Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cilantro?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cilantro most disproportionately are thai pepper (×11.9 chance, n=73), lemongrass (×10.7 chance, n=127), lime juice (×9.1 chance, n=735), avocado (×8.1 chance, n=273), black bean (×7.6 chance, n=208), lime (×6.5 chance, n=377), fish sauce (×6.3 chance, n=34) and mango (×5.6 chance, n=114). 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. thai pepper — PPMI 2.48 · ×11.9 chance · n=73 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
2. lemongrass — PPMI 2.38 · ×10.7 chance · n=127 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
3. lime juice — PPMI 2.21 · ×9.1 chance · n=735 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)
4. avocado — PPMI 2.09 · ×8.1 chance · n=273 (avocado itself appears in 755 recipes)
5. black bean — PPMI 2.03 · ×7.6 chance · n=208 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
6. lime — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=377 (lime itself appears in 1,288 recipes)
7. fish sauce — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=34 (fish sauce itself appears in 120 recipes)
8. mango — PPMI 1.72 · ×5.6 chance · n=114 (mango itself appears in 457 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Green Curry With Shrimp And Fish (Kaeng Khiao) — with lemongrass, lime juice, avocado, lime, fish sauce
• Tom Yum Goong — with lemongrass, lime juice, lime, fish sauce
• Tom Kha Gai — with lemongrass, lime juice, lime, fish sauce
• Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lemongrass, lime juice, lime, fish sauce
• Tom Ka Kai (Thai Coconut Chicken Soup) — with lemongrass, lime juice, lime, fish sauce
• Dale Taldes Slippery Lemongrass Pork Noodles — with lemongrass, lime juice, lime, fish sauce

How this was measured

cilantro appears in 2,851 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.