Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cocoa?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cocoa most disproportionately are peppermint (×8.0 chance, n=85), coffee (×7.9 chance, n=428), peanut butter (×6.0 chance, n=477), hazelnut (×4.8 chance, n=112), macadamia nut (×4.2 chance, n=33), vanilla (×4.2 chance, n=2832), oat (×3.6 chance, n=344) and walnut (×3.2 chance, n=671). 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. peppermint — PPMI 2.08 · ×8.0 chance · n=85 (peppermint itself appears in 140 recipes)
  2. coffee — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=428 (coffee itself appears in 717 recipes)
  3. peanut butter — PPMI 1.80 · ×6.0 chance · n=477 (peanut butter itself appears in 1,046 recipes)
  4. hazelnut — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.8 chance · n=112 (hazelnut itself appears in 307 recipes)
  5. macadamia nut — PPMI 1.45 · ×4.2 chance · n=33 (macadamia nut itself appears in 103 recipes)
  6. vanilla — PPMI 1.42 · ×4.2 chance · n=2832 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
  7. oat — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=344 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
  8. walnut — PPMI 1.15 · ×3.2 chance · n=671 (walnut itself appears in 2,816 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

cocoa appears in 4,807 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.