Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with radish?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with radish most disproportionately are enokidake (×45.5 chance, n=42), kelp (×37.0 chance, n=58), chinese cabbage (×34.7 chance, n=52), seaweed (×19.8 chance, n=37), wasabi (×18.7 chance, n=22), sake (×13.8 chance, n=82), squid (×12.5 chance, n=26) and pear (×11.6 chance, n=50). 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. enokidake — PPMI 3.82 · ×45.5 chance · n=42 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
2. kelp — PPMI 3.61 · ×37.0 chance · n=58 (kelp itself appears in 180 recipes)
3. chinese cabbage — PPMI 3.55 · ×34.7 chance · n=52 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
4. seaweed — PPMI 2.98 · ×19.8 chance · n=37 (seaweed itself appears in 215 recipes)
5. wasabi — PPMI 2.93 · ×18.7 chance · n=22 (wasabi itself appears in 135 recipes)
6. sake — PPMI 2.63 · ×13.8 chance · n=82 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)
7. squid — PPMI 2.53 · ×12.5 chance · n=26 (squid itself appears in 238 recipes)
8. pear — PPMI 2.45 · ×11.6 chance · n=50 (pear itself appears in 493 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Baechu Kimchi (Whole Napa Cabbage Kimchi) — with chinese cabbage, pear
• Baek Kimchi (White Kimchi with Pear, Jujube and Chestnut) — with chinese cabbage, pear
• Naengmyeon (냉면) — with pear
• Buri Daikon (Yellowtail Simmered with Daikon) — with sake
• Kenchinjiru (Temple Soup of Root Vegetables and Crumbled Tofu) — with sake
• Nukazuke (Rice-Bran Pickles and the Bed That Makes Them) — with kelp

How this was measured

radish appears in 555 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.