Skip to main content
Main

Barley As a Food for Infants

A simple porridge made from pearl barley, water, and milk, boiled and strained for infant consumption.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Barley As a Food for Infants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grind the pearl barley in a coffee mill.

  2. Boil the ground barley in 1 quart of water until reduced to 1 pint.

  3. Strain the mixture and add 1 quart of milk.

Serve

  1. Serve to the baby.

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).

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 liquid as it boils and reduces, giving the porridge body.
Milk
Adds creaminess, mild sweetness and a smoother texture to the finished mixture.

The step that matters

Boiling down to 1 pint. Reducing the barley and water concentrates the starch released from the grain, which sets the thickness of the final mixture. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while boiling too long makes it stiff and pasty before the milk is added.

“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

Cream of Barley SoupCream of Barley Soup10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes