Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with swiss cheese?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with swiss cheese most disproportionately are rye bread (×24.7 chance, n=25), sauerkraut (×18.6 chance, n=37), ham (×10.6 chance, n=136), crab (×5.4 chance, n=29), bread (×4.2 chance, n=184), turkey (×3.9 chance, n=35), broccoli (×3.2 chance, n=31) and mushroom (×3.2 chance, n=110). 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. rye bread — PPMI 3.21 · ×24.7 chance · n=25 (rye bread itself appears in 110 recipes)
2. sauerkraut — PPMI 2.92 · ×18.6 chance · n=37 (sauerkraut itself appears in 216 recipes)
3. ham — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=136 (ham itself appears in 1,396 recipes)
4. crab — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=29 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)
5. bread — PPMI 1.44 · ×4.2 chance · n=184 (bread itself appears in 4,741 recipes)
6. turkey — PPMI 1.37 · ×3.9 chance · n=35 (turkey itself appears in 963 recipes)
7. broccoli — PPMI 1.17 · ×3.2 chance · n=31 (broccoli itself appears in 1,041 recipes)
8. mushroom — PPMI 1.16 · ×3.2 chance · n=110 (mushroom itself appears in 3,746 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Cuban Sandwich (Cubano) — with ham, bread
• Media Noche Sandwich — with ham
• Crab Stuffed Crepes — with mushroom

How this was measured

swiss cheese appears in 587 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.