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Drink

Barley Water

Barley Water is a simple beverage made by cooking pearl barley in water, then seasoning with salt, lemon, or sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the pearl barley.

  2. Add the washed barley to the cold water in a pot.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce to a simmer.

  2. Cook slowly for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

  4. Season with salt, and optionally add lemon and sugar to taste.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Its starch and soluble compounds release into the water, giving the drink body and a mild grainy flavour.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 2 hours. Simmering gently extracts flavour and starch from the barley without breaking the grains apart or making the liquid cloudy and bitter. A hard boil can scorch the bottom of the pot and sour the taste.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar. 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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