Strange Words For Food Amounts

[Peter the eater]

I've been trying to keep track of those strange quantity words -- the ones you find in recipes that send you muttering to the reference books and sites. Universally loved foods, like bacon in the example above, tend to have tons of colorfully specific nouns. There's another great bacon word that I encountered then forgot from here -- this site has come up before in the eGullet forums but it's worth re-mentioning since "for each answer you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program."

Got any words to share?

[Chris Hennes]

Not really a great word, just a cautionary tale... One of my first unsupervised cooking projects as a kid was making a lasagna, which called for three cloves of garlic. My parents commented on just how garlicky the lasagna was: I had put in three heads, not knowing the terminology. If you don't know, ask someone!

[lesliec]

"Cup"?

New eGulleters click here...

[maggiethecat]

I'm OK until we reach fitch. Then I'd suggest Google.

I have to admit that I'm down with recipes that call for a wineglass of this or a handful of that.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Elizabeth David has dessertspoon, liqueur glass, wine glass, coffeecup, teacup, tumbler, breakfastcup, and gill. A gill is a quarter pint, but of course she's referring to a quarter of an imperial pint, which is a bit more than a quarter of a U.S. pint.

She was apparently adamant about not translating these measures into other units, which was part of the reason that these classic books weren't as popular as they might have been in the U.S.

My grandmother on my mother's side has recipes calling for "a glass of oil" (by which I assume she meant those green juice glasses with the Grecian motif on them--enough oil to fill her square electric skillet up to about a quarter inch) or "three whiskey glasses," which I think means "three shots of whiskey," because the glasses could get a bit unpleasant ground up in her honey cake.

[Peter the eater]

Chris, why use a clove when you've got a bulb?

On New Year's Day I watched The Lord of the Rings films back to back to back, then looked up "a brace of conies". Two rabbits.

[Peter the eater]

Elizabeth David has dessertspoon, liqueur glass, wine glass, coffeecup, teacup, tumbler, breakfastcup, and gill. A gill is a quarter pint, but of course she's referring to a quarter of an imperial pint, which is a bit more than a quarter of a U.S. pint.

Elizabeth David has lovely quantities. She is discussed every time I have dinner cooked by my father-in-law from Bristol-Sandhurst-SAS. Usually it's about the olives atop the Beefeater Roast, or how to cook the perfect Yorkie (the pudding, not the dog).

[Edward J]

One of my favorites is "peck", as in "A peck of peppers", "a peck of strawberries".

Here's a fact-oid for you:

Virtually all fruits and vegetables are sold by weight: a pound of bannanas, 10 lbs of potatoes, etc.

Tomatoes are sold in usually 25 lb cases

Peppers? Sold in one and one ninth cubic bushels cases.

Strawbs, blueberries, etc, in one pint baskets.

Go figure................

[inductioncook]

There are a lot of very good French cooking words. A great one is "une larme" -- a teardrop. Another almost infinitesimal one is "une souconne" -- a suspicion. And old, pre-metric cookbooks in Italian have all sorts of colorful expressions. Funny how after centuries of folk terms, colorful expressions and exuberant imprecision, people making pasta in Italy just "happened" on the precision that 100g of pasta is to be cooked in 1000ml of water with 10g of salt!

Edited January 13, 2010 by inductioncook (log)

[KarenDW]

having spent the day converting and scaling recipes... I LOVE the metric system!

[Peter the eater]

Funny how after centuries of folk terms, colorful expressions and exuberant imprecision, people making pasta in Italy just "happened" on the precision that 100g of pasta is to be cooked in 1000ml of water with 10g of salt!

Yes, I've wondered about that. And how "one egg" means something different depending on where and when you are.

[PopsicleToze]

In New Orleans many people refer to garlic cloves as "toes". I kid you not

Rhonda

[purplechick]

I would like to contribute "punnet," which is the basket-like container you buy berries in. I think it's a British term, I learned it from my Aussie husband. Interestingly, he also uses it for half-gallon containers (or whatever the metric size would be, 2000 ml?) of ice cream.

