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Dessert

Barley and Apple Pudding

A baked pudding of soaked barley and sliced apples sweetened with sugar and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and apple work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 80 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, 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 the barley

  1. Wash the barley and soak it overnight.

  2. Cook the soaked barley in a saucepan for 2 hours.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the cooked barley into a buttered dish.

  2. Slice the apples and add them to the dish along with the sugar.

  3. Cream the butter and mix it into the dish.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 1 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 + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Barley
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it a soft, starchy body as it cooks.
Apples
Add moisture and tartness, and soften as they bake into the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a smoother, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Cooking the barley fully. Barley must be fully tender before baking, because the oven only sets and browns the dish and will not soften raw grains. Undercooked barley stays chewy and gritty.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, 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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