Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with raisin?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with raisin most disproportionately are currant (×7.7 chance, n=61), date (×6.8 chance, n=80), oat (×6.0 chance, n=235), walnut (×5.4 chance, n=472), fig (×5.2 chance, n=23), apple (×5.1 chance, n=386), cinnamon (×4.9 chance, n=892) and plum (×4.0 chance, n=36). 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. currant — PPMI 2.04 · ×7.7 chance · n=61 (currant itself appears in 257 recipes)
2. date — PPMI 1.92 · ×6.8 chance · n=80 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
3. oat — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=235 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
4. walnut — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=472 (walnut itself appears in 2,816 recipes)
5. fig — PPMI 1.65 · ×5.2 chance · n=23 (fig itself appears in 144 recipes)
6. apple — PPMI 1.62 · ×5.1 chance · n=386 (apple itself appears in 2,480 recipes)
7. cinnamon — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=892 (cinnamon itself appears in 5,918 recipes)
8. plum — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=36 (plum itself appears in 290 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Chiles en Nogada — with walnut, cinnamon
• Apfelstrudel (Apple Strudel) — with apple, cinnamon
• Chiles en Nogada Poblanos — with walnut, apple
• Ghapama (Pumpkin Baked with Rice and Dried Fruit) — with walnut, cinnamon
• Kaiserschmarrn mit Zwetschkenröster (Shredded Emperor's Pancake with Plum Compote) — with cinnamon, plum
• Koljivo (Žito, the Blessed Wheat) — with walnut, cinnamon

How this was measured

raisin appears in 1,963 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.