[syoung68]

my favs (from my grandmother) are smidge and scosche.

[Lindacakes]

Two fingers of bourbon.

[heidih]

I will add "a walnut size lump of butter" which is fairly accurate since walnuts, in my experience, are uniform in size.

[thayes1c]

A pat of butter is a strange one. When I'm making a sauce that needs a hint of nutmeg I like to refer to it as a "ghost of nutmeg." Then again, I am somewhat deranged.

Also, I'm reading David Thompson's Thai Food right now and he mentions an old recipe that calls for a "small bigness" of something to be added.

[Lindacakes]

A knob of butter.

[judiu]

Per my (late) Mom, a "whiffle" of cinnamon in my carrot and raisin salad.

[Peter the eater]

Maybe there needs to be an eGullet glossary.

A "punnet" of blueberries still survives here in Nova Scotia, Canada. I like "une larme" = a teardrop, and "une souconne" = a suspicion. To me, a smidge is less than an eighth teaspoon, but a scosche? Two fingers I know well, but a whiffle?

[inductioncook]

I left the "p" out of "soupconne" earlier -- sorry.

[judiu]

Maybe there needs to be an eGullet glossary.

A "punnet" of blueberries still survives here in Nova Scotia, Canada. I like "une larme" = a teardrop, and "une souconne" = a suspicion. To me, a smidge is less than an eighth teaspoon, but a scosche? Two fingers I know well, but a whiffle?

Peter, a whiffle is the mereset dusting, like the first tiny flurry of snow that blows around on the street; really, in the case of the spice, not enough to notice in the finished product, but still lending a subtle background note. I think my mom invented the usage, but I understood it perfectly!

[andiesenji]

One of my favorites is "peck", as in "A peck of peppers", "a peck of strawberries".

Go figure................

I grew up on a farm in western Kentucky in the 1940s. We used wood baskets like these http://www.crateandbasket.com/wood-baskets_1010_s.aspx for all kinds of garden and orchard produce.

We had bushel baskets, half-bushel, peck or quarter-bushel and half-peck baskets, as well as larger, oval double-bushel, wood-bottom baskets that were used exclusively for tobacco.(grown on the farm until the mid-60s).

While most apples and pears could be placed in bushel baskets without damage, peppers, peas, string beans, squash were picked in peck baskets and even more delicate produce such as tomatoes, berries, etc., went into half-peck baskets.

Unlike the ones shown in the link, ours had wire handles secured to a wire that went all around the upper part of the basket, cinched tight so the basket could carry fairly heavy loads. To make the handles more comfortable a short length of rubber hose was slit along one side and slipped over the wire.

The baskets were made locally, were cheap and had lots of uses besides garden stuff.

Lined with an old sheet, they were used to carry washing out to the clothesline and the dried clothes carried back in. Those needing to be ironed were sprinkled with water, rolled and placed in one of these baskets awaiting the iron.

They made great toy containers and occasionally contained one or more small children (often me) being pulled across the lawn by one or more cousins.

And now you know far more than you ever wanted to know about the "peck" measure.

Incidentally, for dry corn, oats, sorghum, etc., there were quarter-peck scoops that could be hooked onto hanging scales - every feed store had one. So people could purchase such items by either weight or volume, taking their own containers to the store as a bag cost money.

See, today we have returned to doing things the old-fashioned way, instead of using new disposable bags, we take our own bags to the grocery! Recycling is not a new thing at all...

[andiesenji]

my favs (from my grandmother) are smidge and scosche.

One of my uncles, who was with the occupying forces in Japan after WWII always used the term "sukoshi" for a very small amount. (Pronounced skosh)

[Peter the eater]

That's a wonderful peck-splanation Andie, thank-you. I'd never seen a tobacco farm until the summer of 1988 when I bicycled through Bardstown, KY. It was a beautifully lush place with giant leaves draped all over the place. Oh great, now I'm having a cigar fantasy.

Your story reminded me of our own fall potato harvest in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. My kids dig them up like Easter eggs, filling all kinds of containers. I found a good picture from October 2007 showing the woody half-peck and the adaptable plastic milk crate.