Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with orange?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with orange most disproportionately are grapefruit (×9.7 chance, n=32), tequila (×7.1 chance, n=28), brandy (×6.9 chance, n=80), grape (×6.3 chance, n=62), cranberry (×6.0 chance, n=152), mandarin (×5.7 chance, n=44), fig (×5.0 chance, n=20) and date (×4.0 chance, n=42). 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. grapefruit — PPMI 2.27 · ×9.7 chance · n=32 (grapefruit itself appears in 119 recipes)
2. tequila — PPMI 1.96 · ×7.1 chance · n=28 (tequila itself appears in 142 recipes)
3. brandy — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=80 (brandy itself appears in 420 recipes)
4. grape — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=62 (grape itself appears in 353 recipes)
5. cranberry — PPMI 1.78 · ×6.0 chance · n=152 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
6. mandarin — PPMI 1.74 · ×5.7 chance · n=44 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)
7. fig — PPMI 1.61 · ×5.0 chance · n=20 (fig itself appears in 144 recipes)
8. date — PPMI 1.38 · ×4.0 chance · n=42 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Sangria — with brandy
• Mazamorra Morada — with fig
• Melomakarona (Honey Walnut Cookies) — with brandy
• Maamoul (Stuffed Semolina Cookies) — with date
• Carne Asada Burrito Bowl with Grilled Corn — with grape
• Turrón de Doña Pepa — with fig

How this was measured

orange appears in 1,768 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.