Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with orange peel?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with orange peel most disproportionately are orange juice (×15.9 chance, n=269), lemon peel (×9.1 chance, n=65), cranberry (×6.2 chance, n=54), date (×5.8 chance, n=21), apricot (×4.5 chance, n=27), milk fat (×3.4 chance, n=31), almond (×3.0 chance, n=69) and honey (×2.9 chance, n=74). 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 juice — PPMI 2.76 · ×15.9 chance · n=269 (orange juice itself appears in 1,789 recipes)
  2. lemon peel — PPMI 2.21 · ×9.1 chance · n=65 (lemon peel itself appears in 752 recipes)
  3. cranberry — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=54 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
  4. date — PPMI 1.76 · ×5.8 chance · n=21 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
  5. apricot — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=27 (apricot itself appears in 638 recipes)
  6. milk fat — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=31 (milk fat itself appears in 962 recipes)
  7. almond — PPMI 1.10 · ×3.0 chance · n=69 (almond itself appears in 2,424 recipes)
  8. honey — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=74 (honey itself appears in 2,717 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

orange peel appears in 604 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.