Name: Barley Water
Ingredients: 1 handful common barley; 3 pints water; 1 piece lemon peel

Why it works: Barley and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

1 handful common barley
3 pints water
1 piece lemon peel

Directions

Wash the barley.
Simmer the barley gently in 3 pints of water with a piece of lemon peel, then strain and serve.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together484 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

Common barley: Provides the starchy body and mild grainy flavour that give barley water its character.
Lemon peel: Adds aromatic citrus oil and a light tang to the simmered 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.