Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with egg?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with egg most disproportionately are buttermilk (×2.2 chance, n=1307), vanilla (×2.2 chance, n=6888), lard (×2.2 chance, n=2337), yeast (×2.0 chance, n=2345), walnut (×1.9 chance, n=1895), wheat (×1.9 chance, n=13997), milk fat (×1.9 chance, n=643) and date (×1.9 chance, n=254). 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
- buttermilk — PPMI 0.81 · ×2.2 chance · n=1307 (buttermilk itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
- vanilla — PPMI 0.79 · ×2.2 chance · n=6888 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
- lard — PPMI 0.77 · ×2.2 chance · n=2337 (lard itself appears in 3,103 recipes)
- yeast — PPMI 0.68 · ×2.0 chance · n=2345 (yeast itself appears in 3,435 recipes)
- walnut — PPMI 0.66 · ×1.9 chance · n=1895 (walnut itself appears in 2,816 recipes)
- wheat — PPMI 0.66 · ×1.9 chance · n=13997 (wheat itself appears in 20,890 recipes)
- milk fat — PPMI 0.66 · ×1.9 chance · n=643 (milk fat itself appears in 962 recipes)
- date — PPMI 0.65 · ×1.9 chance · n=254 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use egg with one of its measured partners:
- Makowiec (Poppy Seed Roll) — with vanilla, yeast, walnut
- Aranygaluska (Golden Pull-Apart Buns) — with vanilla, yeast, walnut
- Egg Tart (蛋挞) — with vanilla, lard
- Pan Dulce (Conchas) — with vanilla, yeast
- Kürtőskalács (Chimney Cake) — with yeast, walnut
- Sticky Toffee Pudding — with vanilla, date
How this was measured
egg appears in 22,120 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.