Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with green bell pepper?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with green bell pepper most disproportionately are okra (×6.7 chance, n=38), kidney bean (×5.5 chance, n=122), pimento (×5.2 chance, n=70), sausage (×5.0 chance, n=76), tomato juice (×4.7 chance, n=44), black bean (×3.8 chance, n=99), pork sausage (×3.6 chance, n=213) and celery (×3.5 chance, n=622). 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
- okra — PPMI 1.90 · ×6.7 chance · n=38 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
- kidney bean — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=122 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
- pimento — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=70 (pimento itself appears in 312 recipes)
- sausage — PPMI 1.61 · ×5.0 chance · n=76 (sausage itself appears in 353 recipes)
- tomato juice — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=44 (tomato juice itself appears in 217 recipes)
- black bean — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=99 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
- pork sausage — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=213 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
- celery — PPMI 1.25 · ×3.5 chance · n=622 (celery itself appears in 4,170 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use green bell pepper with one of its measured partners:
- Gumbo — with okra, sausage, celery
- Red Beans and Rice — with kidney bean, sausage, celery
- Red Beans and Rice — with kidney bean, sausage, celery
- Boudin — with sausage, pork sausage, celery
- Cajun Shrimp and Sausage Gumbo — with okra, sausage, celery
- Turkey and Sausage Gumbo — with okra, sausage, celery
How this was measured
green bell pepper appears in 2,733 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.