Name: Barley Water
Ingredients: 1 ounce barley; 1 quart water; a bit of orange or lemon peel

Why it works: Barley and orange work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 79 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

1 ounce barley
1 quart water
a bit of orange or lemon peel

Directions

Boil the barley in the water for 20 minutes.
Strain the mixture through muslin into a jug.
Add a bit of orange or lemon peel to the jug.

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 + orangetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together79 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: Releases starch as it cooks, giving the liquid body and a mild cereal flavour.
Orange or lemon peel: Its oils add a fresh citrus aroma to the strained liquid.

“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.