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Cream of Barley Sonp

A thick soup made with barley, butter, flour, milk, stock, and thickened with corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 128 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream of Barley Sonp

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook for three minutes, stirring steadily.

  3. Add the pearl barley and cook for two minutes longer.

  4. Very slowly add the boiling water and milk, stirring until blended.

Simmer and finish

  1. Boil gently for one hour.

  2. Strain the mixture through a sieve and return to the fire.

  3. Add the chicken or veal stock and corn starch dissolved in cold water.

  4. Boil once and serve very hot.

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together128 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness to the base before the flour is cooked in.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Pearl barley
Provides the main body and chewy texture of the soup as it simmers.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a softer, richer flavour to the soup.
Chicken or veal stock
Supplies savoury meat flavour and most of the liquid in the soup.
Corn starch
Adds extra thickening so the soup becomes smoothly body-rich when boiled.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water and milk. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour and starch from clumping into lumps, so the base blends smoothly before it simmers.

“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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