Barley Water with Lemon and Mace
Reader ratingsPearl barley boiled until the water turns silky, spiced with mace, sharpened with lemon and sweetened: barley water from Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife (1739). Alcohol-free.
- Recipe makes
- About 1.2 liters, 5 glasses
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
Includes about 1 hour 30 minutes for the barley water to cool before its final straining.
Barley water in a glass bottle and a stemmed glass, with lemon peel, an earthenware pot and a halved lemon.
The story behind the recipe
Barley water is pearl barley boiled in water until the liquid turns slightly silky, then strained, spiced, sharpened with lemon and sweetened. Eliza Smith printed this version in the ninth edition of The Compleat Housewife (1739), and it needs nothing a modern kitchen lacks.
The sober recipe on a page of wines
Smith filed it among her wines. Elder wine comes just before it, and Barley Wine just after, made from the same grain with a quart of white wine stirred in. Turn the page and the run continues with Plumb-Wine, Ebulum, an elderberry ale, and Cock Ale. Barley water is the only drink on the spread without alcohol.
Smith’s only test of doneness is that the water be “of a good thickness to drink,” and her “walm or two” is a single bubbling up.
It moved into the sickroom without losing its place in the larder. Maria Eliza Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (Philadelphia edition, 1807) prints a plainer barley water among her drinks “For the Sick,” made with common barley and lemon peel. That kind, she writes, “is less apt to nauseate than pearlbarley; but the former is a very pleasant drink.”
Read more about this recipe
Water, mace and three days
Smith gives no water measure, so the amounts here are our choice: 1.75 liters added in three parts, which leaves about 1.2 liters after simmering and straining. Stop when the liquid feels lightly silky on a spoon. Don’t mash the grains, or the drink turns cloudy and porridge-thick. Use one spice, as she says; mace is the more unusual taste today, cinnamon the more familiar. The cooked barley makes a good start to a soup.
She says the bottled drink keeps three or four days in a cool larder. A fridge is the safer place, and three days is our limit. For a thinner grain drink from an older kitchen, try medieval water gruel, oats simmered with honey. Barley water’s place among two thousand years of sober drinks is in Alcohol-Free Drinks Through History.
To make Barley Water.
TAKE of pearl-barley four ounces, put it in a large pipkin, and cover it with water; when the barley is thick and tender, put in more water, and boil it up again, and so do till ‘tis of a good thickness to drink; then put in a blade or two of mace, or a stick of cinamon. Let it have a walm or two, and strain it out, and squeeze in the juice of two or three lemons, and a bit of the peel, and sweeten it to your taste with fine sugar; let it stand till ‘tis cold, and then run it thro’ a bag, and bottle it out: it will keep three or four days.
Recipe makes: About 1.2 liters, 5 glasses
Ingredients
For About 1.2 liters, 5 glasses. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for About 1.2 liters, 5 glasses.
- Pearl barley115 g
- Water1750 ml
- Blade mace1or Cinnamon stick1
- Lemon juice, about 2 lemons90 ml
- Strip unwaxed lemon peel, about 5 cm1
- Sugar, or to taste50 g
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 115 g pearl barley
- 1750 ml water
- 1 blade mace, or 1 cinnamon stick
- 90 ml lemon juice, about 2 lemons
- 1 strip unwaxed lemon peel, about 5 cm
- 50 g sugar, or to taste
Equipment
Large saucepan
Sieve
Heatproof jug or bowl
Muslin
Glass bottle or jar
Instructions
Rinse the pearl barley in a sieve under cold running water.
Put the barley in a large saucepan with about three-sevenths of the water. Bring to a boil, then simmer gently for about 30 minutes, until the grains are tender and most of the water has been taken up.
Add half the remaining water, bring back to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the rest and simmer for another 10 minutes, until the liquid is lightly silky.
Add the mace, or cinnamon stick and boil for 1 to 2 minutes.
Strain the liquid through a sieve into a heatproof jug, without pressing the barley. Keep the grains for another dish.
Stir in the lemon juice, the unwaxed lemon peel and the sugar until the sugar has dissolved. Taste, and add more lemon or sugar if you like.
Leave to cool, then strain through muslin or a jelly bag into a clean bottle or jug, discarding the peel and spice. Refrigerate and serve cold.
Nutrition
55calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- About 1.2 liters, 5 glasses
- Servings
- 5
Roughly estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for granulated sugar and lemon juice, with an allowance for the starch the barley gives up to the water, for one of five 240 ml glasses.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
Smith’s batch is four ounces of barley. Scale the water with it, and judge the thickness by eye.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
The UK Food Standards Agency advises getting cooked food into the fridge within one to two hours of cooking and keeping the fridge at 0 to 5°C. Let the barley water cool on the counter for no longer than that, keep it in the fridge and drink it within three days.
Smith’s four ounces are avoirdupois ounces, about 113 g, rounded here to 115 g. Her “two or three lemons” give about 90 to 130 ml of juice; this version starts with two and leaves the third to taste.
Barley contains gluten.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
E[liza] Smith, The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion, 9th ed. (London, 1739), “To make Barley Water”, p. 221
Recipe details
- Drink
- Alcohol-free
- Drink family
- Sodas & Soft Drinks
- Region
- British
- Era
- 18th century
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Occasion
- Dry January
- Season
- Summer