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Cream of Barley Soup
1/4 cup barley 1/3 pint cream 2/3 pint milk 3 cups water Soak the barley a few hours or over night. Drain, and cook in three cups of water. When tender, take out one-third of the barley. Put the remainder through a colander, add the cream and milk and the remaining one-third of the barley. Reheat, add salt, and serve.
If cream is not obtainable, a thin white sauce may be used instead. A little onion or celery salt may be added for seasoning if desired.
A plain barley porridge thinned with dairy, and it works as well now as it did then. The only real decisions are which barley you buy and how gently you reheat it.
- The measurementsAssuming US pints, 1/3 pint of cream is about 2/3 cup and 2/3 pint of milk about 1 1/3 cups. If the book is British, the pint is 20 oz and you get roughly 3/4 cup cream to 1 2/3 cups milk; either ratio makes a soup, so scale to the consistency you want.
- Which barleyPearl barley is the default and will be tender in 45 to 60 minutes. Hulled barley keeps its bran and wants 75 to 90 minutes plus more water. Quick-cooking barley is pre-steamed and will turn to paste; avoid it here.
- Soaking is optionalAn overnight soak shortens the simmer by 15 minutes or so and was worth more when fuel was counted. Skip it if you like, but add another cup of water to the pot.
- Watch the waterThree cups for a quarter cup of barley is a generous ratio, and most of it stays in the pot as the starchy liquid that gives the soup its body, so keep the cooking water rather than pouring it off after the simmer.
- "Through a colander"This means pressing the softened grain through to make a rough purée, not straining it away. A food mill, a sieve and a wooden spoon, or a few pulses with an immersion blender all do the same job. Do not blend it smooth or it goes gluey.
- Reheating with the dairyThis is the hinge. Once the cream and milk are in, bring the pot only to a bare steam over low heat. A hard boil risks scorching the starchy milk and leaving a skin on the surface.
- If you use the white sauceA thin white sauce in this period means about 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk. It gives a heavier, blander soup than cream, so lean harder on the salt and the celery or onion seasoning.
- YieldAbout a quart, which is three modest bowls or four small first courses. It thickens considerably as it cools and will need thinning with milk the next day.
Cream of barley soup belongs to a family of "cream of" purées that filled the first pages of American cookbooks from the 1880s onward: a starchy base, cooked soft, sieved, and let down with milk or a white sauce. Where meat stock is not used, the appeal is obvious, since the usual soup foundation is off the table and the grain has to supply both body and substance. Barley in particular had a long reputation as invalid food, surviving today in barley water. The instruction to hold back a third of the grain and stir it in whole is a small piece of craft that keeps the soup from being wholly smooth, and the note about substituting white sauce tells you plainly that cream was not something every household could count on.