Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with blueberry?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with blueberry most disproportionately are blackberry (×33.8 chance, n=42), raspberry (×16.2 chance, n=96), strawberry (×15.9 chance, n=131), peach (×5.9 chance, n=24), banana (×5.5 chance, n=42), lemon peel (×4.6 chance, n=26), yogurt (×4.3 chance, n=37) and cream cheese (×3.8 chance, n=83). 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. blackberry — PPMI 3.52 · ×33.8 chance · n=42 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)
  2. raspberry — PPMI 2.79 · ×16.2 chance · n=96 (raspberry itself appears in 794 recipes)
  3. strawberry — PPMI 2.77 · ×15.9 chance · n=131 (strawberry itself appears in 1,105 recipes)
  4. peach — PPMI 1.78 · ×5.9 chance · n=24 (peach itself appears in 546 recipes)
  5. banana — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=42 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)
  6. lemon peel — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.6 chance · n=26 (lemon peel itself appears in 752 recipes)
  7. yogurt — PPMI 1.47 · ×4.3 chance · n=37 (yogurt itself appears in 1,146 recipes)
  8. cream cheese — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=83 (cream cheese itself appears in 2,932 recipes)

How this was measured

blueberry appears in 474 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.