Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with smoke?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with smoke most disproportionately are sausage (×12.5 chance, n=32), ham (×10.7 chance, n=109), turkey (×7.1 chance, n=50), sherry (×4.5 chance, n=23), bay (×4.5 chance, n=51), pork sausage (×4.3 chance, n=43), bacon (×4.1 chance, n=72) and pork (×3.3 chance, n=57). 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
- sausage — PPMI 2.52 · ×12.5 chance · n=32 (sausage itself appears in 353 recipes)
- ham — PPMI 2.37 · ×10.7 chance · n=109 (ham itself appears in 1,396 recipes)
- turkey — PPMI 1.97 · ×7.1 chance · n=50 (turkey itself appears in 963 recipes)
- sherry — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=23 (sherry itself appears in 706 recipes)
- bay — PPMI 1.50 · ×4.5 chance · n=51 (bay itself appears in 1,568 recipes)
- pork sausage — PPMI 1.46 · ×4.3 chance · n=43 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
- bacon — PPMI 1.41 · ×4.1 chance · n=72 (bacon itself appears in 2,417 recipes)
- pork — PPMI 1.20 · ×3.3 chance · n=57 (pork itself appears in 2,357 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use smoke with one of its measured partners:
- Cajun Red Beans And Rice — with sausage, bay
- Erwtensoep (Snert) — with sausage, pork
- Stamppot Boerenkool met Rookworst (Kale Mash with Smoked Sausage) — with sausage, bacon
- Kalua Pork — with pork
- Memphis Dry-Rub Baby Back Ribs — with pork
How this was measured
smoke appears in 463 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.