Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cider?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cider most disproportionately are beet (×7.6 chance, n=34), celery oil (×7.1 chance, n=128), vinegar (×6.7 chance, n=984), maple syrup (×4.8 chance, n=43), tamarind (×4.7 chance, n=140), cabbage (×4.3 chance, n=90), apple (×4.1 chance, n=179) and mustard (×4.0 chance, n=303). 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. beet — PPMI 2.03 · ×7.6 chance · n=34 (beet itself appears in 250 recipes)
2. celery oil — PPMI 1.96 · ×7.1 chance · n=128 (celery oil itself appears in 1,008 recipes)
3. vinegar — PPMI 1.90 · ×6.7 chance · n=984 (vinegar itself appears in 8,238 recipes)
4. maple syrup — PPMI 1.56 · ×4.8 chance · n=43 (maple syrup itself appears in 507 recipes)
5. tamarind — PPMI 1.54 · ×4.7 chance · n=140 (tamarind itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
6. cabbage — PPMI 1.47 · ×4.3 chance · n=90 (cabbage itself appears in 1,166 recipes)
7. apple — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=179 (apple itself appears in 2,480 recipes)
8. mustard — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=303 (mustard itself appears in 4,243 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Grilled Maple Bourbon Pork Chops — with vinegar, maple syrup, apple, mustard
• Chow Chow (End-of-Garden Relish) — with vinegar, cabbage, apple, mustard
• Red Beet Eggs — with beet, vinegar, apple, mustard
• Barbecue Ribs — with vinegar, apple, mustard
• Collard Greens — with vinegar, apple, mustard
• Potato Salad — with vinegar, apple, mustard

How this was measured

cider appears in 1,135 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.