Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cream?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cream most disproportionately are chive (×3.3 chance, n=712), gelatin (×2.9 chance, n=669), coffee (×2.9 chance, n=334), strawberry (×2.7 chance, n=475), blackberry (×2.6 chance, n=69), peppermint (×2.4 chance, n=54), milk fat (×2.4 chance, n=371) and mandarin (×2.3 chance, n=105). 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. chive — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=712 (chive itself appears in 1,338 recipes)
  2. gelatin — PPMI 1.08 · ×2.9 chance · n=669 (gelatin itself appears in 1,418 recipes)
  3. coffee — PPMI 1.06 · ×2.9 chance · n=334 (coffee itself appears in 717 recipes)
  4. strawberry — PPMI 0.98 · ×2.7 chance · n=475 (strawberry itself appears in 1,105 recipes)
  5. blackberry — PPMI 0.94 · ×2.6 chance · n=69 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)
  6. peppermint — PPMI 0.88 · ×2.4 chance · n=54 (peppermint itself appears in 140 recipes)
  7. milk fat — PPMI 0.88 · ×2.4 chance · n=371 (milk fat itself appears in 962 recipes)
  8. mandarin — PPMI 0.85 · ×2.3 chance · n=105 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

cream appears in 10,243 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.