Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with lime?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with lime most disproportionately are tequila (×20.5 chance, n=59), lemongrass (×15.4 chance, n=82), thai pepper (×13.4 chance, n=37), fish sauce (×8.2 chance, n=20), avocado (×6.9 chance, n=106), cilantro (×6.5 chance, n=377), mango (×6.2 chance, n=57) and rum (×5.7 chance, n=71). 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. tequila — PPMI 3.02 · ×20.5 chance · n=59 (tequila itself appears in 142 recipes)
2. lemongrass — PPMI 2.73 · ×15.4 chance · n=82 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
3. thai pepper — PPMI 2.59 · ×13.4 chance · n=37 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
4. fish sauce — PPMI 2.11 · ×8.2 chance · n=20 (fish sauce itself appears in 120 recipes)
5. avocado — PPMI 1.94 · ×6.9 chance · n=106 (avocado itself appears in 755 recipes)
6. cilantro — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=377 (cilantro itself appears in 2,851 recipes)
7. mango — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=57 (mango itself appears in 457 recipes)
8. rum — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.7 chance · n=71 (rum itself appears in 621 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Green Curry With Shrimp And Fish (Kaeng Khiao) — with lemongrass, fish sauce, avocado, cilantro
• Tom Yum Goong — with lemongrass, fish sauce, cilantro
• Tom Kha Gai — with lemongrass, fish sauce, cilantro
• Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lemongrass, fish sauce, cilantro
• Tom Kha Teacups — with lemongrass, fish sauce, cilantro
• Tom Ka Kai (Thai Coconut Chicken Soup) — with lemongrass, fish sauce, cilantro

How this was measured

lime appears in 1,288 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.