Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with wine?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with wine most disproportionately are star anise (×9.6 chance, n=22), peanut oil (×7.8 chance, n=46), cured pork (×5.9 chance, n=30), shiitake (×5.5 chance, n=53), sesame oil (×5.4 chance, n=162), barley (×5.4 chance, n=24), pork sausage (×4.9 chance, n=108) and soy sauce (×4.6 chance, n=320). 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. star anise — PPMI 2.26 · ×9.6 chance · n=22 (star anise itself appears in 142 recipes)
2. peanut oil — PPMI 2.06 · ×7.8 chance · n=46 (peanut oil itself appears in 363 recipes)
3. cured pork — PPMI 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=30 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
4. shiitake — PPMI 1.71 · ×5.5 chance · n=53 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
5. sesame oil — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=162 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
6. barley — PPMI 1.68 · ×5.4 chance · n=24 (barley itself appears in 276 recipes)
7. pork sausage — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.9 chance · n=108 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
8. soy sauce — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=320 (soy sauce itself appears in 4,263 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Siu Mai (烧卖) — with shiitake, sesame oil, soy sauce
• Spicy Lemongrass Chicken Banh Mi — with peanut oil, sesame oil, soy sauce
• Chinese Chicken Salad With Sesame Peanut Vinaigrette — with peanut oil, sesame oil, soy sauce
• Classic Bibimbap with Fried Egg — with shiitake, sesame oil, soy sauce
• Hot and Sour Soup with Tofu — with shiitake, sesame oil, soy sauce
• Moo Shu Pork — with shiitake, sesame oil, soy sauce

How this was measured

wine appears in 1,030 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.