Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with chickpea?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with chickpea most disproportionately are kidney bean (×9.8 chance, n=37), cumin (×6.6 chance, n=179), turmeric (×6.5 chance, n=69), feta cheese (×6.2 chance, n=31), coriander (×6.0 chance, n=80), black bean (×5.4 chance, n=24), fenugreek (×4.5 chance, n=31) and sesame seed (×4.4 chance, n=46). 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. kidney bean — PPMI 2.28 · ×9.8 chance · n=37 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
2. cumin — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.6 chance · n=179 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
3. turmeric — PPMI 1.87 · ×6.5 chance · n=69 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
4. feta cheese — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=31 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
5. coriander — PPMI 1.78 · ×6.0 chance · n=80 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
6. black bean — PPMI 1.68 · ×5.4 chance · n=24 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
7. fenugreek — PPMI 1.51 · ×4.5 chance · n=31 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
8. sesame seed — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=46 (sesame seed itself appears in 1,442 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Sindhi Kadhi (Roasted Gram Flour and Tamarind Vegetable Stew) — with cumin, turmeric, coriander, fenugreek
• Ash Reshteh (Noodle and Bean Soup) — with kidney bean, turmeric, fenugreek
• Moroccan Vegetable Casserole — with cumin, turmeric, coriander
• Halloumi Cheese And Mixed Beans Salad — with kidney bean, coriander, sesame seed
• Beef and Chickpea Harissa Stew — with cumin, coriander, sesame seed
• Chana Masala — with cumin, turmeric, coriander

How this was measured

chickpea appears in 465 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.