Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with tomato?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with tomato most disproportionately are celery oil (×5.8 chance, n=1008), kidney bean (×4.0 chance, n=361), okra (×3.7 chance, n=86), basil (×3.3 chance, n=2413), black bean (×3.3 chance, n=354), mozzarella cheese (×3.3 chance, n=859), green bell pepper (×3.2 chance, n=1522) and red kidney bean (×3.2 chance, n=55). 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. celery oil — PPMI 1.75 · ×5.8 chance · n=1008 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
2. kidney bean — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=361 (kidney bean itself appears in 518 recipes)
3. okra — PPMI 1.32 · ×3.7 chance · n=86 (okra itself appears in 132 recipes)
4. basil — PPMI 1.21 · ×3.3 chance · n=2413 (basil itself appears in 4,153 recipes)
5. black bean — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=354 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
6. mozzarella cheese — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=859 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)
7. green bell pepper — PPMI 1.17 · ×3.2 chance · n=1522 (green bell pepper itself appears in 2,733 recipes)
8. red kidney bean — PPMI 1.15 · ×3.2 chance · n=55 (red kidney bean itself appears in 100 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Chili Mac Skillet with Melted Cheddar — with kidney bean, green bell pepper, red kidney bean
• Vegetarian Jambalaya — with kidney bean, green bell pepper, red kidney bean
• Vegetarian Red Beans and Rice — with kidney bean, green bell pepper, red kidney bean
• Dal Makhani — with kidney bean, red kidney bean
• Rajma Chawal — with kidney bean, red kidney bean
• Creole Okra(Microwave) — with okra, basil

How this was measured

tomato appears in 11,069 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.