Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with mango?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with mango most disproportionately are lime juice (×10.0 chance, n=129), fenugreek (×7.0 chance, n=47), avocado (×6.3 chance, n=34), lime (×6.2 chance, n=57), coriander (×5.7 chance, n=75), cilantro (×5.6 chance, n=114), mint (×5.4 chance, n=45) and turmeric (×5.4 chance, n=56). 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. lime juice — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=129 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)
2. fenugreek — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=47 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
3. avocado — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=34 (avocado itself appears in 755 recipes)
4. lime — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=57 (lime itself appears in 1,288 recipes)
5. coriander — PPMI 1.74 · ×5.7 chance · n=75 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
6. cilantro — PPMI 1.72 · ×5.6 chance · n=114 (cilantro itself appears in 2,851 recipes)
7. mint — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=45 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
8. turmeric — PPMI 1.68 · ×5.4 chance · n=56 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Banh Trang Tron (Rice Paper Salad) — with lime juice, lime, mint
• Blackened Mahi Tacos with Mango Salsa — with avocado, lime, cilantro
• Ajiaco Cubano — with lime juice, lime
• Camarones al Carbon: Grilled Tiger Shrimp with Two Sauces — with avocado, cilantro
• Blackened Mahi Mahi with Mango Salsa — with lime, cilantro
• Amba (Fermented Green Mango and Fenugreek Pickle) — with fenugreek, turmeric

How this was measured

mango appears in 457 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.