Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with pork sausage?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with pork sausage most disproportionately are fennel (×20.0 chance, n=416), cured pork (×7.4 chance, n=50), provolone cheese (×6.7 chance, n=27), sauerkraut (×6.2 chance, n=29), mozzarella cheese (×5.5 chance, n=175), wine (×4.9 chance, n=108), smoke (×4.3 chance, n=43) and green bell pepper (×3.6 chance, n=213). 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. fennel — PPMI 2.99 · ×20.0 chance · n=416 (fennel itself appears in 968 recipes)
  2. cured pork — PPMI 2.00 · ×7.4 chance · n=50 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
  3. provolone cheese — PPMI 1.90 · ×6.7 chance · n=27 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
  4. sauerkraut — PPMI 1.83 · ×6.2 chance · n=29 (sauerkraut itself appears in 216 recipes)
  5. mozzarella cheese — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=175 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)
  6. wine — PPMI 1.58 · ×4.9 chance · n=108 (wine itself appears in 1,030 recipes)
  7. smoke — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=43 (smoke itself appears in 463 recipes)
  8. green bell pepper — PPMI 1.29 · ×3.6 chance · n=213 (green bell pepper itself appears in 2,733 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

pork sausage appears in 1,371 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.