Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with gelatin?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with gelatin most disproportionately are mandarin (×9.7 chance, n=60), strawberry (×7.8 chance, n=191), pineapple (×6.9 chance, n=259), raspberry (×6.0 chance, n=106), blackberry (×5.9 chance, n=22), grape (×5.9 chance, n=46), cherry (×5.1 chance, n=124) and currant (×4.0 chance, n=23). 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. mandarin — PPMI 2.27 · ×9.7 chance · n=60 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)
  2. strawberry — PPMI 2.05 · ×7.8 chance · n=191 (strawberry itself appears in 1,105 recipes)
  3. pineapple — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=259 (pineapple itself appears in 1,697 recipes)
  4. raspberry — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=106 (raspberry itself appears in 794 recipes)
  5. blackberry — PPMI 1.78 · ×5.9 chance · n=22 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)
  6. grape — PPMI 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=46 (grape itself appears in 353 recipes)
  7. cherry — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=124 (cherry itself appears in 1,095 recipes)
  8. currant — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=23 (currant itself appears in 257 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

gelatin appears in 1,418 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.