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Dr. Eustace Smith's Receipt for Barley Jelly

A sweetened barley gelatin made by boiling pearl barley, straining, and setting the liquid.

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

Dr. Eustace Smith's Receipt for Barley Jelly

single serving

Ingredients

Directions

Make the barley liquid

  1. Combine the washed pearl barley and water in a pot.

  2. Slowly boil the mixture until it reduces to 1 pint.

  3. Strain out the barley and let the liquid settle into a jelly.

Serve

  1. Dissolve 2 teaspoons of the jelly in 8 ounces of warmed and sweetened milk for a single serving.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Its starch thickens the boiling water into a liquid that sets as it cools.
Water
Extracts starch from the barley and reduces to form the jelly base.
Milk
Provides the creamy liquid in which the jelly is dissolved for serving.

The step that matters

Slowly boil the mixture until it reduces to 1 pint. Reducing the liquid concentrates the starch released by the barley. If it is too thin, the jelly will not set firmly when cooled.

“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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