Skip to main content
Drink

Excellent Barley Water

A simple barley infusion made with pearl barley, sugar, salt, lemon peel, and boiling water, steeped for at least 12 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Excellent Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the pearl barley by rolling it in a soft cloth.

  2. Place the barley in a quart jug with sugar, salt, and lemon peel.

Steep

  1. Fill the jug with boiling water and stir gently for a few minutes.

  2. Cover the jug and let it stand until completely cold.

  3. Let it steep for at least 12 hours, preferably overnight.

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 + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Releases starch and flavour into the water, giving the drink its body and grainy taste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the mild, grainy flavour of the barley.
Lemon peel
Its oils add a bright citrus aroma and flavour to the water.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour and starch from the barley and lemon peel during steeping.

The step that matters

Steep long enough, then let it cool completely. Flavour and starch leach slowly from the barley and peel into the water, so a short steep gives a weak, thin drink. Covering the jug keeps aromas in and lets the liquid cool gradually.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar. 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

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes