Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with pecan?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with pecan most disproportionately are bourbon whiskey (×8.8 chance, n=48), date (×5.6 chance, n=75), cherry (×4.3 chance, n=164), sweet potato (×4.0 chance, n=81), coconut (×3.6 chance, n=230), pumpkin (×3.4 chance, n=98), vanilla (×3.4 chance, n=1069) and maple syrup (×3.4 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. bourbon whiskey — PPMI 2.18 · ×8.8 chance · n=48 (bourbon whiskey itself appears in 156 recipes)
2. date — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=75 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
3. cherry — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=164 (cherry itself appears in 1,095 recipes)
4. sweet potato — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=81 (sweet potato itself appears in 583 recipes)
5. coconut — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.6 chance · n=230 (coconut itself appears in 1,858 recipes)
6. pumpkin — PPMI 1.23 · ×3.4 chance · n=98 (pumpkin itself appears in 821 recipes)
7. vanilla — PPMI 1.23 · ×3.4 chance · n=1069 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
8. maple syrup — PPMI 1.23 · ×3.4 chance · n=60 (maple syrup itself appears in 507 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Hummingbird Cake — with vanilla
• Bourbon Pecan Pie — with vanilla
• Pralines — with vanilla

How this was measured

pecan appears in 2,215 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.