[Sca-cooks] How old is barley water?
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu May 17 16:10:37 PDT 2007
On May 17, 2007, at 6:56 PM, Terry Decker wrote:
> Barley water is documented in Anthimus (6th Century) as a drink for
> those
> ill with fever. As a drink, you may come across it referenced as
> orgeat and
> orgemonde, where it is mixed with anise, fruit or almonds.
>
> Bear
Which is interesting, since at some point we seem to have barley-
based drinks evolving over the years into almond-based drinks... it
may be a total coincidence that we have barley / hordeum at one end
of the line and modern orgeat and orzata at the other, but I suspect
there may have been a sort of sprawl or shift where almond-flavored
barley drinks lost their barley element, possibly as a result of a
previous shift from barley to barley sugar to ordinary sugar, with
the almond element remaining something of a constant.
I guess it's a variant of the same process that allows for blancmange
that is neither white nor rice-based.
Adamantius
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