Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with honey?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with honey most disproportionately are sake (×6.5 chance, n=190), grain wheat flour (×5.9 chance, n=185), fig (×5.7 chance, n=35), rye flour (×4.3 chance, n=24), oat (×3.3 chance, n=176), plum (×3.0 chance, n=37), orange peel (×2.9 chance, n=74) and pear (×2.9 chance, n=60). 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
- sake — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=190 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)
- grain wheat flour — PPMI 1.78 · ×5.9 chance · n=185 (grain wheat flour itself appears in 733 recipes)
- fig — PPMI 1.74 · ×5.7 chance · n=35 (fig itself appears in 144 recipes)
- rye flour — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=24 (rye flour itself appears in 131 recipes)
- oat — PPMI 1.18 · ×3.3 chance · n=176 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
- plum — PPMI 1.10 · ×3.0 chance · n=37 (plum itself appears in 290 recipes)
- orange peel — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=74 (orange peel itself appears in 604 recipes)
- pear — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=60 (pear itself appears in 493 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use honey with one of its measured partners:
- Acai na Tigela — with oat
- Baklava (Greek) — with orange peel
- Korean Short Ribs — with pear
- Lamb Chops With Curried Pears — with pear
How this was measured
honey appears in 2,717 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.