Name: Barley Water
Ingredients: 1 heaping teaspoon coarsely ground barley grains; ½ cup water; a pinch of salt; 1 tablespoon fresh milk

Why it works: Barley and milk work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 598 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

1 heaping teaspoon coarsely ground barley grains
½ cup water
a pinch of salt
1 tablespoon fresh milk

Directions

Coarsely grind a heaping teaspoon of barley grains.
Boil the ground barley in ½ cup of water.
Strain the mixture.
Add a pinch of salt and 1 tablespoon of fresh milk.

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.

Barley + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together598 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley grains: Release starch and flavour into the water as they boil, forming the base liquid.
Fresh milk: Adds richness and a mild creamy body to the strained liquid.

“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.