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Barley Water
Take two ounces of pearl barley, wash it well, and boil for ten minutes in a little water to clear it. When drained put to it five pints of boiling water, and let it boil until reduced to one half. Then strain for use. An excellent pectoral drink is made by boiling the barley as above, and adding the following ingredients: half an ounce of liquorice root, sliced and well bruised; two ounces of figs, the same of raisins, stoned; distilled water, one pint, to one quart of the prepared barley water. Let all boil till the liquid is reduced to two pints, then strain for use. If used freely this preparation will be found very efficacious in cases of inflammatory attacks of the chest, coughs, etc. Probable cost, 4d. per pint.
A straightforward long-boiled infusion; the only real skills are patience and a fine strainer. Quantities are large by modern standards, so scale down unless you want a jug for several days.
- Quantities in cupsTwo ounces of pearl barley is a scant third of a cup; five imperial pints is 100 imperial fl oz, about 12 US cups. Reduced by half you finish with roughly 6 cups of plain barley water.
- The first boil mattersThe ten-minute boil in "a little water" is a blanch to remove surface starch and the raw, dusty taste. Drain it away completely and rinse the grains before adding the fresh boiling water, or the finished drink turns cloudy and gluey.
- Keep it at a bare simmerA hard rolling boil for the time needed to halve five pints will break the grains down and thicken the liquid. A slow simmer, uncovered, gives a clear drink; expect 90 minutes or more.
- StrainingPass it through a fine sieve lined with muslin or a coffee filter while hot. Cooled barley water sets slightly and strains poorly.
- Pearl barley, not pot barleyPearl barley is still sold everywhere and is the right grain here. Pot (or Scotch) barley retains more bran, takes longer, and gives a darker, nuttier liquid.
- Distilled waterThe entry gives no reason for specifying it. Filtered or ordinary drinking water is fine.
- The figs and raisins are the sugarThere is no added sweetener; the dried fruit supplies it, and the boiled-down liquid is quite sweet. Lemon juice or peel can be added off the heat at the end.
- Liquorice root is not inertGlycyrrhizin in real liquorice root raises blood pressure and depletes potassium when taken in quantity over days. Whatever the book says about using it "freely," treat the pectoral version as a flavoured drink to be had occasionally, not as a remedy, and skip it entirely if you are pregnant or on blood-pressure medication.
- KeepingNo preservative and no sugar to speak of, so it sours fast. Refrigerate and use within two or three days.
Barley water was treated as sickroom equipment as much as refreshment: the standard drink for invalids and fever patients, cheap enough at fourpence a pint. The idea is very old, boiled barley decoctions being described in the Hippocratic writings as ptisane, from which the French tisane descends; the grain's soluble starch was thought to soothe and "sheathe" irritated tissue. The second half of the entry is a straight pharmacy formula of the period, close to the compound liquorice and fig preparations sold as cough linctus, and "pectoral" simply means for the chest. The claim that it treats inflammatory attacks of the chest belongs to its era, not to ours. What survived is the plain version, which by the late nineteenth century had also become a summer drink, lemon barley water later being fixed in the public mind by its long association with Wimbledon.