Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with parmesan cheese?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with parmesan cheese most disproportionately are mozzarella cheese (×6.5 chance, n=551), macaroni (×6.3 chance, n=1146), porcini (×5.8 chance, n=35), artichoke (×5.8 chance, n=132), spinach (×5.5 chance, n=46), provolone cheese (×5.3 chance, n=56), cured pork (×4.8 chance, n=86) and cottage cheese (×4.6 chance, n=98). 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
- mozzarella cheese — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=551 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)
- macaroni — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=1146 (macaroni itself appears in 3,181 recipes)
- porcini — PPMI 1.76 · ×5.8 chance · n=35 (porcini itself appears in 106 recipes)
- artichoke — PPMI 1.75 · ×5.8 chance · n=132 (artichoke itself appears in 403 recipes)
- spinach — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=46 (spinach itself appears in 147 recipes)
- provolone cheese — PPMI 1.66 · ×5.3 chance · n=56 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
- cured pork — PPMI 1.57 · ×4.8 chance · n=86 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
- cottage cheese — PPMI 1.52 · ×4.6 chance · n=98 (cottage cheese itself appears in 377 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use parmesan cheese with one of its measured partners:
- Spinach and Four-Cheese Stuffed Shells — with mozzarella cheese, spinach, provolone cheese
- Spinach Artichoke Baked Pasta — with mozzarella cheese, artichoke, spinach
- Mediterranean Spinach Lasagna — with spinach, cottage cheese
- Chicken and Spinach Alfredo Bake — with mozzarella cheese, spinach
- Mushroom and Spinach Manicotti — with mozzarella cheese, spinach
- Oysters Rockefeller — with spinach
How this was measured
parmesan cheese appears in 3,628 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.