Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with mint?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with mint most disproportionately are watermelon (×10.1 chance, n=20), melon (×10.0 chance, n=29), lamb (×9.6 chance, n=96), lemongrass (×9.0 chance, n=43), english cucumber (×8.8 chance, n=22), lime juice (×6.2 chance, n=203), feta cheese (×5.8 chance, n=72) and yogurt (×5.4 chance, n=113). 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. watermelon — PPMI 2.31 · ×10.1 chance · n=20 (watermelon itself appears in 109 recipes)
2. melon — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=29 (melon itself appears in 160 recipes)
3. lamb — PPMI 2.26 · ×9.6 chance · n=96 (lamb itself appears in 551 recipes)
4. lemongrass — PPMI 2.20 · ×9.0 chance · n=43 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
5. english cucumber — PPMI 2.17 · ×8.8 chance · n=22 (english cucumber itself appears in 138 recipes)
6. lime juice — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=203 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)
7. feta cheese — PPMI 1.75 · ×5.8 chance · n=72 (feta cheese itself appears in 689 recipes)
8. yogurt — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=113 (yogurt itself appears in 1,146 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lemongrass, english cucumber, lime juice
• Lamb Kofta with Cucumber Tomato Salad — with lamb, english cucumber, yogurt
• Lamb Kofta with Yogurt Sauce — with lamb, english cucumber, yogurt
• Vietnamese Grilled Lemongrass Chicken Vermicelli Bowls (Bun Ga Nuong) — with lemongrass, english cucumber, lime juice
• Raita — with english cucumber, yogurt
• Cacik — with english cucumber, yogurt

How this was measured

mint appears in 1,154 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.