Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with bacon?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with bacon most disproportionately are lima bean (×5.6 chance, n=35), cured pork (×4.4 chance, n=53), smoke (×4.1 chance, n=72), sauerkraut (×3.5 chance, n=29), turnip (×3.1 chance, n=22), blue cheese (×2.9 chance, n=45), swiss cheese (×2.8 chance, n=63) and bean (×2.8 chance, n=226). 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. lima bean — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=35 (lima bean itself appears in 164 recipes)
2. cured pork — PPMI 1.49 · ×4.4 chance · n=53 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
3. smoke — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=72 (smoke itself appears in 463 recipes)
4. sauerkraut — PPMI 1.26 · ×3.5 chance · n=29 (sauerkraut itself appears in 216 recipes)
5. turnip — PPMI 1.12 · ×3.1 chance · n=22 (turnip itself appears in 189 recipes)
6. blue cheese — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=45 (blue cheese itself appears in 414 recipes)
7. swiss cheese — PPMI 1.04 · ×2.8 chance · n=63 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)
8. bean — PPMI 1.04 · ×2.8 chance · n=226 (bean itself appears in 2,109 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Feijoada — with bean
• Feijao Tropeiro — with bean
• Full English Breakfast — with bean
• Locro — with bean
• Refried Beans — with bean
• South West Blue Cheese Bacon Burgers Recipe — with blue cheese

How this was measured

bacon appears in 2,417 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.