Healths improvement: or, Rules comprizing and discovering the nature, method, and manner of preparing all sorts of food used in this nation. Written by that ever famous Thomas Muffett, Doctor in Physick: corrected and enlarged by Christopher Bennet, Doctor in Physick, and fellow of the Colledg of Physitians in London.

Hordeum.

Barly used any way in bread, drink or broth, is ever cooling (saith Galen) and engendreth but a thin and weak juice. Before we use it in broths or Ptisan, it should be clean hulld, and washed in many waters. The decoction of Barly in chicken-broth, strained with a few blauncht almonds, and sweetned with sugar, and rosewater, is a ve∣ry covenient meat for sound men, but more for them which are sick and abhor flesh.

Cardan saith that Galen maketh mention of a kind of Barly in Greece▪ growing without a husk, and hulld by nature; which place he never citeth, because he was mistaken; for through all Galen I could never find any such thing, though of purpose I searched for it very diligently. The best Barly is the biggest and yellowest without, and fullest, closest and heaviest within; it is never to be used in meat till it be half a year old, be∣cause lying causeth it to ripen better, and to be also far less windy. Being made into Malt by a sweet fire and good cunning, it is the foundation of our English wine, which being as well made as it is at Not••ingam, proveth meat drink and cloth to the poorer sort. Parched Barly or Malt is hot and dry, but otherwise it is temperately cooling and less drying. That Wheate and Rye is far more nourishing then Barly. Plutarch would thence prove, because they are half a year longer in the earth, and are of a more thick, sappy, and firm substance. But Rice (being counted and called by Tragus German Bar∣ly) disarmeth that reason, which is not sowed till March and yet is of as great or rather greater nourishment.

Notes

• lib. de alim. fac. cap. 9.
• lib. 6. cap. 20. de rer. var.
• Plut. in. Nat. Quest