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Drink

Lemonade and Barley Water

A chilled drink made from lemon juice, sugar, thinly sliced lemon rind, and boiling barley water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and barley 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 ↓

Lemonade and Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Strain the juice of the lemon.

  2. Add the lemon juice to the sugar and thinly cut lemon rind.

  3. Pour in the boiling barley water.

  4. Cover and let it stand until cold.

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. Lemon + barleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + barleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the drink.
Lemon rind
Contributes aromatic oils that give the drink its lemon fragrance.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that softens the tartness of the lemon.

The step that matters

Cover and let it stand until cold. Covering keeps the aromatic oils from the rind and lemon in the liquid instead of letting them escape as steam. Slow cooling lets the flavours blend and settle into the drink.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, barley):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, barley. 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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