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Thick Barley Water

A thick barley beverage made with barley, water, raisins, lemon peel, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and raisin work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Thick Barley Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the barley as directed.

  2. Combine 3 tablespoons of barley with 1 pint of water in a pot.

Simmer and serve

  1. Simmer for 2 hours.

  2. During the last 15 minutes, add the opened raisins, lemon peel, and sugar.

  3. Serve without straining.

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 + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 recipes

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

  2. Barley + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

Barley
Its starch releases into the water, thickening the drink and giving it body.
Opened raisins
Add sweetness and a mild fruity flavour as they steep in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the raisins, lemon peel, and sugar in the last 15 minutes. Adding them at the end keeps the lemon peel and raisins from over-cooking and turning bitter or dull, while still infusing their flavour into the drink.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, raisin, 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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