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Cream of Barley Soup

A creamy soup made with barley, butter, flour, milk, stock, and thickened with corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Cream of Barley Soup

Why it works: Barley and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 128 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream of Barley Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook for three minutes, stirring steadily.

  3. Add the pearl barley and cook for two minutes longer.

  4. Slowly add the boiling water and milk, stirring until blended.

  5. Boil gently for one hour.

Strain and finish

  1. Pass the mixture through a sieve and return to the fire.

  2. Add the chicken or veal stock and corn starch dissolved in cold water.

  3. Boil once and serve very hot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together128 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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
Provides the body and starchy texture that thickens and gives the soup its substance.
Flour
Cooked in butter, it forms a roux that helps thicken the soup.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy body to the soup.
Corn starch
Added dissolved in cold water, it thickens the stock when briefly boiled.
Chicken or veal stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Add the corn starch dissolved in cold water. Starch must be dissolved in cold liquid first so it does not clump, then briefly boiled so it swells and thickens the soup evenly.

“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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