Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with macaroni?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with macaroni most disproportionately are romano cheese (×7.4 chance, n=108), parmesan cheese (×6.3 chance, n=1146), mozzarella cheese (×5.3 chance, n=395), cured pork (×5.1 chance, n=80), basil (×4.9 chance, n=1023), cottage cheese (×4.6 chance, n=87), broccoli (×3.8 chance, n=198) and porcini (×3.8 chance, n=20). 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. romano cheese — PPMI 2.00 · ×7.4 chance · n=108 (romano cheese itself appears in 293 recipes)
2. parmesan cheese — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=1146 (parmesan cheese itself appears in 3,628 recipes)
3. mozzarella cheese — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=395 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)
4. cured pork — PPMI 1.63 · ×5.1 chance · n=80 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
5. basil — PPMI 1.60 · ×4.9 chance · n=1023 (basil itself appears in 4,153 recipes)
6. cottage cheese — PPMI 1.53 · ×4.6 chance · n=87 (cottage cheese itself appears in 377 recipes)
7. broccoli — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=198 (broccoli itself appears in 1,041 recipes)
8. porcini — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=20 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Three-Cheese Baked Mac and Cheese with Broccoli — with parmesan cheese, broccoli
• Baked Mac and Cheese with Crispy Breadcrumb Top — with parmesan cheese

How this was measured

macaroni appears in 3,181 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.