Skip to main content
Drink

Barley Water

A simple barley drink made by boiling pearl barley, simmering, and seasoning with lemon and sugar.

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 ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Wash the pearl barley in water.

  2. Boil the barley in a little fresh water for a few minutes, then pour off the water.

Simmer and finish

  1. Add 1 quart of fresh water and bring to a boil.

  2. Let it simmer for nearly an hour, then strain the mixture.

  3. Sweeten with sugar and season with lemon peel and juice.

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
Its starch and soluble compounds release into the water, giving the drink body and a mild grain flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the grain and lemon flavours.

The step that matters

Pour off the first boil. Briefly boiling the barley and discarding that water removes surface dust and impurities before the long simmer, so the final drink tastes clean rather than gritty or muddy.

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