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Drink

Thick Barley Water

A thickened drink made by simmering barley in water, then cooled and sweetened with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Thick Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the barley two or three times.

  2. In a double boiler, combine the barley and cold water.

  3. Bring to a boil and let it simmer slowly for 2 hours.

Chill and serve

  1. Pour into a pitcher and add the lemon peel.

  2. Chill until perfectly cold.

  3. Remove the lemon peel and sweeten 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Gives the drink its body and starchy, mildly nutty flavour as it simmers.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic citrus oils that flavour the water while it chills.

The step that matters

Simmering the barley slowly. Barley must cook long enough for its starch and flavour to release into the water. A rolling boil can break grains apart and cloud the liquid, so a gentle simmer is best.

“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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