Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with lemon peel?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with lemon peel most disproportionately are orange peel (×9.1 chance, n=65), lemon juice (×6.2 chance, n=406), blueberry (×4.6 chance, n=26), milk fat (×4.3 chance, n=49), raspberry (×3.1 chance, n=29), strawberry (×3.1 chance, n=40), mint (×2.9 chance, n=40) and apricot (×2.8 chance, n=21). 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. orange peel — PPMI 2.21 · ×9.1 chance · n=65 (orange peel itself appears in 604 recipes)
  2. lemon juice — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=406 (lemon juice itself appears in 5,530 recipes)
  3. blueberry — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.6 chance · n=26 (blueberry itself appears in 474 recipes)
  4. milk fat — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=49 (milk fat itself appears in 962 recipes)
  5. raspberry — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=29 (raspberry itself appears in 794 recipes)
  6. strawberry — PPMI 1.12 · ×3.1 chance · n=40 (strawberry itself appears in 1,105 recipes)
  7. mint — PPMI 1.08 · ×2.9 chance · n=40 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
  8. apricot — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=21 (apricot itself appears in 638 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

lemon peel appears in 752 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.