Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with rum?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with rum most disproportionately are coffee (×6.9 chance, n=48), pineapple (×6.2 chance, n=102), banana (×6.2 chance, n=62), coconut (×6.1 chance, n=111), lime (×5.7 chance, n=71), brandy (×5.6 chance, n=23), cherry (×4.6 chance, n=49) and nutmeg (×3.4 chance, n=88). 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
- coffee — PPMI 1.93 · ×6.9 chance · n=48 (coffee itself appears in 717 recipes)
- pineapple — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=102 (pineapple itself appears in 1,697 recipes)
- banana — PPMI 1.82 · ×6.2 chance · n=62 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)
- coconut — PPMI 1.81 · ×6.1 chance · n=111 (coconut itself appears in 1,858 recipes)
- lime — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.7 chance · n=71 (lime itself appears in 1,288 recipes)
- brandy — PPMI 1.73 · ×5.6 chance · n=23 (brandy itself appears in 420 recipes)
- cherry — PPMI 1.52 · ×4.6 chance · n=49 (cherry itself appears in 1,095 recipes)
- nutmeg — PPMI 1.21 · ×3.4 chance · n=88 (nutmeg itself appears in 2,686 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use rum with one of its measured partners:
- Jamaican Rum Punch — with pineapple, lime, nutmeg
- Sweet Potato Pudding (Hell a Top, Hell a Bottom) — with coconut, nutmeg
- Tembleque (Coconut Pudding) — with coconut, lime
- Stollen (Christmas Fruit Bread) — with nutmeg
- Jamaican Black Cake — with nutmeg
- Mojito — with lime
How this was measured
rum appears in 621 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.