Skip to main content
Drink

Barley Water

A simple barley infusion made by boiling barley in water, then straining and adding lemon juice and sugar.

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 the barley

  1. Put the barley into a saucepan with 1 pint of cold water.

  2. Bring it to a boil, then strain the water as it is unwholesome.

  3. Add another pint of cold water to the barley and bring it to a boil again.

Simmer and flavour

  1. Let it simmer for 10 minutes.

  2. Strain it into a jug, add a few drops of lemon juice and a little sugar, but do not make it too sweet.

  3. Let it cool before drinking.

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. Lemon + sugartop 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).

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

Keen, robinson's patent barley
Provides the main body and mild flavour of the drink as it simmers out of the grain.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, added to taste so the drink stays mild.

The step that matters

Straining off the first water. Boiling the barley first and discarding that water removes impurities and bitter flavours from the grain before the final brew, so the drink tastes clean.

Swap the lemon

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