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Baking

To Cook Barley

A simple dish of barley cooked in water, optionally with raisins, wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and raisin work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Cook Barley

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the barley and cover it with cold water.

  2. Let it swell and cook slowly on the back of the stove for several hours until tender, adding water as needed.

  3. If desired, add whole raisins during cooking.

  4. Once soft, stir in wine and sugar to taste.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Barley + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Barley + winetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together128 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Raisin + winetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Barley
Provides the bulk of the dish, softening into a chewy, tender grain as it absorbs water.
Whole raisins
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit as they plump in the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking slowly until tender. Barley needs long, gentle simmering to soften fully, and it can scorch or dry out if the pot runs low on water, so water must be added as needed.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, wine, sugar):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, wine, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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