Name: Apple Barley Water
Ingredients: ¼ pound pearl barley; 1 gallon water; ½ pound brown sugar

Why it works: Barley and sugar work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 755 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple Barley Water

Ingredients

¼ pound pearl barley
1 gallon water
½ pound brown sugar

Directions

Make the barley water

Boil 1 gallon of water.
Add ¼ pound of pearl barley and boil for 1 hour.
Strain the mixture through a colander.

Sweeten and serve

Stir in ½ pound of brown sugar until dissolved.
Let it cool before serving.

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.

Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together755 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pearl barley: Releases starch and flavour into the water as it simmers, giving the drink body and a mild grain taste.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and a molasses-like depth that balances the plain grain flavour.

“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.