Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with ham?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with ham most disproportionately are smoke (×10.7 chance, n=109), swiss cheese (×10.6 chance, n=136), provolone cheese (×10.0 chance, n=41), cured pork (×4.6 chance, n=32), white bread (×4.6 chance, n=37), asparagus (×3.8 chance, n=42), pea (×3.2 chance, n=91) and cheddar cheese (×3.1 chance, n=228). 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. smoke — PPMI 2.37 · ×10.7 chance · n=109 (smoke itself appears in 463 recipes)
2. swiss cheese — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=136 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)
3. provolone cheese — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=41 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
4. cured pork — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=32 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
5. white bread — PPMI 1.51 · ×4.6 chance · n=37 (white bread itself appears in 371 recipes)
6. asparagus — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=42 (asparagus itself appears in 508 recipes)
7. pea — PPMI 1.17 · ×3.2 chance · n=91 (pea itself appears in 1,294 recipes)
8. cheddar cheese — PPMI 1.13 · ×3.1 chance · n=228 (cheddar cheese itself appears in 3,371 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Ploughman's Lunch — with cheddar cheese
• Francesinha — with white bread
• Cuban Sandwich (Cubano) — with swiss cheese
• Media Noche Sandwich — with swiss cheese
• Hoppin' John Soup — with pea
• Arroz con Gandules — with pea

How this was measured

ham appears in 1,396 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.