Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with walnut?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with walnut most disproportionately are date (×9.2 chance, n=156), raisin (×5.4 chance, n=472), oat (×4.0 chance, n=224), fig (×3.6 chance, n=23), banana (×3.6 chance, n=163), cranberry (×3.4 chance, n=140), cinnamon (×3.4 chance, n=886) and apple (×3.4 chance, n=370). 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
- date — PPMI 2.22 · ×9.2 chance · n=156 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
- raisin — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=472 (raisin itself appears in 1,963 recipes)
- oat — PPMI 1.39 · ×4.0 chance · n=224 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
- fig — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=23 (fig itself appears in 144 recipes)
- banana — PPMI 1.27 · ×3.6 chance · n=163 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)
- cranberry — PPMI 1.24 · ×3.4 chance · n=140 (cranberry itself appears in 919 recipes)
- cinnamon — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=886 (cinnamon itself appears in 5,918 recipes)
- apple — PPMI 1.22 · ×3.4 chance · n=370 (apple itself appears in 2,480 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use walnut with one of its measured partners:
- Chiles en Nogada — with raisin, cinnamon
- Chiles en Nogada Poblanos — with raisin, apple
- Ghapama (Pumpkin Baked with Rice and Dried Fruit) — with raisin, cinnamon
- Koljivo (Žito, the Blessed Wheat) — with raisin, cinnamon
- Tufahije (Walnut-Stuffed Poached Apples) — with cinnamon, apple
- Baklava (Greek) — with cinnamon
How this was measured
walnut appears in 2,816 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.