Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cheddar cheese?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cheddar cheese most disproportionately are cream chicken soup (×4.3 chance, n=36), corn grit (×4.1 chance, n=35), broccoli (×4.0 chance, n=222), cream mushroom soup (×3.7 chance, n=34), pimento (×3.6 chance, n=59), sour cream (×3.2 chance, n=63), ham (×3.1 chance, n=228) and cottage cheese (×3.1 chance, n=61). 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. cream chicken soup — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.3 chance · n=36 (cream chicken soup itself appears in 160 recipes)
2. corn grit — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=35 (corn grit itself appears in 163 recipes)
3. broccoli — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=222 (broccoli itself appears in 1,041 recipes)
4. cream mushroom soup — PPMI 1.31 · ×3.7 chance · n=34 (cream mushroom soup itself appears in 174 recipes)
5. pimento — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.6 chance · n=59 (pimento itself appears in 312 recipes)
6. sour cream — PPMI 1.15 · ×3.2 chance · n=63 (sour cream itself appears in 376 recipes)
7. ham — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=228 (ham itself appears in 1,396 recipes)
8. cottage cheese — PPMI 1.12 · ×3.1 chance · n=61 (cottage cheese itself appears in 377 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Ploughman's Lunch — with ham
• Caribbean Creamed Corn, Cornbread — with pimento
• Chicken Fajitas — with sour cream

How this was measured

cheddar cheese appears in 3,371 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.