With the food historian’s centuries-behind-the-curve timing, I’ve recently discovered the tasting menu, just as the vanguard of food writers are tiring of it. A time-travelling tour of cultured butter or mutton ham, with an inquisitive chef at the controls, relieves me from my blunders with dusty cookbooks and the worry that I’ll be ruining a whole leg of pork or destroying an oven (sorry, Mum). The best restaurants’ samples honour ancient, taken-for-granted ingredients, such as the Box Tree in Ilkley’s puffed and spice-dusted single grain of barley, which brought a pop of flavour to a cheese custard.
Barley came to these islands along with a couple of innovative and disruptive ideas – farming and pots – around 4,200 BCE. Fast-growing and hardy, it became the staple grain, only replaced some time after 1066 by wheat in the south and oats in the north. Pots and barley have had intertwined careers, as suggested by the Anglo-Norman word “pottage” (which evolved into porridge) for a grain stew. To Anglo-Saxons it was a “brewis” (the ancestor of Scots “brose”), to which was added “worts” – leaves such as bishopwort, helenium, radish and dock, each with their (supposed) medical use. If we eat barley today, it is usually as pearl barley (more refined and less nutritious than “pot barley”) in Scotch broth. Its combination of creamy starch and nutty heart – an iron fist in a velvet glove – is ideal, too, for risotto.
We still grow, in these islands, half as much barley (about seven million tonnes per year) as wheat, but it’s barely a kitchen ingredient now. Most goes on animal feed; the rest on beer and whisky. Barley is blessed with quantities of an enzyme that converts starch to sugar; it gets working when wet and the seeds germinate, a process known as malting. As even wild yeasts in the air can devour sugar and turn it into alcohol, I like to think that all the Neolithic home-brewer needed to get the party started were powers of observation and a pot.
As barley meal – or beremeal in Scotland – was fuel for workers and peasants, it has scarcely troubled the printed cookbook, except for a few bannocks and breads in the cool north and wet west. Other records give fleeting but revealing glimpses. The social investigator Frederick Morton Eden noticed approvingly, in The State of the Poor (1797), that at Christmas “the crust of the goose-pye, a dish with which almost every table in the county at that season is supplied, was made of barley-meal”. Keats, in Devon with his dying brother, rhymed the Teign head with “cream/All spread upon barley bread”. Around the same time, a Board of Agriculture report recommended that the rapidly increasing population should eat “pot barley” rather than brew it into beer.
We have not taken this advice. We use this virtuous grain to feed our pleasant vices: as alcohol, meat and sweetness – in the form of barley malt extract. This brings a homely taste to factory-made biscuits, cakes and, particularly, breakfast cereals. Unlike refined sugar, however, malt extract has plenty of micro-nutrients such as B vitamins along with its calories and, as you would guess from its earthy colour, is rich in gut-boosting polyphenols.
Barley flour, having less gluten than wheat, makes dense bread, but it works well in combination. Elizabeth David recommends about 15 per cent barley meal to wheat flour – I’ve had good results using up to 25 per cent of flour made from a type called naked barley. It absorbs more water than wheat and so makes excellent light, short pastry, and brings softness and good keeping qualities to breads and cakes. Together with a jar of barley malt extract, it hasn’t quite transported us to Keats’s Devon or Eden’s Cumbria, but we’ve been living in a heaven of retro-baking with malted biscuits and that squidgy delight of childhood, malt loaf. Barley is too good to leave to chefs, cereal manufacturers and food historians; it earns its place in our food future, too.
[See also: There is no hierarchy to good wine]
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America