Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with squash?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with squash most disproportionately are zucchini (×12.9 chance, n=149), sage (×4.7 chance, n=42), fenugreek (×3.2 chance, n=28), turmeric (×2.7 chance, n=36), coriander (×2.6 chance, n=44), macaroni (×2.6 chance, n=75), chicken broth (×2.4 chance, n=88) and cumin (×2.4 chance, n=81). 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. zucchini — PPMI 2.56 · ×12.9 chance · n=149 (zucchini itself appears in 1,264 recipes)
2. sage — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.7 chance · n=42 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
3. fenugreek — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.2 chance · n=28 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
4. turmeric — PPMI 0.99 · ×2.7 chance · n=36 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
5. coriander — PPMI 0.96 · ×2.6 chance · n=44 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
6. macaroni — PPMI 0.95 · ×2.6 chance · n=75 (macaroni itself appears in 3,181 recipes)
7. chicken broth — PPMI 0.88 · ×2.4 chance · n=88 (chicken broth itself appears in 3,993 recipes)
8. cumin — PPMI 0.86 · ×2.4 chance · n=81 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Couscous with Seven Vegetables (Couscous Bidawi) — with zucchini, turmeric, cumin
• Roasted Vegetable Tabbouleh with Grilled Flat Bread and Yogurt-Tahini Dressing — with zucchini, cumin
• Moroccan Pork Casserole — with coriander, cumin
• Chickpea and Butternut Squash Curry — with turmeric, cumin
• Locro — with cumin
• Sopa de Zapallo (Pumpkin Soup) — with cumin

How this was measured

squash appears in 583 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.