There’s the fairly standard “enough dry spaghetti to fit in a circle formed by one’s thumb and forefinger” for a meal for two.
Which I had heard before; but seeing it written down made me think - that’s a self regulating measure. Because if you assume - and I think it’s reasonable - that a big person (I mean big in frame) needs to eat more than a smaller person, this adjusts the amount of pasta accordingly. In it’s own small way, that’s quite brilliant.
j
I’ve had people ask for the recipe after a meal. I write it down, they look at it, laugh, then ask for more details. So, I get out my recipe book and show them; “sauté some onions and celery, chop and add some zucchini”. No specifics, season to taste.
A community cookbook fundraiser included layering ingredients until “the bowel is full”.
Fit for a graduating class at MIT!
Actually, I just disregard sizes of onions in recipes and go by feel, because what exactly is a “large onion”? The large onions at my store are enormous. From experience, I’m sure the recipes aren’t talking about these, but they never seem to have a definition that is convenient to reference.
Apparently, looking it up, it seems like 4, 8, and 12 oz are the ballpark weights for small, medium, and large. The onions at my grocery are at least 16 oz (weighing the one intact one I have, it’s 18 oz.)
13 centismoots by 19.5 centismoots for your 9"x13" pan. 
My wife once read a recipe requiring an egg of oil. It specifically said to poke a hole in an egg, pour out the insides, fill the empty eggshell with oil and then pour it into the recipe. Something about how it had to have *exactly *the same amount of oil as eggs.
A ‘glug’. As in add three glugs of of red wine to the ragu.
Yeah, I’m actually somewhat annoyed by the habit people have of referring to cooking as an art and baking as a science. I’ve had to talk more than one person new to baking down off a ledge because they freaked out not knowing how much a dash is and afraid their cake will blow up in their face. If having a measuring spoon marked Tad calms their worries enough that they actually start baking stuff, I’m all for it.
Someone should show that recipe writer a scale and blow their mind.
I think you’re right. But I can’t remember which brand of jeans advertised that their new style had “a skosh more” or where, exactly, they put that skosh.
Google is my friend. It was Levis For Men. But a quick google doesn’t divulge where the skosh went beyond “where it counts”. There was a related blog screed against making jeans for fat-asses, though, so I’ve decided to look no more.
Oooo! I have to try that. Are the chips the size of rice grains? Lentils?
Thank you! I find this cooking=art, baking=science analogy too strong and scares people off. There is some truth in it, but baking does usually tolerate a reasonable amount of slop, and there certainly is “art” to it, as our ancestors were not using precise kitchen scales and measuring cups to bake their goods. You do develop a feel for it, and the amount of liquid you need to add to a dough may change depending on the humidity of the day you are baking it, so going by “exact numbers” isn’t even that exact, unless you’re factoring in for that.
I find centi- to be an inelegant prefix; everything else is in powers of 1000. So 135 x 195 millismoots, please.
About half the size of a tab of acid. They were about the thickness and crispness of a kettle-cooked potato chip. I don’t know how much trouble it would be to make your own. Maybe sprinkle them on, or stir them in, just prior to serving so they don’t get soggy.
And I hope “half the size of a tab of acid” will now be a contender for most unusual measurement seen in a recipe.
I made my own pickled ginger. Peel the skin, then slice or use peeler to make thin slices. You pickle the slices and boom, pickled ginger. Store bought is way easier and just as good, though.
My grandmother had handwritten recipes calling for “one glass” of this or “two glasses” of that. When my mother and aunt were clearing out her apartment after she died, they think they determined the actual glass in question.
Justin Wilson used to have fun with wine. If a recipe called for 3 cups of wine, he would carefully measure three cups, then up-end the bottle and add quite a bit more.
Here is him making gumbo:
At 06:10, he adds cayenne pepper sauce: “1 teaspoon, and a little more”.At 08:32, he shows off his ability to measure out a teaspoon of salt with the palm of his hand.
On the subject of coleslaw, one Mexican restaurant in my town serves slaw with a dressing that consists only of oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. I like it better than the anglo versions.
Not everything else. I don’t recall how popular it was throughout Europe, but in Hungary, deli items were all typically ordered in decagrams. So you’d ask for 20 dekas of salami, 30 deka of cheese, etc. Similarly, shots were served in centiliters, glasses of drinks in deciliters. Nothing inelegant about the “centi-” prefix, and, to me, a centismoot feels more intuitive for describing objects of that scale, just like you normally wouldn’t describe it as a 230 mm by 330 millimeter pan. We have lovely system of SI prefixes; we should use them!
For the record, in Japanese “skosh” (the more formal version of which is “skoshi”) means “a little” of anything. It can be a little salt, a little bigger, a little further, a little skill with language, pretty much anything. There is always some context to show what kind of measurement is being addressed.
I remember that jeans commercial too and it was the first time I had heard this term used in American English. I think it was some time in the 80s but I’m not sure. I’ve always wondered how this word passed into our vernacular, and having done so, why it didn’t gain more currency. Japanese have adopted so many English words, and continue to do so every day, relatively few words travel in the opposite direction.
Bill Wharton (aka The Sauce Boss) performs the blues on stage while making a huge pot of gumbo. After the show he feeds the audience.
When he adds his hot sauce, he stops playing for a bit, explaining how precision is important or he’ll ruin the gumbo. He very carefully adds exactly one drop. Then he asks the audience if they like a bit of heat with their gumbo. Naturally, everyone screams YEAH!!! So he very carefully adds one more drop. He stirs the gumbo, takes a taste, and screams out for a beer, which someone in the audience passes to him.
Once he is ok again, he says, “now where was I?”, grabs the bottle, and upends it into the pot.
What was the rest of the reciple? I hope it wasn’t
" … mayonnaise ⅞ cup and 2 tsp of sugar … "
with the key word faded from frequent folding or such. :smack: