Skip to main content
Main

Thick Barley Soup

A thick soup made from pearl barley, flour, butter, veal stock, salt, and finished with cream or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Thick Barley Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine barley and flour with butter over low heat for a few seconds.

  2. Add veal stock and salt, then bring to a boil while stirring continuously.

  3. Boil for 2 hours, adding more stock if the soup thickens too much.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the soup through a fine sieve, pressing well to extract liquid.

  2. Return the soup to heat, adjusting thickness with more stock if necessary.

  3. Taste and adjust salt, then finish with cream or butter in the serving bowl.

  4. Serve with fried croutons of bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Barley + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together201 recipes

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

  5. Barley + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together582 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Pearl barley
Thickens the soup as its starches soften and release during long simmering.
Flour
Toasted briefly in butter, it helps bind and thicken the soup body.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavor to the base and finish.
Veal stock
Forms the liquid base, providing savory depth and body.
Cream
Adds smoothness and richness when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Boiling for 2 hours while adding stock. Barley keeps absorbing liquid and thickening as it cooks, so the soup can turn stiff or scorch. Adding stock as needed keeps the consistency loose and the barley fully softened.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes