Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with almond?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with almond most disproportionately are pistachio (×6.4 chance, n=58), currant (×4.9 chance, n=48), cherry (×4.3 chance, n=179), apricot (×4.2 chance, n=103), date (×3.8 chance, n=55), cardamom (×3.5 chance, n=53), mandarin (×3.4 chance, n=36) and brandy (×3.3 chance, n=52). 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. pistachio — PPMI 1.85 · ×6.4 chance · n=58 (pistachio itself appears in 240 recipes)
  2. currant — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=48 (currant itself appears in 257 recipes)
  3. cherry — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=179 (cherry itself appears in 1,095 recipes)
  4. apricot — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.2 chance · n=103 (apricot itself appears in 638 recipes)
  5. date — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=55 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
  6. cardamom — PPMI 1.24 · ×3.5 chance · n=53 (cardamom itself appears in 403 recipes)
  7. mandarin — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=36 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)
  8. brandy — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.3 chance · n=52 (brandy itself appears in 420 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

almond appears in 2,424 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.