Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with tabasco pepper?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with tabasco pepper most disproportionately are tamarind (×10.2 chance, n=262), lovage (×9.2 chance, n=20), celery oil (×7.9 chance, n=122), crab (×6.2 chance, n=55), horseradish (×5.4 chance, n=35), vinegar (×3.6 chance, n=458), green bell pepper (×3.1 chance, n=132) and bay (×3.1 chance, n=75). 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. tamarind — PPMI 2.32 · ×10.2 chance · n=262 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
  2. lovage — PPMI 2.22 · ×9.2 chance · n=20 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
  3. celery oil — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=122 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
  4. crab — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=55 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
  5. horseradish — PPMI 1.68 · ×5.4 chance · n=35 (horseradish itself appears in 425 recipes)
  6. vinegar — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=458 (vinegar itself appears in 8,238 recipes)
  7. green bell pepper — PPMI 1.15 · ×3.1 chance · n=132 (green bell pepper itself appears in 2,733 recipes)
  8. bay — PPMI 1.14 · ×3.1 chance · n=75 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)

How this was measured

tabasco pepper appears in 977 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.