Skip to main content
Drink

Pearl Barley Water

A barley water beverage made by boiling pearl barley, sweetening with sugar candy, and adding lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pearl Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Make the barley liquor

  1. Boil the pearl barley in a muslin bag in 2 quarts of water.

  2. Allow it to simmer for 3 hours.

Sweeten and flavour

  1. Clear the liquid and sweeten with sugar candy.

  2. Flavour with the juice of a lemon and let it cool.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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
Simmering releases its mild flavour and starch, giving the drink a light body.
Sugar candy
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, grainy flavour of the barley.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness that lift the flavour of the drink.

The step that matters

Simmer the barley for the full 3 hours. Long, gentle simmering is what draws flavour and starch out of the pearl barley. A shorter simmer leaves the drink thin and weakly flavoured.

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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesBarley WaterBarley Water22 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes