Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with kidney bean?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with kidney bean most disproportionately are lima bean (×24.7 chance, n=33), chili powder (×12.5 chance, n=25), black bean (×10.3 chance, n=51), chickpea (×9.8 chance, n=37), green bell pepper (×5.5 chance, n=122), beef (×4.2 chance, n=193), cumin (×4.2 chance, n=126) and oregano (×4.1 chance, n=113). 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. lima bean — PPMI 3.21 · ×24.7 chance · n=33 (lima bean itself appears in 164 recipes)
2. chili powder — PPMI 2.52 · ×12.5 chance · n=25 (chili powder itself appears in 246 recipes)
3. black bean — PPMI 2.33 · ×10.3 chance · n=51 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
4. chickpea — PPMI 2.28 · ×9.8 chance · n=37 (chickpea itself appears in 465 recipes)
5. green bell pepper — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=122 (green bell pepper itself appears in 2,733 recipes)
6. beef — PPMI 1.43 · ×4.2 chance · n=193 (beef itself appears in 5,670 recipes)
7. cumin — PPMI 1.42 · ×4.2 chance · n=126 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
8. oregano — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=113 (oregano itself appears in 3,429 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Chili Mac Skillet with Melted Cheddar — with chili powder, green bell pepper, beef, cumin
• Classic Beef Chili with Kidney Beans — with chili powder, beef, cumin, oregano
• One-Pot Beef and Bean Chili — with chili powder, black bean, beef, cumin
• Classic Beef Chili with Skillet Cornbread — with chili powder, beef, cumin
• Loaded Veggie Chili with Cornbread — with chili powder, black bean, cumin
• One-Pot Vegetarian Chili with Sweet Potato — with chili powder, black bean, cumin

How this was measured

kidney bean appears in 518 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.