Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with pea?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with pea most disproportionately are saffron (×6.1 chance, n=34), pimento (×6.0 chance, n=38), brown rice (×4.5 chance, n=35), cauliflower (×4.0 chance, n=30), carrot (×3.9 chance, n=342), tuna (×3.9 chance, n=40), asparagus (×3.7 chance, n=38) and egg noodle (×3.6 chance, n=30). 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. saffron — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=34 (saffron itself appears in 273 recipes)
2. pimento — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=38 (pimento itself appears in 312 recipes)
3. brown rice — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=35 (brown rice itself appears in 383 recipes)
4. cauliflower — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=30 (cauliflower itself appears in 368 recipes)
5. carrot — PPMI 1.37 · ×3.9 chance · n=342 (carrot itself appears in 4,268 recipes)
6. tuna — PPMI 1.35 · ×3.9 chance · n=40 (tuna itself appears in 510 recipes)
7. asparagus — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=38 (asparagus itself appears in 508 recipes)
8. egg noodle — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=30 (egg noodle itself appears in 412 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Vegetable Biryani — with saffron, cauliflower, carrot
• Ensalada Rusa — with carrot, tuna
• Pancit Canton (Stir-Fried Wheat Noodles) — with carrot, egg noodle
• Arroz con Pollo — with saffron, pimento
• Pasta Salad — with pimento, carrot
• Glossy Shrimp and Vegetable Udon Stir-Fry — with carrot, egg noodle

How this was measured

pea appears in 1,294 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.