Name: Barley Water
Ingredients: 3 tablespoons pearl barley; 1 quart cold water

Barley Water

Ingredients

3 tablespoons pearl barley
1 quart cold water

Directions

Prepare

Wash the pearl barley and soak it for 2 hours.
Strain the barley and cover it with cold water.

Cook

Boil slowly until the water is reduced to ½ quart.

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

What each ingredient does

Pearl barley: Starch and husk fibre that release flavour and body into the water as it simmers.
Cold water: Extracts the barley's flavour and starch gently, and its volume is reduced by boiling to concentrate the liquid.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until reduced to ½ quart. A gentle simmer extracts flavour and starch from the barley without scorching it or boiling off the liquid too fast. Reducing the volume concentrates the flavour, so the cook should stop at the stated measure.

“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.