Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with cream cheese?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with cream cheese most disproportionately are crab (×3.9 chance, n=104), blueberry (×3.8 chance, n=83), pecan (×3.2 chance, n=330), strawberry (×3.1 chance, n=157), gelatin (×2.9 chance, n=187), pumpkin (×2.8 chance, n=104), horseradish (×2.7 chance, n=53) and mandarin (×2.5 chance, n=32). 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. crab — PPMI 1.36 · ×3.9 chance · n=104 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
  2. blueberry — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=83 (blueberry itself appears in 474 recipes)
  3. pecan — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.2 chance · n=330 (pecan itself appears in 2,215 recipes)
  4. strawberry — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=157 (strawberry itself appears in 1,105 recipes)
  5. gelatin — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=187 (gelatin itself appears in 1,418 recipes)
  6. pumpkin — PPMI 1.01 · ×2.8 chance · n=104 (pumpkin itself appears in 821 recipes)
  7. horseradish — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=53 (horseradish itself appears in 425 recipes)
  8. mandarin — PPMI 0.91 · ×2.5 chance · n=32 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

cream cheese appears in 2,932 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.