Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with peanut?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with peanut most disproportionately are thai pepper (×12.8 chance, n=21), lemongrass (×7.0 chance, n=22), lime juice (×4.9 chance, n=105), mint (×4.7 chance, n=65), sesame oil (×3.8 chance, n=84), lime (×3.5 chance, n=54), fish (×3.4 chance, n=87) and cilantro (×3.4 chance, n=116). 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. thai pepper — PPMI 2.55 · ×12.8 chance · n=21 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
2. lemongrass — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=22 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
3. lime juice — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=105 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)
4. mint — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=65 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
5. sesame oil — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=84 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
6. lime — PPMI 1.25 · ×3.5 chance · n=54 (lime itself appears in 1,288 recipes)
7. fish — PPMI 1.23 · ×3.4 chance · n=87 (fish itself appears in 2,118 recipes)
8. cilantro — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=116 (cilantro itself appears in 2,851 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Bun Bo Nam Bo (Southern Beef Noodle Salad) — with lemongrass, lime juice, mint, lime, fish, cilantro
• Vietnamese Grilled Lemongrass Chicken Vermicelli Bowls (Bun Ga Nuong) — with lemongrass, lime juice, mint, lime, fish, cilantro
• Goi Ga (Chicken Salad) — with lime juice, mint, lime, fish, cilantro
• Goi Du Du (Green Papaya Salad) — with lime juice, mint, lime, fish, cilantro
• Fiery Beef And Rice Noodle Salad — with lime juice, mint, lime, fish, cilantro
• Vietnamese Lemongrass Beef Stir-Fry — with lemongrass, lime juice, lime, fish, cilantro

How this was measured

peanut appears in 762 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.