Barley Jelly
3 tablespoons pearl barley 1/2 saltspoon salt 1 quart cold water Soak the barley over night, drain, and add the quart of cold water and salt. Cook in a double boiler for four hours.
A convalescent-cookery staple rather than a dish in its own right: four hours of gentle heat breaks the barley down until the liquid sets to a soft jelly on cooling. Almost everything about it hinges on the double boiler.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon — barely a pinch, in keeping with food intended for invalids.
- The double boiler is the pointDirect heat will scorch the starch and reduce a quart of water far too fast. The upper pan should never touch the simmering water below, and the lower pan needs topping up over four hours or it will boil dry.
- The missing stepThe recipe does not say to strain, but a jelly requires it. Pour the whole through a fine sieve or muslin while hot, pressing the grain lightly, and let the liquid cool undisturbed. It sets weakly — think a loose, trembling gel, not a moulded shape.
- YieldLittle liquid is lost in a double boiler, so expect somewhat less than the starting quart once the grain has taken up its share. The spent barley is bland but perfectly edible in soup.
- ServingTraditionally taken plain, or with a little lemon juice, sugar or milk stirred in as the patient could tolerate it. Chilled, it keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator and will loosen again if warmed.
Barley water and barley jelly belong to the old category of "sick-room cookery," a fixture in English and American household manuals from the eighteenth century onward and generally traced back further still to classical barley gruels prescribed for fevers. The logic was that starch extracted into water gave nourishment without asking anything of the digestion, and barley in particular was thought soothing to the stomach and the urinary tract.