Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with orange juice?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with orange juice most disproportionately are orange peel (×15.9 chance, n=269), mandarin (×6.6 chance, n=52), watermelon (×6.5 chance, n=20), melon (×6.0 chance, n=27), cranberry (×4.9 chance, n=126), pineapple (×3.8 chance, n=183), date (×3.7 chance, n=40) and peach (×3.6 chance, n=55). 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. orange peel — PPMI 2.76 · ×15.9 chance · n=269 (orange peel itself appears in 604 recipes)
  2. mandarin — PPMI 1.89 · ×6.6 chance · n=52 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)
  3. watermelon — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=20 (watermelon itself appears in 109 recipes)
  4. melon — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=27 (melon itself appears in 160 recipes)
  5. cranberry — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.9 chance · n=126 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
  6. pineapple — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=183 (pineapple itself appears in 1,697 recipes)
  7. date — PPMI 1.32 · ×3.7 chance · n=40 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
  8. peach — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=55 (peach itself appears in 546 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

orange juice appears in 1,789 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.