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Drink

Apple Barley Water

Apple Barley Water is a beverage made by boiling barley with apple skins, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Apple Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the barley overnight.

  2. In a pot, combine soaked barley and water.

  3. Add coarse sea salt, apple skins, and sugar.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil slowly for 1 hour or until the mixture turns red.

  2. Strain the mixture and add lemon juice if desired.

  3. Serve hot or cold.

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. Barley + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Barley
Gives the drink its body and mild grainy flavor as it simmers in the water.
Apple skins
Add color and a fruity aroma, turning the mixture red as it boils.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the grainy and tart notes of the drink.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 1 hour or until the mixture turns red. A gentle simmer extracts flavor and color from the skins and barley without scorching the bottom of the pot. Boiling too hard can cook off water unevenly and make the drink taste harsh or cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, apple, 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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