Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with pear?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with pear most disproportionately are radish (×11.6 chance, n=50), sake (×4.6 chance, n=24), cranberry (×4.1 chance, n=29), apricot (×4.1 chance, n=20), sesame seed (×3.6 chance, n=40), sesame oil (×3.2 chance, n=45), lettuce (×3.1 chance, n=31) and apple (×3.1 chance, n=60). 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. radish — PPMI 2.45 · ×11.6 chance · n=50 (radish itself appears in 555 recipes)
2. sake — PPMI 1.52 · ×4.6 chance · n=24 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)
3. cranberry — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=29 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
4. apricot — PPMI 1.40 · ×4.1 chance · n=20 (apricot itself appears in 638 recipes)
5. sesame seed — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=40 (sesame seed itself appears in 1,442 recipes)
6. sesame oil — PPMI 1.15 · ×3.2 chance · n=45 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
7. lettuce — PPMI 1.14 · ×3.1 chance · n=31 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
8. apple — PPMI 1.14 · ×3.1 chance · n=60 (apple itself appears in 2,480 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Bulgogi (불고기) — with sesame seed, sesame oil
• Galbi (갈비) — with sesame seed, sesame oil
• Naengmyeon (냉면) — with radish, sesame seed
• Weeknight Beef Bulgogi Rice Bowls — with sesame seed, sesame oil
• Grilled Beef Short Rib Galbi — with sesame seed, sesame oil
• Korean Braised Short Ribs (Galbi Jjim) — with sesame seed, sesame oil

How this was measured

pear appears in 493 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.