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Drink

Excellent Barley Water

A refreshing drink made by steeping pearl barley in boiling water with sugar, salt, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Excellent Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the pearl barley clean with a soft cloth.

  2. Place the barley in a quart jug with sugar, salt, and lemon peel.

Steep

  1. Fill the jug with boiling water and stir gently for a few minutes.

  2. Cover the jug and let it cool completely.

  3. Allow it to sit for at least 12 hours, preferably overnight.

  4. Pour off the barley water; you can refill the jug with boiling water up to two more times.

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

Pearl barley
Releases starch and soluble compounds into the water, giving the drink its body and mild flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the barley and lemon flavours.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic oils that flavour the water as it steeps.

The step that matters

Cover the jug and let it cool completely before steeping. Covering keeps dust and airborne contaminants out during the long steep. Letting the water cool before the long rest keeps the infusion clean and the flavour balanced, rather than cooking the barley further.

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.

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