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Barley Water for Invalids

A warm barley infusion brewed with water, lemon peel or cinnamon, sweetened to taste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 for Invalids

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the barley with ½ cup of cold water.

  2. Pour this mixture into a pot with 1 quart of boiling water.

  3. Stir and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Add the lemon peel or cinnamon for flavor.

  5. Let it cool, then remove the lemon peel and sweeten to taste.

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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Robinson's patent barley
Starch from the barley thickens the liquid slightly and gives the drink its body.

“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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