Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with pepper?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with pepper most disproportionately are fenugreek (×6.1 chance, n=923), turmeric (×4.2 chance, n=979), coriander (×3.6 chance, n=1060), pimento (×2.9 chance, n=143), cumin (×2.5 chance, n=1463), lima bean (×2.2 chance, n=57), okra (×2.1 chance, n=44) and tamarind (×2.1 chance, n=559). 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. fenugreek — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=923 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
2. turmeric — PPMI 1.44 · ×4.2 chance · n=979 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
3. coriander — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=1060 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
4. pimento — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=143 (pimento itself appears in 312 recipes)
5. cumin — PPMI 0.90 · ×2.5 chance · n=1463 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
6. lima bean — PPMI 0.78 · ×2.2 chance · n=57 (lima bean itself appears in 164 recipes)
7. okra — PPMI 0.73 · ×2.1 chance · n=44 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
8. tamarind — PPMI 0.73 · ×2.1 chance · n=559 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Crispy Spiced Okra Curry — with turmeric, coriander, cumin, okra
• Kuku wa Nazi (Chicken in Coconut Milk) — with turmeric, coriander, cumin, tamarind
• Mchuzi wa Samaki (Swahili Fish Curry) — with turmeric, coriander, cumin, tamarind
• Bamia (Okra Stew) — with coriander, cumin, okra
• Ghormeh Sabzi (Herb and Bean Stew) — with fenugreek, turmeric, coriander
• Beef Malabar — with turmeric, coriander, cumin

How this was measured

pepper appears in 10,193 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.