Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with buttermilk?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with buttermilk most disproportionately are blackberry (×5.7 chance, n=25), grain wheat flour (×4.3 chance, n=84), currant (×3.1 chance, n=21), blueberry (×2.7 chance, n=34), coffee (×2.5 chance, n=48), lard (×2.4 chance, n=199), egg (×2.2 chance, n=1307) and wheat (×2.1 chance, n=1170). 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 1.74 · ×5.7 chance · n=25 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)
2. grain wheat flour — PPMI 1.47 · ×4.3 chance · n=84 (grain wheat flour itself appears in 733 recipes)
3. currant — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=21 (currant itself appears in 257 recipes)
4. blueberry — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=34 (blueberry itself appears in 474 recipes)
5. coffee — PPMI 0.93 · ×2.5 chance · n=48 (coffee itself appears in 717 recipes)
6. lard — PPMI 0.89 · ×2.4 chance · n=199 (lard itself appears in 3,103 recipes)
7. egg — PPMI 0.81 · ×2.2 chance · n=1307 (egg itself appears in 22,120 recipes)
8. wheat — PPMI 0.75 · ×2.1 chance · n=1170 (wheat itself appears in 20,890 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Tiramisu — with coffee, egg
• Country Ham with Red-Eye Gravy — with coffee, lard
• Cornbread — with egg
• Fried Green Tomatoes — with egg
• Hushpuppies — with egg
• Danish Æbleskiver — with egg

How this was measured

buttermilk appears in 1,682 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.