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Barley with Cream
Immerse four ounces of the best barley in a pint boiling water for ten minutes. Thoroughly drain and rinse in cold water. Replace in the pan, add a pint water, half pint fresh milk and half teaspoon salt, lightly mix and let slowly simmer for one and a half hours, being careful to mix with a wooden spoon at the bottom every eight minutes, to prevent burning. Remove, and serve with cream and powdered sugar separately.
A plain barley porridge, served hot with cream and sugar poured over at table. The whole recipe hinges on stirring the bottom of the pan often enough, since barley starch settles and scorches.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces of pearl barley is roughly half to two-thirds of a cup by volume. If the pints here are Imperial (20 fl oz), that works out to about 2 1/2 US cups of water for each pint called for and about 1 1/4 cups for the half pint of milk; using straight US pints simply gives a thicker porridge.
- "The best barley"This most likely means pearl barley, hulled and polished, which is what the timing suits. Pot barley or hulled barley keeps more bran and will need closer to two hours and more liquid; quick-cooking pearl barley will collapse well before the hour and a half is up.
- Why the first blanchingThe ten minutes in boiling water followed by a cold rinse washes off surface starch and any dusty or musty flavour from long storage. It is worth doing: it keeps the finished porridge from turning gluey.
- The stirring intervalEvery eight minutes is not fussiness. Milk solids and barley starch both sink, and once they catch on the base the scorch flavours the whole pan. A heavy-bottomed pan and the lowest steady heat make the schedule easier to keep.
- Milk and scorchingOne part milk to two parts water is still enough dairy to catch and burn. If your hob runs hot, a heat diffuser or a double boiler makes scorching much less likely, at the cost of a longer cooking time.
- Consistency and finishingAfter 90 minutes the grains should be swollen and tender with the liquid thickened around them. If it stiffens too far, loosen with a little hot milk before serving rather than at the start.
- Yield and servingServes two or three as a breakfast or nursery dish. Pass cream and sugar separately as directed; the porridge itself is salted only, so it takes sweetening at table well.
Barley boiled soft in water and milk was for centuries a food of the sickroom as much as the breakfast table, alongside gruel and arrowroot, and barley water was given in fevers long before it became a summer drink. Barley itself is one of the oldest cultivated grains in Europe and the Near East, and was long a common porridge grain in northern and eastern Europe before wheat and rolled oats became cheaper and more widely eaten. That this version arrives with cream and powdered sugar rather than salt or butter places it with the sweet milk-porridge dishes still found in Scandinavia, Poland and Germany, where milk-cooked grains are eaten as a light meal in their own right.