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Drink

Compound Barley Water

A beverage made by boiling pearl barley, figs, and water, then sweetened and optionally flavored with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and fig share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Compound Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Wash the pearl barley with water to remove any foreign matter.

  2. Add ½ pint of water to the barley and boil briefly, then discard the liquid.

Make the barley water

  1. Pour 4 pints of boiling water over the barley and boil down to 2 pints.

  2. Strain the mixture to obtain barley water.

Add figs and finish

  1. In a separate pot, boil together 2 pints of barley water, 1 pint of water, and 2½ ounces of sliced figs.

  2. Sweeten with sugar and add lemon peel 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.

  1. Barley + figtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together48 recipes

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

  2. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  4. Fig + sugartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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
Provides the starch and body that give the drink its mild, cloudy character.
Sliced figs
Add natural sweetness and a soft, fruity flavour to the liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the flavour of the barley and figs.

The step that matters

Boil down to 2 pints. Boiling the barley in 4 pints of water and reducing it concentrates the liquid. Stopping at the right volume sets the strength of the final drink, so the measure matters.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, fig, 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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