Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cranberry?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cranberry most disproportionately are orange peel (×6.2 chance, n=54), orange (×6.0 chance, n=152), raspberry (×5.4 chance, n=62), apple (×4.9 chance, n=177), orange juice (×4.9 chance, n=126), pineapple (×4.2 chance, n=103), pear (×4.1 chance, n=29) and apricot (×4.0 chance, n=37). 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. orange peel — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=54 (orange peel itself appears in 604 recipes)
  2. orange — PPMI 1.78 · ×6.0 chance · n=152 (orange itself appears in 1,768 recipes)
  3. raspberry — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=62 (raspberry itself appears in 794 recipes)
  4. apple — PPMI 1.60 · ×4.9 chance · n=177 (apple itself appears in 2,480 recipes)
  5. orange juice — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.9 chance · n=126 (orange juice itself appears in 1,789 recipes)
  6. pineapple — PPMI 1.44 · ×4.2 chance · n=103 (pineapple itself appears in 1,697 recipes)
  7. pear — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=29 (pear itself appears in 493 recipes)
  8. apricot — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=37 (apricot itself appears in 638 recipes)

How this was measured

cranberry appears in 919 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.