Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with fenugreek?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with fenugreek most disproportionately are turmeric (×43.3 chance, n=933), coriander (×34.2 chance, n=932), cumin (×16.8 chance, n=927), lemongrass (×8.7 chance, n=34), lentil (×8.4 chance, n=33), coconut (×7.6 chance, n=210), mango (×7.0 chance, n=47) and pepper (×6.1 chance, n=923). 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. turmeric — PPMI 3.77 · ×43.3 chance · n=933 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
2. coriander — PPMI 3.53 · ×34.2 chance · n=932 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
3. cumin — PPMI 2.82 · ×16.8 chance · n=927 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
4. lemongrass — PPMI 2.16 · ×8.7 chance · n=34 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
5. lentil — PPMI 2.12 · ×8.4 chance · n=33 (lentil itself appears in 267 recipes)
6. coconut — PPMI 2.03 · ×7.6 chance · n=210 (coconut itself appears in 1,858 recipes)
7. mango — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=47 (mango itself appears in 457 recipes)
8. pepper — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=923 (pepper itself appears in 10,193 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Kara Kuzhambu (Sour Shallot and Aubergine Gravy) — with turmeric, coriander, cumin, coconut
• Xitti Kodi (Saraswat Fish Curry with Kokum, No Onion or Garlic) — with turmeric, coriander, cumin, coconut
• Ghormeh Sabzi (Herb and Bean Stew) — with turmeric, coriander, pepper
• Amba (Fermented Green Mango and Fenugreek Pickle) — with turmeric, cumin, mango
• Nadan Meen Curry with Kudampuli — with turmeric, coriander, coconut
• Sindhi Kadhi (Roasted Gram Flour and Tamarind Vegetable Stew) — with turmeric, coriander, cumin

How this was measured

fenugreek appears in 942 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.