Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with bell pepper?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with bell pepper most disproportionately are oregano (×3.3 chance, n=1075), olive (×3.1 chance, n=533), smoke (×2.9 chance, n=129), cumin (×2.9 chance, n=1034), black bean (×2.9 chance, n=168), saffron (×2.8 chance, n=73), pork sausage (×2.7 chance, n=360) and kidney bean (×2.6 chance, n=130). 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. oregano — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.3 chance · n=1075 (oregano itself appears in 3,429 recipes)
2. olive — PPMI 1.12 · ×3.1 chance · n=533 (olive itself appears in 1,810 recipes)
3. smoke — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=129 (smoke itself appears in 463 recipes)
4. cumin — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=1034 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
5. black bean — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=168 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
6. saffron — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=73 (saffron itself appears in 273 recipes)
7. pork sausage — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=360 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
8. kidney bean — PPMI 0.96 · ×2.6 chance · n=130 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Arroz con Pollo — with oregano, olive, cumin, saffron
• Black Bean Soup (Sopa de Frijoles Negros) — with oregano, olive, cumin, black bean
• Congrí (Moros y Cristianos) — with oregano, olive, cumin, black bean
• Loaded Veggie Chili with Cornbread — with olive, cumin, black bean, kidney bean
• One-Pot Vegetarian Chili with Sweet Potato — with olive, cumin, black bean, kidney bean
• Three-Bean Vegetarian Chili — with olive, cumin, black bean, kidney bean

How this was measured

bell pepper appears in 6,142 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.