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Drink

Barley Water

Barley Water is a simple beverage made from pearl barley, boiling water, lemon juice, and optional sugar and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Wash the pearl barley in cold water.

  2. Boil the barley for three minutes, then drain and discard the water.

Make the barley water

  1. Add 2 quarts of boiling water and boil until reduced to 1 quart, about 2 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture, add the lemon juice, and sweeten to taste.

  3. Optionally, season with coarse sea salt.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pearl barley
Releases starch and mild grain flavor into the water during long simmering, giving it body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness and mellow grain flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's tartness.

The step that matters

Reducing the water to 1 quart. Boiling slowly for about 2 hours concentrates the flavor and starch from the barley. Reducing too fast or too little changes the body and strength of the drink, so check the volume as it cooks.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, 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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