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Barley Water with Raisins
Boil a cupful of pearl barley with a handful of seeded raisins in two quarts of boiling water for three hours, or cook overnight in a fireless cooker. If cooked over the fire use a porcelainlined kettle, and stir occasionally. Season with lemon juice and sugar.
A simple two-ingredient decoction, but the proportions assume long, slow evaporation and a pot that will not react with acid. A few notes before you start.
- The hinge: keep it wetA cup of pearl barley in two quarts of water simmered three hours will absorb and boil away most of the liquid if the lid is off. Keep it covered at the barest simmer and add boiling water as needed to end with roughly the volume you began with.
- Fireless cookerAn insulated box that held a preheated pot overnight without further fuel. A slow cooker on low, or a heavy pot brought to a boil and left in a 200F oven, does the same work.
- Porcelain-lined kettleEnamelled cast iron or steel. The instruction matters because the lemon juice and long cooking will pick up metallic flavour and grey discolouration from bare iron or unlined copper. Stainless steel is fine.
- Seeded raisinsRaisins whose seeds had been removed by hand or machine, as many table raisins of the period still carried them. Ordinary seedless raisins are what the recipe wants; a handful is roughly a third of a cup.
- StrainingThe recipe does not say. Strained through muslin you get the classic clear barley water; poured off unstrained you get a thicker, cloudier drink with the softened grain left behind. Either works.
- SeasoningAdd the lemon juice off the heat, or the long boil will flatten it. Start with the juice of one lemon and two tablespoons of sugar for the full batch and adjust; the raisins already contribute sweetness.
- Yield and servingDepending on how much water you replace during cooking, roughly six to eight cups strained, enough for four to six glasses. It thickens in the refrigerator and keeps three or four days; thin with water before serving.
Barley water is one of the oldest surviving invalid drinks in English cookery, descended from the classical ptisan, a barley decoction prescribed by Greek and Roman physicians and still recommended in nineteenth-century domestic manuals for fevers, sore throats and weak digestion. Its reputation rested partly on the belief that the starch was soothing and partly on the practical fact that it was a way to get fluid and a little nourishment into someone who would not eat. The raisins here do double duty, sweetening the liquid and lending body.