Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with apple?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with apple most disproportionately are grape (×7.0 chance, n=96), raisin (×5.1 chance, n=386), cranberry (×4.9 chance, n=177), cinnamon (×4.6 chance, n=1066), cider (×4.1 chance, n=179), plum (×3.8 chance, n=43), sauerkraut (×3.7 chance, n=31) and nutmeg (×3.5 chance, n=366). 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. grape — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=96 (grape itself appears in 353 recipes)
2. raisin — PPMI 1.62 · ×5.1 chance · n=386 (raisin itself appears in 1,963 recipes)
3. cranberry — PPMI 1.60 · ×4.9 chance · n=177 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
4. cinnamon — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=1066 (cinnamon itself appears in 5,918 recipes)
5. cider — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=179 (cider itself appears in 1,135 recipes)
6. plum — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=43 (plum itself appears in 290 recipes)
7. sauerkraut — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=31 (sauerkraut itself appears in 216 recipes)
8. nutmeg — PPMI 1.25 · ×3.5 chance · n=366 (nutmeg itself appears in 2,686 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Apfelstrudel (Apple Strudel) — with raisin, cinnamon
• Butternut Squash Soup with Brown Butter — with cider, nutmeg
• Chicken Shawarma Stuffed Sweet Potatoes — with cinnamon, cider
• Chicken Vindaloo — with cinnamon, cider
• Cincinnati-Style Chili over Spaghetti — with cinnamon, cider
• Grilled Turkey Tenderloin with Apple Cider Glaze — with cinnamon, cider

How this was measured

apple appears in 2,480 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.