Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with tuna?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with tuna most disproportionately are wasabi (×29.6 chance, n=32), egg noodle (×8.8 chance, n=29), radish (×5.4 chance, n=24), lettuce (×4.4 chance, n=45), olive (×4.1 chance, n=59), pea (×3.9 chance, n=40), cucumber (×3.7 chance, n=56) and fish (×3.3 chance, n=56). 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. wasabi — PPMI 3.39 · ×29.6 chance · n=32 (wasabi itself appears in 135 recipes)
2. egg noodle — PPMI 2.17 · ×8.8 chance · n=29 (egg noodle itself appears in 412 recipes)
3. radish — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=24 (radish itself appears in 555 recipes)
4. lettuce — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=45 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
5. olive — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=59 (olive itself appears in 1,810 recipes)
6. pea — PPMI 1.35 · ×3.9 chance · n=40 (pea itself appears in 1,294 recipes)
7. cucumber — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=56 (cucumber itself appears in 1,908 recipes)
8. fish — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=56 (fish itself appears in 2,118 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Salade Niçoise — with olive, cucumber
• Tuna Nicoise Salad with Parmesan — with olive, fish
• Greek-Style Grilled Tuna Steaks with Lemon-Oregano Oil — with olive, fish
• Tuna Noodle Casserole with Crushed Potato Chips — with egg noodle, pea
• Marmitako — with olive, fish
• Vitello Tonnato — with olive

How this was measured

tuna appears in 510 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.