Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with apricot?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with apricot most disproportionately are plum (×13.8 chance, n=40), brandy (×6.9 chance, n=29), date (×6.0 chance, n=23), orange peel (×4.5 chance, n=27), almond (×4.2 chance, n=103), pear (×4.1 chance, n=20), cranberry (×4.0 chance, n=37) and raisin (×3.6 chance, n=71). 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. plum — PPMI 2.62 · ×13.8 chance · n=40 (plum itself appears in 290 recipes)
2. brandy — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=29 (brandy itself appears in 420 recipes)
3. date — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=23 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
4. orange peel — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=27 (orange peel itself appears in 604 recipes)
5. almond — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.2 chance · n=103 (almond itself appears in 2,424 recipes)
6. pear — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=20 (pear itself appears in 493 recipes)
7. cranberry — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=37 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
8. raisin — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=71 (raisin itself appears in 1,963 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Ghapama (Pumpkin Baked with Rice and Dried Fruit) — with almond, raisin
• Bread and Butter Pudding — with raisin
• Greek-stuffed Tomatoes — with raisin
• Spiced Chickpea and Sweet Potato Tagine — with almond
• Bobotie with Yellow Rice — with raisin

How this was measured

apricot appears in 638 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.