Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with coconut?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with coconut most disproportionately are lemongrass (×12.9 chance, n=99), thai pepper (×10.5 chance, n=42), macadamia nut (×9.0 chance, n=27), fenugreek (×7.6 chance, n=210), rum (×6.1 chance, n=111), turmeric (×6.0 chance, n=253), coriander (×5.1 chance, n=273) and pineapple (×4.9 chance, n=243). 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. lemongrass — PPMI 2.55 · ×12.9 chance · n=99 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
2. thai pepper — PPMI 2.35 · ×10.5 chance · n=42 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
3. macadamia nut — PPMI 2.20 · ×9.0 chance · n=27 (macadamia nut itself appears in 103 recipes)
4. fenugreek — PPMI 2.03 · ×7.6 chance · n=210 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
5. rum — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=111 (rum itself appears in 621 recipes)
6. turmeric — PPMI 1.78 · ×6.0 chance · n=253 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
7. coriander — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=273 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
8. pineapple — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=243 (pineapple itself appears in 1,697 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Satay (Moo Satay) — with lemongrass, turmeric, coriander
• Rendang (Slow-Cooked Spiced Beef) — with lemongrass, turmeric, coriander
• Ayam Goreng (Indonesian Fried Chicken) — with lemongrass, turmeric, coriander
• Babi Guling (Balinese Spit-Roasted Pork) — with lemongrass, turmeric, coriander
• Kara Kuzhambu (Sour Shallot and Aubergine Gravy) — with fenugreek, turmeric, coriander
• Nadan Meen Curry with Kudampuli — with fenugreek, turmeric, coriander

How this was measured

coconut appears in 1,858 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.