Name: Barley Water
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons barley; 8 cups boiling water; Sweetener to taste; Lemon flavoring (optional)

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

2 tablespoons barley
8 cups boiling water
Sweetener to taste
Lemon flavoring (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Wash and scald the barley.
Combine the barley with boiling water in a pot.

Simmer and finish

Simmer gently for 2 to 3 hours.
Strain the mixture and let it cool.
Sweeten and flavor to taste, preferably with lemon.

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

Barley: Releases starch and flavor into the water during long simmering, giving the drink its body and grainy taste.
Sweetener: Adds sweetness to balance the mild, grainy flavor of the strained barley 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.