Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with turmeric?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with turmeric most disproportionately are fenugreek (×43.3 chance, n=933), coriander (×25.9 chance, n=1089), cumin (×13.6 chance, n=1158), lemongrass (×11.8 chance, n=71), lentil (×9.2 chance, n=56), chickpea (×6.5 chance, n=69), saffron (×6.4 chance, n=40) and cauliflower (×6.1 chance, n=51). 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. fenugreek — PPMI 3.77 · ×43.3 chance · n=933 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
2. coriander — PPMI 3.25 · ×25.9 chance · n=1089 (coriander itself appears in 1,841 recipes)
3. cumin — PPMI 2.61 · ×13.6 chance · n=1158 (cumin itself appears in 3,730 recipes)
4. lemongrass — PPMI 2.46 · ×11.8 chance · n=71 (lemongrass itself appears in 264 recipes)
5. lentil — PPMI 2.22 · ×9.2 chance · n=56 (lentil itself appears in 267 recipes)
6. chickpea — PPMI 1.87 · ×6.5 chance · n=69 (chickpea itself appears in 465 recipes)
7. saffron — PPMI 1.86 · ×6.4 chance · n=40 (saffron itself appears in 273 recipes)
8. cauliflower — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.1 chance · n=51 (cauliflower itself appears in 368 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Moroccan Vegetable Casserole — with coriander, cumin, chickpea, cauliflower
• Sindhi Kadhi (Roasted Gram Flour and Tamarind Vegetable Stew) — with fenugreek, coriander, cumin, chickpea
• Aloo Gobi — with coriander, cumin, cauliflower
• Satay (Moo Satay) — with coriander, cumin, lemongrass
• Couscous with Seven Vegetables (Couscous Bidawi) — with cumin, chickpea, saffron
• Rfissa — with fenugreek, lentil, saffron

How this was measured

turmeric appears in 1,457 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.