Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with maple syrup?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with maple syrup most disproportionately are cider (×4.8 chance, n=43), sweet potato (×4.3 chance, n=20), pumpkin (×3.8 chance, n=25), oat (×3.7 chance, n=37), grain wheat flour (×3.6 chance, n=21), pecan (×3.4 chance, n=60), nutmeg (×2.9 chance, n=63) and cranberry (×2.9 chance, n=21). 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. cider — PPMI 1.56 · ×4.8 chance · n=43 (cider itself appears in 1,135 recipes)
2. sweet potato — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=20 (sweet potato itself appears in 583 recipes)
3. pumpkin — PPMI 1.34 · ×3.8 chance · n=25 (pumpkin itself appears in 821 recipes)
4. oat — PPMI 1.30 · ×3.7 chance · n=37 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
5. grain wheat flour — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=21 (grain wheat flour itself appears in 733 recipes)
6. pecan — PPMI 1.23 · ×3.4 chance · n=60 (pecan itself appears in 2,215 recipes)
7. nutmeg — PPMI 1.08 · ×2.9 chance · n=63 (nutmeg itself appears in 2,686 recipes)
8. cranberry — PPMI 1.05 · ×2.9 chance · n=21 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Grilled Maple Bourbon Pork Chops — with cider
• Maple-Glazed Meatloaf Minis with Bacon — with cider
• Sheet-Pan Maple Dijon Salmon with Sweet Potatoes — with sweet potato

How this was measured

maple syrup appears in 507 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.