Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with lemon juice?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with lemon juice most disproportionately are lemon peel (×6.2 chance, n=406), mint (×2.6 chance, n=257), salmon (×2.5 chance, n=135), chickpea (×2.5 chance, n=101), chicory (×2.5 chance, n=34), artichoke (×2.5 chance, n=87), tarragon (×2.5 chance, n=112) and yogurt (×2.4 chance, n=242). 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
- lemon peel — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=406 (lemon peel itself appears in 752 recipes)
- mint — PPMI 0.94 · ×2.6 chance · n=257 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
- salmon — PPMI 0.94 · ×2.5 chance · n=135 (salmon itself appears in 610 recipes)
- chickpea — PPMI 0.92 · ×2.5 chance · n=101 (chickpea itself appears in 465 recipes)
- chicory — PPMI 0.91 · ×2.5 chance · n=34 (chicory itself appears in 157 recipes)
- artichoke — PPMI 0.91 · ×2.5 chance · n=87 (artichoke itself appears in 403 recipes)
- tarragon — PPMI 0.91 · ×2.5 chance · n=112 (tarragon itself appears in 519 recipes)
- yogurt — PPMI 0.89 · ×2.4 chance · n=242 (yogurt itself appears in 1,146 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use lemon juice with one of its measured partners:
- Falafel with Roasted Tomato and Yogurt Sauce — with mint, chickpea, yogurt
- Harissa Roasted Salmon with Yogurt Sauce — with mint, salmon, yogurt
- Dhokla — with chickpea, yogurt
- Fatteh (Chickpea and Bread Pudding) — with chickpea, yogurt
- Bulgur Salad with Garbanzo Beans, Feta, and Plum Tomatoes — with lemon peel, mint
- French-Style Shrimp Salad — with artichoke, tarragon
How this was measured
lemon juice appears in 5,530 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.