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Cream of Barley

A creamy barley soup made with pearl barley, broth, cream, salt, and chervil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and chervil share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cream of Barley

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the barley

  1. Boil the barley in water for five minutes.

  2. Strain and boil in one pint of chicken broth for two and a half hours until perfectly soft.

  3. Rinse through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the remaining stock, the cream (previously boiled and strained), salt, and chopped chervil.

  2. Serve.

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 + cherviltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + cherviltop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Barley + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together301 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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 soup as it softens, and its grains give body.
Cream
Adds fat for a rich, smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Broth
Supplies the main liquid and savoury flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Boil the barley until perfectly soft. The barley must soften completely during its long simmer, because only fully tender grains pass through the fine sieve to give a smooth, creamy soup. Undercooked grains leave a gritty texture and can be left behind in the sieve.

Swap the chervil

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Chervilthe original
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, cream. 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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