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Bread

Our Daily Bread

A simple barley bread cooked with onion, turnip or carrot, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 629 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Our Daily Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the barley in cold water until soft.

  2. Add the soaked barley to boiling soup.

  3. Add the peeled and finely sliced onion and the turnip or carrot.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt.

Cook

  1. Boil on a slow, steady fire for three hours or more, ensuring it does not burn.

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 + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Barley + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Its starch thickens the liquid and gives the soup a chewy, filling body.
Onion
As it softens and cooks down, it adds aroma and a gentle sweetness.
Turnip or carrot
As it cooks soft, it adds body and a mild sweetness to the soup.

The step that matters

Keep the fire slow and steady. Barley starch and the vegetables' sugars can scorch on the bottom of the pot if the heat is too high over a long cook. A gentle, steady simmer over three hours or more keeps the soup from burning.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, turnip. 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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