Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with tamarind?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with tamarind most disproportionately are celery oil (×12.7 chance, n=338), tabasco pepper (×10.2 chance, n=262), lovage (×7.5 chance, n=28), vinegar (×7.4 chance, n=1612), crab (×5.6 chance, n=86), horseradish (×5.2 chance, n=58), cider (×4.7 chance, n=140) and mustard (×4.5 chance, n=508). 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
- celery oil — PPMI 2.54 · ×12.7 chance · n=338 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
- tabasco pepper — PPMI 2.32 · ×10.2 chance · n=262 (tabasco pepper itself appears in 977 recipes)
- lovage — PPMI 2.01 · ×7.5 chance · n=28 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
- vinegar — PPMI 2.00 · ×7.4 chance · n=1612 (vinegar itself appears in 8,238 recipes)
- crab — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=86 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
- horseradish — PPMI 1.64 · ×5.2 chance · n=58 (horseradish itself appears in 425 recipes)
- cider — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.7 chance · n=140 (cider itself appears in 1,135 recipes)
- mustard — PPMI 1.51 · ×4.5 chance · n=508 (mustard itself appears in 4,243 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use tamarind with one of its measured partners:
- Sambar — with mustard
- Chilli Crab (Mud Crab in Tomato and Sambal Gravy) — with crab
- Kara Kuzhambu (Sour Shallot and Aubergine Gravy) — with mustard
- Mirchi ka Salan (Chillies in Peanut and Sesame Gravy) — with mustard
- Rasam (Pepper and Tamarind Broth) — with mustard
- Sambar (Toor Dal and Vegetables with Tamarind) — with mustard
How this was measured
tamarind appears in 1,682 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.