Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with corn?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with corn most disproportionately are celery oil (×12.8 chance, n=1008), black bean (×4.6 chance, n=221), lima bean (×4.4 chance, n=56), tamarind (×3.1 chance, n=404), tabasco pepper (×3.0 chance, n=225), kidney bean (×2.9 chance, n=116), avocado (×2.9 chance, n=169) and bourbon whiskey (×2.8 chance, n=34). 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. celery oil — PPMI 2.55 · ×12.8 chance · n=1008 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
2. black bean — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=221 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
3. lima bean — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=56 (lima bean itself appears in 164 recipes)
4. tamarind — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=404 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
5. tabasco pepper — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=225 (tabasco pepper itself appears in 977 recipes)
6. kidney bean — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=116 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
7. avocado — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=169 (avocado itself appears in 755 recipes)
8. bourbon whiskey — PPMI 1.03 · ×2.8 chance · n=34 (bourbon whiskey itself appears in 156 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Black Bean and Sweet Potato Burrito Bowls — with black bean, avocado
• Carne Asada Burrito Bowl with Grilled Corn — with black bean, avocado
• Chicken Burrito Bowl with Black Beans and Charred Corn Salsa — with black bean, avocado
• Huevos Rancheros with Black Beans — with black bean, avocado
• Sheet-Pan Loaded Vegetarian Nachos — with black bean, avocado
• Loaded Veggie Chili with Cornbread — with black bean, kidney bean

How this was measured

corn appears in 4,964 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.