Skip to main content
Drink

Barley Water

A simple drink made by boiling barley in water, optionally flavored with lemon, sugar, figs, raisins, liquorice-root, honey, gum arabic, or powdered nitre.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Fig and honey work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 228 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Make the barley water

  1. Wash or boil 2 ounces of barley in 1 quart of water.

  2. Simmer until it reaches a pleasant thickness.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. For a second boiling, use the strained barley to make another pint.

Flavour and finish

  1. Add lemon juice, peel, and sugar for flavor if desired.

  2. For medicinal use, mix powdered nitre with honey or sugar. Combine with boiling barley water.

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. Fig + honeytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

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

  2. Fig + raisintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  3. Barley + figtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together48 recipes

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

  4. Barley + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Its starch thickens the water as it simmers, giving the drink body.
Lemon juice and peel
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the mild barley flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar, fig, raisin, honey. 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.

More barley water recipes

Apple 4with Egg White 4 See all 274 →

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes