Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cucumber?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cucumber most disproportionately are chive (×14.4 chance, n=579), seaweed (×7.8 chance, n=50), wasabi (×6.9 chance, n=28), radish (×6.4 chance, n=107), mustard (×6.1 chance, n=772), lettuce (×4.9 chance, n=188), mint (×4.6 chance, n=159) and parsley (×4.0 chance, n=730). 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. chive — PPMI 2.67 · ×14.4 chance · n=579 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
2. seaweed — PPMI 2.05 · ×7.8 chance · n=50 (seaweed itself appears in 215 recipes)
3. wasabi — PPMI 1.94 · ×6.9 chance · n=28 (wasabi itself appears in 135 recipes)
4. radish — PPMI 1.86 · ×6.4 chance · n=107 (radish itself appears in 555 recipes)
5. mustard — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.1 chance · n=772 (mustard itself appears in 4,243 recipes)
6. lettuce — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=188 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
7. mint — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=159 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
8. parsley — PPMI 1.38 · ×4.0 chance · n=730 (parsley itself appears in 6,142 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Fattoush — with radish, lettuce, mint, parsley
• Salata Baladi (Egyptian Country Salad) — with radish, mint, parsley
• Naengmyeon (냉면) — with radish, mustard
• Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lettuce, mint
• Chłodnik (Cold Beet Soup) — with chive, radish
• Okroshka (Окрошка) — with radish, mustard

How this was measured

cucumber appears in 1,908 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.