Name: Thick Welsh Barley Cakes
Ingredients: 2 cups fine barley meal; 1½ cups skim milk

Thick Welsh Barley Cakes

Thick Welsh barley cakes are made from barley meal and skim milk, baked until cooked through and served warm with cold butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients

Why it works: Barley and milk work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 598 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Thick Welsh Barley Cakes

Ingredients

2 cups fine barley meal
1½ cups skim milk

Directions

Make the dough

In a bowl, combine fine barley meal and skim milk to form a stiff dough.
Roll out the dough to about ¾ inch thick, the size of a small baking stone.

Bake and serve

Bake until cooked through.
Serve warm with cold butter.

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.

Barley + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together598 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine barley meal: Forms the main structure of the cake as it sets with the liquid.
Skim milk: Hydrates the barley meal so it binds into a stiff, rollable dough.

“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.