SC - interesting URL - food shopping!

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Sigh.  This is where Al-Baghdadi has it over European cookery books.  One of these days I
may construct a measuring cup marked in ratls and uqiya and see if anybody understands.

Philip & Susan Troy wrote:

> Tara Sersen wrote:
>
> > Now, to start a documentation war ;) if there is little documentation for cooks
> > measuring things (i.e. the recipes don't usually list measurements,) how can
> > we assume they DID?  And, if we can't assume that they did because no documentation
> > supports this claim, what assumption are we left with other than that they eyeballed
> > measurements?
>
> Occasonally recipes _will_ list measurements in a rudimentary way: a
> gallon of wine, a dozen eggs and do away half the whites, an ounce of
> cinnamon, an eggshell full of salt, a piece of butter the size of an
> egg, etc. Recipes will also fairly frequently provide descriptive
> guidelines: it should be thick, loke that it be stondyng, make it sharp
> with vinegar, add sugar to abate the sharpness of the vinegar, etc.

Some of these descriptions of metrology involve unknown quantities.  How long is a
Paternoster, do the people in that region say it fast of slow?  I was looking at one
receipt for wafres that involved rolling out your paste 'the size of a slice of cheese' as
if these were standardized?

> If a recipe does give a known quantity and then goes on to say, for
> example, how thick it should be, it ought to be possible to deduce some
> kind of ballpark estimate for how much bread to include.
>
> I agree that cooks eyeball measurements all the time; they often don't
> have time for anything else. But it is informed eyeballing based both on
> experience and the desire to have a consistent finished product. That
> doesn't mean they're not measuring, it just means they aren't using
> measuring cups.

Amen!  Eyeballs were made before cups, after all.

Selene