Skip to main content
Main

Barley Soup

A simple barley soup made with barley, stock, salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Barley and pepper work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 897 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Barley Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the barley slowly in water for three hours.

  2. Heat the soup stock.

  3. Add the cooked barley, salt, pepper, and butter just before 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 + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together897 recipes

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

  2. Barley + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Barley
Provides chewy texture and body as its starch softens and releases into the broth.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base and carries most of the savory flavor.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Cook the barley slowly in water for three hours. Barley is a dense grain that needs long, gentle simmering to hydrate and soften fully. Rushing it leaves the grains hard and chewy, while boiling too hard can break them apart and make the soup cloudy.

“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.

More barley soup recipes

Beef 20Pearl 8Scotch 6Cream 4Creamy 4Creamed 3 See all 96 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes