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Barley Gruel

A simple barley porridge cooked with cinnamon, sugar, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 and cook the barley

  1. Wash the pearl barley.

  2. Boil the barley in 2 quarts of water with the stick of cinnamon until reduced to 1 quart.

  3. Strain the mixture and return it to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add sugar and ¾ pint of port wine.

  2. 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.

  1. Barley + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Barley + port winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together45 recipes

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

  4. Cinnamon + port winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. 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 starch and body that thicken the liquid into a porridge.
Port wine
Adds sweetness, acidity and a deep aroma to the finished porridge.

The step that matters

Boiling the barley until reduced to 1 quart. The barley must simmer long enough to soften fully and release its starch, while the liquid reduces to the stated volume. Stopping early leaves the grains firm and the porridge thin.

“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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