Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with lard?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with lard most disproportionately are blackberry (×3.2 chance, n=26), oat (×2.9 chance, n=181), wheat (×2.7 chance, n=2778), raisin (×2.7 chance, n=257), rhubarb (×2.7 chance, n=22), nutmeg (×2.6 chance, n=341), vanilla (×2.5 chance, n=1111) and buttermilk (×2.4 chance, n=199). 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. blackberry — PPMI 1.16 · ×3.2 chance · n=26 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)
  2. oat — PPMI 1.07 · ×2.9 chance · n=181 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
  3. wheat — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=2778 (wheat itself appears in 20,890 recipes)
  4. raisin — PPMI 0.99 · ×2.7 chance · n=257 (raisin itself appears in 1,963 recipes)
  5. rhubarb — PPMI 0.98 · ×2.7 chance · n=22 (rhubarb itself appears in 169 recipes)
  6. nutmeg — PPMI 0.96 · ×2.6 chance · n=341 (nutmeg itself appears in 2,686 recipes)
  7. vanilla — PPMI 0.93 · ×2.5 chance · n=1111 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
  8. buttermilk — PPMI 0.89 · ×2.4 chance · n=199 (buttermilk itself appears in 1,682 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

lard appears in 3,103 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.