Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cinnamon?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cinnamon most disproportionately are lovage (×10.6 chance, n=140), pumpkin (×6.5 chance, n=498), nutmeg (×6.1 chance, n=1533), raisin (×4.9 chance, n=892), cardamom (×4.8 chance, n=181), apple (×4.6 chance, n=1066), mace (×4.4 chance, n=51) and star anise (×4.0 chance, n=53). 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. lovage — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=140 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
2. pumpkin — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=498 (pumpkin itself appears in 821 recipes)
3. nutmeg — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=1533 (nutmeg itself appears in 2,686 recipes)
4. raisin — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=892 (raisin itself appears in 1,963 recipes)
5. cardamom — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.8 chance · n=181 (cardamom itself appears in 403 recipes)
6. apple — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=1066 (apple itself appears in 2,480 recipes)
7. mace — PPMI 1.48 · ×4.4 chance · n=51 (mace itself appears in 125 recipes)
8. star anise — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=53 (star anise itself appears in 142 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Stollen (Christmas Fruit Bread) — with nutmeg, raisin, cardamom
• Glögg — with raisin, cardamom, star anise
• Mauby — with nutmeg, mace, star anise
• Pho Bo (Beef Noodle Soup) — with cardamom, star anise
• Mole Poblano — with pumpkin, raisin
• Berbere Spice Blend — with nutmeg, cardamom

How this was measured

cinnamon appears in 5,918 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.