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Dessert

Barley and Apple Pudding

A baked pudding made from soaked barley, sliced apples, sugar, lemon rind, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 and Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash the barley and soak it overnight.

Cook and bake

  1. Cook the soaked barley in a saucepan for two hours.

  2. Pour the cooked barley into a buttered pie dish.

  3. Add the sliced apples, sugar, and grated lemon rind.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for one hour.

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. Barley + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 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

Barley
Forms the bulk of the pudding, giving it a soft, starchy body as it cooks.
Apples
Add moisture and fruity sweetness that soften and flavour the pudding as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly in the oven.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic oil that lifts the sweetness of the apples and barley.

The step that matters

Cooking the barley until fully tender. Barley must be cooked through before baking, because the oven only sets and browns the pudding and will not soften hard grains.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, apple, sugar, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, apple, sugar, butter. 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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