Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with strawberry?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with strawberry most disproportionately are kiwi (×25.4 chance, n=48), blueberry (×15.9 chance, n=131), rhubarb (×13.0 chance, n=38), grape (×10.8 chance, n=66), blackberry (×10.7 chance, n=31), raspberry (×8.1 chance, n=111), gelatin (×7.8 chance, n=191) and banana (×7.0 chance, n=125). 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. kiwi — PPMI 3.23 · ×25.4 chance · n=48 (kiwi itself appears in 109 recipes)
  2. blueberry — PPMI 2.77 · ×15.9 chance · n=131 (blueberry itself appears in 474 recipes)
  3. rhubarb — PPMI 2.56 · ×13.0 chance · n=38 (rhubarb itself appears in 169 recipes)
  4. grape — PPMI 2.38 · ×10.8 chance · n=66 (grape itself appears in 353 recipes)
  5. blackberry — PPMI 2.37 · ×10.7 chance · n=31 (blackberry itself appears in 167 recipes)
  6. raspberry — PPMI 2.09 · ×8.1 chance · n=111 (raspberry itself appears in 794 recipes)
  7. gelatin — PPMI 2.05 · ×7.8 chance · n=191 (gelatin itself appears in 1,418 recipes)
  8. banana — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=125 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

How this was measured

strawberry appears in 1,105 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.