Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cherry?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cherry most disproportionately are date (×8.8 chance, n=58), pineapple (×8.2 chance, n=240), brandy (×8.0 chance, n=58), currant (×7.2 chance, n=32), mandarin (×6.0 chance, n=29), pistachio (×5.1 chance, n=21), gelatin (×5.1 chance, n=124) and rum (×4.6 chance, n=49). 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. date — PPMI 2.18 · ×8.8 chance · n=58 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
  2. pineapple — PPMI 2.11 · ×8.2 chance · n=240 (pineapple itself appears in 1,697 recipes)
  3. brandy — PPMI 2.08 · ×8.0 chance · n=58 (brandy itself appears in 420 recipes)
  4. currant — PPMI 1.98 · ×7.2 chance · n=32 (currant itself appears in 257 recipes)
  5. mandarin — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.0 chance · n=29 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)
  6. pistachio — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=21 (pistachio itself appears in 240 recipes)
  7. gelatin — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=124 (gelatin itself appears in 1,418 recipes)
  8. rum — PPMI 1.52 · ×4.6 chance · n=49 (rum itself appears in 621 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

cherry appears in 1,095 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.