Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with broccoli?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with broccoli most disproportionately are cauliflower (×19.5 chance, n=117), cream chicken soup (×8.0 chance, n=21), cream mushroom soup (×7.4 chance, n=21), cheddar cheese (×4.0 chance, n=222), brown rice (×3.8 chance, n=24), macaroni (×3.8 chance, n=198), cottage cheese (×3.2 chance, n=20) and swiss cheese (×3.2 chance, n=31). 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. cauliflower — PPMI 2.97 · ×19.5 chance · n=117 (cauliflower itself appears in 368 recipes)
  2. cream chicken soup — PPMI 2.08 · ×8.0 chance · n=21 (cream chicken soup itself appears in 160 recipes)
  3. cream mushroom soup — PPMI 2.00 · ×7.4 chance · n=21 (cream mushroom soup itself appears in 174 recipes)
  4. cheddar cheese — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=222 (cheddar cheese itself appears in 3,371 recipes)
  5. brown rice — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=24 (brown rice itself appears in 383 recipes)
  6. macaroni — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=198 (macaroni itself appears in 3,181 recipes)
  7. cottage cheese — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.2 chance · n=20 (cottage cheese itself appears in 377 recipes)
  8. swiss cheese — PPMI 1.17 · ×3.2 chance · n=31 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

broccoli appears in 1,041 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.