Name: Barley Water
Ingredients: 2 ounces pearl barley; 1½ pints water; lemon peel (optional); lemon juice (optional)

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

2 ounces pearl barley
1½ pints water
lemon peel (optional)
lemon juice (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Wash the pearl barley well with cold water and discard the washings.

Cook and strain

Boil the barley with 1½ pints of water in a covered pot for 20 minutes.
Strain the mixture.

Flavor

Sweeten and flavor with lemon peel or lemon juice if desired.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together484 recipes

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

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 flavor into the water, giving the drink body and a mild grain taste.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances sweetness.
Lemon peel: Its oils add a fragrant citrus aroma.

“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.