Name: Barley Gruel
Ingredients: 4 ounces pearl barley; 2 quarts water; 1 stick cinnamon; ¾ pint port wine; sugar to taste

Why it works: Barley and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 127 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Barley Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the pearl barley.

Make the porridge

Boil the barley in 2 quarts of water with the stick of cinnamon until reduced to 1 quart.
Strain the mixture and return it to the saucepan.
Add sugar and ¾ pint of port wine.
Heat the mixture and serve as desired.

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 + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together127 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Barley + port winetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together45 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Cinnamon + port winetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together241 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together755 recipes

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Pearl barley: Provides the body and starch that thicken the liquid into a porridge.
Port wine: Adds sweetness, depth and fruity aroma to the finished porridge.
Cinnamon: Adds warm aroma that flavours the cooking 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.