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Drink

Barley Water

Barley water is a beverage made by boiling pearl barley in water, sweetened with sugar and flavored with lemon and optional dried fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and fig share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Wash the pearl barley thoroughly.

  2. Boil the barley in 1 pint of boiling water for 5 minutes.

  3. Pour off the water and add 2 quarts of fresh boiling water.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil until the mixture reduces to 2½ pints, then strain it.

  2. Add sugar and thinly sliced lemon to taste.

  3. For added flavor, include figs or stoned raisins 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 + figtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Lemon + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  4. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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
Released starch and flavor thicken and give the drink its body as it simmers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, starchy flavor of the barley.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture reduces to 2½ pints. Simmering concentrates the barley's flavor and starch. Stopping too early leaves a weak, thin drink, while boiling too long makes it overly strong and reduces the yield.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Figthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Vanillafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, sugar, lemon. 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.

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