Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with milk?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with milk most disproportionately are yeast (×2.9 chance, n=2137), peppermint (×2.5 chance, n=74), cocoa (×2.4 chance, n=2509), vanilla (×2.4 chance, n=4582), coffee (×2.3 chance, n=347), vanilla extract (×2.3 chance, n=49), blueberry (×2.1 chance, n=208) and baking powder (×2.0 chance, n=43). 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. yeast — PPMI 1.07 · ×2.9 chance · n=2137 (yeast itself appears in 3,435 recipes)
2. peppermint — PPMI 0.91 · ×2.5 chance · n=74 (peppermint itself appears in 140 recipes)
3. cocoa — PPMI 0.90 · ×2.4 chance · n=2509 (cocoa itself appears in 4,807 recipes)
4. vanilla — PPMI 0.87 · ×2.4 chance · n=4582 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
5. coffee — PPMI 0.82 · ×2.3 chance · n=347 (coffee itself appears in 717 recipes)
6. vanilla extract — PPMI 0.81 · ×2.3 chance · n=49 (vanilla extract itself appears in 102 recipes)
7. blueberry — PPMI 0.72 · ×2.1 chance · n=208 (blueberry itself appears in 474 recipes)
8. baking powder — PPMI 0.70 · ×2.0 chance · n=43 (baking powder itself appears in 100 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Pan Dulce (Conchas) — with yeast, cocoa, vanilla, vanilla extract
• Banh Flan (Vietnamese Creme Caramel) — with vanilla, coffee, vanilla extract
• Tres Leches Cake — with vanilla, vanilla extract, baking powder
• Makowiec (Poppy Seed Roll) — with yeast, vanilla, vanilla extract
• Aranygaluska (Golden Pull-Apart Buns) — with yeast, vanilla, vanilla extract
• Peach Cobbler — with vanilla, vanilla extract, baking powder

How this was measured

milk appears in 13,577 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.