Skip to main content
Drink

Barley Water

A simple barley infusion boiled and strained, sweetened with sugar and optionally flavored with lemon or apple.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

  1. Wash the barley thoroughly.

  2. In a clean pot, combine the barley and cold water.

  3. Boil until the mixture is reduced to 1 quart.

Finish

  1. Strain the liquid and let it cool.

  2. Add a little sugar and a slice of lemon or apple if desired.

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

Barley
Its starch and soluble compounds release into the water during boiling, giving the drink its body and flavor.
Cold water
Serves as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor and starch from the barley as it simmers down.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the grainy, mildly bitter flavor of the cooked barley.

The step that matters

Boil until reduced to 1 quart. Reducing the liquid concentrates the barley extract, so stopping too early gives a weak drink and boiling too long makes it overly strong and thick. Measuring the volume keeps the flavor consistent.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. 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