
- scallop — PPMI 2.13 · ×8.4 chance · n=92 (scallop itself appears in 302 recipes)
- clam — PPMI 1.85 · ×6.4 chance · n=118 (clam itself appears in 509 recipes)
- saffron — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.3 chance · n=62 (saffron itself appears in 273 recipes)
- veal — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=44 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)
- porcini — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=21 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
- tarragon — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=96 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)
- shallot — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=253 (shallot itself appears in 1,548 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use white wine with one of its measured partners:
- Jambon Persillé de Bourgogne — with veal, tarragon, shallot
- Béarnaise Sauce — with tarragon, shallot
- Moules Marinières — with mussel, shallot
- Cazuela de Mariscos — with mussel, saffron
- Cioppino-Style Seafood Stew — with mussel, clam
- Mussels in White Wine Garlic Broth — with mussel, shallot
How this was measured
white wine appears in 2,312 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.