Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with bean?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with bean most disproportionately are kale (×6.3 chance, n=26), tomato juice (×3.3 chance, n=24), chickpea (×3.2 chance, n=50), bacon (×2.8 chance, n=226), barley (×2.7 chance, n=25), sausage (×2.7 chance, n=31), peanut oil (×2.6 chance, n=31) and peanut (×2.5 chance, n=64). 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
- kale — PPMI 1.85 · ×6.3 chance · n=26 (kale itself appears in 124 recipes)
- tomato juice — PPMI 1.21 · ×3.3 chance · n=24 (tomato juice itself appears in 217 recipes)
- chickpea — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.2 chance · n=50 (chickpea itself appears in 465 recipes)
- bacon — PPMI 1.04 · ×2.8 chance · n=226 (bacon itself appears in 2,417 recipes)
- barley — PPMI 1.01 · ×2.7 chance · n=25 (barley itself appears in 276 recipes)
- sausage — PPMI 0.97 · ×2.7 chance · n=31 (sausage itself appears in 353 recipes)
- peanut oil — PPMI 0.95 · ×2.6 chance · n=31 (peanut oil itself appears in 363 recipes)
- peanut — PPMI 0.93 · ×2.5 chance · n=64 (peanut itself appears in 762 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use bean with one of its measured partners:
- Sindhi Kadhi (Roasted Gram Flour and Tamarind Vegetable Stew) — with chickpea, peanut oil, peanut
- Feijoada — with bacon, sausage
- Feijao Tropeiro — with bacon, sausage
- African Red Beans — with peanut oil, peanut
- Feijoada Fritters With Collard Greens — with bacon, sausage
- Sausage and Kale White Bean Stew — with kale, sausage
How this was measured
bean appears in 2,109 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.