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Barley Soup

A simple soup made with pearled barley, water, salt, celery, optional vegetables, butter, and served with soda crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Barley Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Wash and soak the barley.

  2. Boil the barley with 2 to 3 quarts of water and salt for 2 hours on low heat.

  3. Add the tied celery stalks and optional carrots or asparagus for flavor.

Finish and serve

  1. When done, stir in the butter and serve with soda crackers.

  2. If desired, add dried soaked fruit before serving, or top with cream and parsley.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Barley + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together784 recipes

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

  5. Barley + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together571 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Pearled barley
Forms the body of the soup and thickens the broth as its starch softens during long simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished broth.
Celery stalks
Release aromatic flavor into the water during simmering, then are removed.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, celery, butter, cream, parsley):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Carrotthe original
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Turnipfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, celery, butter, cream, parsley. 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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