Barley Stock
2 ounces barley 1 quart water 1/2 teaspoon salt Put the barley, water and salt into a saucepan. Bring to the boiling point. Skim and simmer gently for one hour. Strain.
A plain vegetarian base stock: barley simmered in salted water and strained. It is a building block rather than a finished soup, and a few details decide whether it is worth making.
- Quantities in modern terms2 ounces of pearl barley is a scant 1/3 cup; 1 quart is 4 cups. You will finish with roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of stock after evaporation and absorption.
- Which barleyPearl barley gives a clean, faintly sweet liquid. Pot or hulled barley takes longer than an hour to give up much of anything and will leave the stock thin.
- The skimmingThe grey foam that rises in the first minutes is largely starch released by the grain. Skimming it helps toward a clearer stock rather than a cloudy, slightly gluey one.
- Keep it at a bare simmerA rolling boil agitates the grains, breaks them down and clouds the liquid. Small bubbles at the edge of the pan for the full hour is what is wanted.
- Strain properlyPour through a fine sieve and let it drip rather than pressing the grains, which forces starch through. A coffee filter or muslin gives a nearly clear stock if you want one.
- Do not waste the grainThe strained barley is cooked and perfectly good in a vegetable soup, a salad or a pilaf. The recipe says nothing about what becomes of it.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt to a quart is a light hand, which is right for a stock you will season again later. Taste before using it as the base of anything already salted.
- KeepingRefrigerate within a couple of hours and use within three days, or freeze in cup portions. Starchy stocks sour faster than you expect.
Barley water and barley stock belong to a long tradition of grain-based liquids used where meat broth was unavailable, unaffordable or forbidden — in invalid cookery, in Lenten and fast-day kitchens, and in the vegetarian cookbooks that multiplied in Britain and America from the later nineteenth century onward. Books of this kind faced a practical problem: nearly every classical soup began with a meat stock, so a meatless equivalent had to be supplied before the rest of the soup chapter could function. Barley, cheap and easily had, gave body and a mild savour without any animal product, and the same grain simmered in water and strained had been given to the sick as barley water for centuries — a use generally traced back to Greek medical writing. What appears here is a bare four-line formula.