Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cayenne?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cayenne most disproportionately are chinese cabbage (×6.5 chance, n=147), black bean (×4.3 chance, n=347), cilantro (×4.1 chance, n=1541), cumin (×3.9 chance, n=1907), kidney bean (×3.6 chance, n=245), lime juice (×3.5 chance, n=830), okra (×3.5 chance, n=61) and corn grit (×3.5 chance, n=75). 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. chinese cabbage — PPMI 1.87 · ×6.5 chance · n=147 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
2. black bean — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=347 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
3. cilantro — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=1541 (cilantro itself appears in 2,851 recipes)
4. cumin — PPMI 1.36 · ×3.9 chance · n=1907 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
5. kidney bean — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=245 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
6. lime juice — PPMI 1.26 · ×3.5 chance · n=830 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)
7. okra — PPMI 1.26 · ×3.5 chance · n=61 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
8. corn grit — PPMI 1.25 · ×3.5 chance · n=75 (corn grit itself appears in 163 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Coyote Quesadilla — with black bean, cilantro, cumin, lime juice
• Black Bean And Corn Salad I — with black bean, cilantro, cumin
• Beer-Battered Baja Fish Tacos — with cilantro, cumin, lime juice
• Black Bean Soup with Lime Crema — with black bean, cilantro, cumin
• Coconut Lentil Dal with Rice — with cilantro, cumin, lime juice
• Coconut Shrimp Curry — with cilantro, cumin, lime juice

How this was measured

cayenne appears in 8,371 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.