Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with lime juice?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with lime juice most disproportionately are lime peel oil (×29.9 chance, n=91), tequila (×13.5 chance, n=54), lemongrass (×12.1 chance, n=90), thai pepper (×11.6 chance, n=45), fish sauce (×10.6 chance, n=36), watermelon (×10.4 chance, n=32), mango (×10.0 chance, n=129) and avocado (×10.0 chance, n=212). 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
- lime peel oil — PPMI 3.40 · ×29.9 chance · n=91 (lime peel oil itself appears in 108 recipes)
- tequila — PPMI 2.60 · ×13.5 chance · n=54 (tequila itself appears in 142 recipes)
- lemongrass — PPMI 2.49 · ×12.1 chance · n=90 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
- thai pepper — PPMI 2.46 · ×11.6 chance · n=45 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
- fish sauce — PPMI 2.37 · ×10.6 chance · n=36 (fish sauce itself appears in 120 recipes)
- watermelon — PPMI 2.34 · ×10.4 chance · n=32 (watermelon itself appears in 109 recipes)
- mango — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=129 (mango itself appears in 457 recipes)
- avocado — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=212 (avocado itself appears in 755 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use lime juice with one of its measured partners:
- Green Curry With Shrimp And Fish (Kaeng Khiao) — with lemongrass, fish sauce, avocado
- Tom Yum Goong — with lemongrass, fish sauce
- Tom Kha Gai — with lemongrass, fish sauce
- Banh Trang Tron (Rice Paper Salad) — with fish sauce, mango
- Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lemongrass, fish sauce
- Tom Ka Kai (Thai Coconut Chicken Soup) — with lemongrass, fish sauce
How this was measured
lime juice appears in 1,796 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.