Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with butter?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with butter most disproportionately are macadamia nut (×2.0 chance, n=72), vanilla (×2.0 chance, n=6159), pecan (×1.9 chance, n=1497), cocoa (×1.9 chance, n=3138), heavy cream (×1.9 chance, n=108), oat (×1.9 chance, n=822), milk fat (×1.9 chance, n=620) and rhubarb (×1.8 chance, n=106). 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
- macadamia nut — PPMI 0.70 · ×2.0 chance · n=72 (macadamia nut itself appears in 103 recipes)
- vanilla — PPMI 0.68 · ×2.0 chance · n=6159 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
- pecan — PPMI 0.67 · ×1.9 chance · n=1497 (pecan itself appears in 2,215 recipes)
- cocoa — PPMI 0.63 · ×1.9 chance · n=3138 (cocoa itself appears in 4,807 recipes)
- heavy cream — PPMI 0.63 · ×1.9 chance · n=108 (heavy cream itself appears in 166 recipes)
- oat — PPMI 0.63 · ×1.9 chance · n=822 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
- milk fat — PPMI 0.62 · ×1.9 chance · n=620 (milk fat itself appears in 962 recipes)
- rhubarb — PPMI 0.59 · ×1.8 chance · n=106 (rhubarb itself appears in 169 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use butter with one of its measured partners:
- Pralines — with vanilla, pecan, heavy cream
- Profiteroles — with vanilla, heavy cream
- Clafoutis — with vanilla, heavy cream
- Pan Dulce (Conchas) — with vanilla, cocoa
- Sticky Toffee Pudding — with vanilla, heavy cream
- Victoria Sponge — with vanilla, heavy cream
How this was measured
butter appears in 22,081 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.