Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with pineapple?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with pineapple most disproportionately are mandarin (×16.0 chance, n=119), kiwi (×9.6 chance, n=28), cherry (×8.2 chance, n=240), macadamia nut (×7.7 chance, n=21), gelatin (×6.9 chance, n=259), banana (×6.4 chance, n=177), melon (×6.3 chance, n=27) and rum (×6.2 chance, n=102). 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. mandarin — PPMI 2.77 · ×16.0 chance · n=119 (mandarin itself appears in 279 recipes)
  2. kiwi — PPMI 2.27 · ×9.6 chance · n=28 (kiwi itself appears in 109 recipes)
  3. cherry — PPMI 2.11 · ×8.2 chance · n=240 (cherry itself appears in 1,095 recipes)
  4. macadamia nut — PPMI 2.04 · ×7.7 chance · n=21 (macadamia nut itself appears in 103 recipes)
  5. gelatin — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=259 (gelatin itself appears in 1,418 recipes)
  6. banana — PPMI 1.86 · ×6.4 chance · n=177 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)
  7. melon — PPMI 1.85 · ×6.3 chance · n=27 (melon itself appears in 160 recipes)
  8. rum — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=102 (rum itself appears in 621 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

pineapple appears in 1,697 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.

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Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.