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Barley Gruel

A thin porridge made from pearl barley, boiled with water, sweetened with sugar and butter, optionally flavored with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and walnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 54 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Barley Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Wash the pearl barley in clean cold water.

  2. Boil the barley in 1 pint of water for 5 minutes, then pour the water away.

Cook and strain

  1. Add 1 quart of boiling water to the barley and let it boil for 3 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture, discarding the barley solids.

Finish and serve

  1. If desired, infuse thinly cut lemon peel in enough cold water to cover it for 10 minutes, then stir into the gruel.

  2. Add sugar and butter, then 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.

  1. Barley + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together54 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 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

Pearl barley
Provides the starch that thickens the water into a gruel as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavour of the thin gruel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the plain, mild barley flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling the barley for 3 hours. Barley must simmer long enough for its starch to break down and release into the water, which is what thickens the gruel. Stopping early leaves it thin and the grains hard.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, sugar, butter, walnut):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar, butter, walnut. 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 porridge recipes

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