Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with brandy?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with brandy most disproportionately are cherry (×8.0 chance, n=58), apricot (×6.9 chance, n=29), orange (×6.9 chance, n=80), rum (×5.6 chance, n=23), coffee (×4.4 chance, n=21), milk fat (×4.3 chance, n=27), raspberry (×3.8 chance, n=20) and orange juice (×3.4 chance, n=40). 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
- cherry — PPMI 2.08 · ×8.0 chance · n=58 (cherry itself appears in 1,095 recipes)
- apricot — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=29 (apricot itself appears in 638 recipes)
- orange — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=80 (orange itself appears in 1,768 recipes)
- rum — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=23 (rum itself appears in 621 recipes)
- coffee — PPMI 1.49 · ×4.4 chance · n=21 (coffee itself appears in 717 recipes)
- milk fat — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.3 chance · n=27 (milk fat itself appears in 962 recipes)
- raspberry — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=20 (raspberry itself appears in 794 recipes)
- orange juice — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=40 (orange juice itself appears in 1,789 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use brandy with one of its measured partners:
- Sangria — with orange, orange juice
- Melomakarona (Honey Walnut Cookies) — with orange, orange juice
- Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cake) — with cherry
How this was measured
brandy appears in 420 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.