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Barley Water
2 tablespoons barley. 1 quart cold water.
Wash barley, add water and let soak 4 hours. Cook in same water until water is reduced one-half, if to be used for infant feeding; for adults reduce liquid to 1 cup. Salt and cream or lemon juice and sugar may be added as the case requires.
A sickroom staple stripped to its bones: grain, water, time. The one thing the printed text leaves out is how much barley, so start from the standard proportion and adjust.
- The missing quantityThe original gives only the quart of water; the barley amount has dropped out of the line. Invalid-cookery books of the period commonly give something in the region of 2 tablespoons of pearl barley to a quart, and that sort of ratio gives the light, faintly cloudy drink intended here. A markedly larger quantity, say two ounces to the quart, would give something closer to a thin gruel.
- Pearl barley, not pot or hulledPearl barley has had the bran polished away and releases its starch quickly. Hulled or pot barley keeps its bran, takes far longer to soften, and gives a darker, nuttier liquid that will not reduce to the same clean consistency.
- Do not use this for an infantThe direction for infant feeding reflects 1900s practice and is now firmly rejected. Barley water is nutritionally near-empty and displaces milk; in babies it causes poor growth and, because it dilutes sodium, a real risk of hyponatremia. Infants take breast milk or formula, on medical advice, and nothing else in this line.
- Reduction is the timing, not the clockJudge by volume, not minutes. A quart simmering uncovered takes roughly 30 to 40 minutes to fall to a pint and closer to an hour to reach a cup. Keep it at a bare simmer; a hard boil throws starch onto the pan bottom and scorches it.
- Strain while hotPour through a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth as soon as it comes off the heat. Cooled barley water thickens and the spent grains hold liquid you will lose. The drained barley itself is perfectly good in soup.
- Seasoning as prescribedSalt and cream make it a savoury, slightly nourishing drink for someone off solid food; lemon juice and sugar make the familiar cordial. Add lemon after cooking, not during, or the long heat flattens it.
- Yield and keepingReduced to a cup, this is one serving; reduced by half, two or three. It sours quickly, so refrigerate and use within two days, and expect it to gel slightly as the starch sets.
Barley water belongs to a long European tradition of grain decoctions given to the sick, traceable in principle to the classical ptisan, a barley drink prescribed in the Hippocratic writings and still recommended by name in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical texts. By the time this book was compiled, it had settled into the standard invalid-cookery repertoire alongside beef tea, gruel and toast water: bland, easily swallowed, and thought to soothe both stomach and kidneys. The instruction to make a weaker version for infant feeding is the period speaking plainly. Before safe commercial formula and reliable pasteurisation, diluted cow's milk was commonly cut with barley or oat water in the belief that the starch made the curd finer and more digestible, and household books gave the proportions as routinely as they gave a cake recipe.