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Barley Pudding

A baked barley pudding with milk, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, currants, candied peel, and apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Barley Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the barley

  1. Wash the barley and simmer it in a small amount of water for a few minutes.

  2. Pour off the water and add milk and flavorings as you would for rice pudding.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs with sugar and nutmeg.

  2. Mix the beaten eggs into the milk and barley.

  3. Adjust richness with more or fewer eggs.

  4. Add butter, cream, or marrow if desired.

Bake

  1. Butter a deep dish.

  2. Pour the pudding mixture into the dish, leaving space for the currants, candied peel, and apple pieces.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for one hour.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Barley + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Provides the starchy body that thickens the pudding as it cooks.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding structure and a custard-like texture.
Milk
Supplies moisture and richness, cooking with the barley into a creamy base.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of sweetness that contrast with the soft pudding.

The step that matters

Adjust richness with more or fewer eggs. Eggs set as the pudding bakes, so too many can make it firm and rubbery while too few leaves it loose and wet. Tasting the mixture before baking helps balance the custard.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, milk, sugar, nutmeg, egg, butter, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, milk, sugar, nutmeg, egg, butter, cream. 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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