Most weird measurements in recipes don’t give me cause for hesitation, but I inherited a number of recipes from my late Kiwi mother-in-law that called for a “dessert spoonful” of one ingredient or another.
Do New Zealanders eat their desserts with the same size spoon as we do here? I have no idea.
Finally settled on about a tablespoon, and that seems to work.
Kiwis eat their desserts with tablespoons? Man, they must really love their sweets, down there!
LOL, well, if my husband was representative of Kiwis in any way, yes, they do love their sweets! But I would love to learn a more exact measurement in terms I recognize for what was meant by that recipe notation.
I saw it used in Australian recipes, too, though mostly just those offered by the older folks.
My reasoning is that a dessert spoon is generally the larger spoon in a set of cutlery, the ones we commonly use for soup. Teaspoons are the ones we usually use to stir our coffee. When serving desserts that require a spoon, I’ve always set out the larger spoon. So… there ya go.
Huh, around here, desserts are always eaten using teaspoons. And a tablespoon is much larger yet than even a soup spoon.
But Miss Manners says…
never mind.
Okay, this was from a preschooler so it’s not a real recipe, but I still like it: “A cup of degrees.”
What, you prefer to measure your degrees by weight?
Dunno why you felt the need to be coy about the book. Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout.
Well-known Nero Wolfe mystery.
They learned from their parents, and probably used the same dishes as their parents. So they used half of the wine glass of this and 1/3 of the earthenware bowl of that. Baking doesn’t need to be all THAT precise, and you do get a feel for what the batter looks and feels like.
I do most of my sugar cooking (things like making jelly, or lemon curd, or the hot sugar syrup that’s the base of buttercream frosting) by eye and experience, because it’s a PITA to get a thermometer into the shallow amount of hot sugar, and I haven’t yet found a candy thermometer accurate enough to be worth the effort. So the first couple of times I make the dish I meticulously pour out bits into cold water until it’s the “medium ball” stage (or whatever) and the 5th time, I cook it until it looks right.
I once measured all my volume measurements against each other. That is, I tested that the tablespoon held 3 times, the volume of the teaspoon, and that the right number of tablespoons filled the cup, and the right number of cups filled the larger measuring cups, etc. (I threw out one “tablespoon” as a result, too, because it was only 2 teaspoons. Everything else proved to be accurate, or at least, they all agreed with each other.) While I was doing that, I also measured the teaspoons and dinner spoons that I eat with. The teaspoon proved to be remarkably close to a true teaspoon, and the dinner spoon was about 1.5 teaspoons. My dinner spoon looks similar to the spoons I am often given for dessert. Take that for whatever it’s worth.
The “dessert spoon” measure is 10ml, or two teaspoonfuls (or 2/3 tablespoon).
This guy has a YouTube channel celebrating the 18th century life style. There is come crafting but it is mostly cookery and the recipes from the period are awfully vague, even the baking. He generally tries to standardize them, guessing if necessary (It says a handful of fennel; we’ll try two tablespoons.) but like you said, even for something needing some precision like bread making, experience makes up for vagueness.
My cooking style does not rely on strict measuring. I tend to add seasonings and ingredients until Edesia puts her hand on my shoulder and says “Abbastanza, figlio mio…” Adjusting the recipes will often improve the dish.
1 tablespoon is three teaspoons. So 1.5 tablespoons is 4.5 teaspoons.
Someodd measurements may have originated when there were metric/American conversions. I have directions for a crumble streusel topping that came from a German woman who used metric. 250 grams of butter is about 8.75 ounces. And 300 grams of flour is about 10-1/2 ounces.
Wasn’t being coy, I couldn’t think of which one.
And even making a basic loaf of bread doesn’t need anywhere near that much precision. I could do it without any measurements, and I bet I could teach most people who to do it in a couple of tries. Bread can take a wide range of hydration and yeast levels and still come out as good bread, as long as you knead it well to develop the gluten (or give it enough time to develop the gluten itself in no-knead recipes), and are patient to make sure you get good rises.
In the five years I lived in Hungary, my stove had only two settings: I and II. I have no idea to this day what temps they were supposed to correspond to, but I’m guessing something like 325 and 450, plus or minus 25 degrees or so. You get used to it and figure it out rather quickly if you have to cook every day. One is a “slow oven”; the other is a “fast oven.” And, yes, you can set it between the two if you want, but there are no temps associated with it, and I never bothered getting a thermometer for it.
Not so much a weird measurement as a weird way of expressing it: yesterday, my niece was making “fried” ice cream pie, and the recipe called for half of a 1.5 quart container of vanilla ice cream. That’s 0.75 quarts, or 3 cups, but the recipe author apparently wasn’t up to doing the math.
For my part, my recipes tend to involve measures of “enough” and “until it smells right”. I do make an effort to use actual standard measurements when I write recipes for others, but they’re usually just an approximation of what I use.
We have a recipe for ginger cookies (lebkuchenherzen) that informs the cook as follow:
Your kitchen doesn’t have a reference baby?
Babysitter, LSD, microwave…
I have an old french cookbook which calls for a “thumbnail” of butter (une vignette de beurre) in the crepe recipe.
Of course, for all I know that could be a perfectly normal measurement in France.