Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with cheese?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cheese most disproportionately are corn grit (×4.1 chance, n=37), macaroni (×3.7 chance, n=652), rye bread (×3.5 chance, n=21), cured pork (×3.0 chance, n=51), chicory (×2.8 chance, n=24), basil (×2.7 chance, n=613), black bean (×2.7 chance, n=90) and pork sausage (×2.6 chance, n=196). 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
- corn grit — PPMI 1.42 · ×4.1 chance · n=37 (corn grit itself appears in 163 recipes)
- macaroni — PPMI 1.32 · ×3.7 chance · n=652 (macaroni itself appears in 3,181 recipes)
- rye bread — PPMI 1.25 · ×3.5 chance · n=21 (rye bread itself appears in 110 recipes)
- cured pork — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=51 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
- chicory — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=24 (chicory itself appears in 157 recipes)
- basil — PPMI 0.99 · ×2.7 chance · n=613 (basil itself appears in 4,153 recipes)
- black bean — PPMI 0.99 · ×2.7 chance · n=90 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
- pork sausage — PPMI 0.96 · ×2.6 chance · n=196 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use cheese with one of its measured partners:
- Pesto alla Genovese — with basil
- Tlayuda Oaxaquena — with black bean
- Sabzi Khordan (Fresh Herb Platter) — with basil
- Coyote Quesadilla — with black bean
- Roast Cherry Tomatoes And Feta — with basil
- Caprese Salad — with basil
How this was measured
cheese appears in 3,495 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.