SC - weights and measures
Vincent Cuenca
bootkiller at hotmail.com
Thu Sep 21 08:59:11 PDT 2000
Here's another riddle for the list:
De Nola gives a system of weights and measures for spices in his recipe for
Duke's Powder:
"And the weights for spices sold in the shops are thus: one pound is twelve
ounces; one ounce, eight drachms; one drachm, three scruples: another way to
understand this more clearly: a drachm weighs three dineros and a scruple
weighs twenty grains of wheat."
This sounds a lot like the troy scale. Elsewhere, De Nola uses the word
"cuarteron" to measure cheese and sugar and defines it as four Castilian
ounces. The 1726 RAE defines a cuarteron as "generally understood to be the
fourth part of a pound." (Note: Taillevent uses the same measure for sugar,
in the "Pie of Raw Pears" recipe.) We can reasonably assume that sugar was
considered a spice, and so ostensibly would be weighed out with the same
scales as other spices. So, by this logic, is a cuarteron of sugar the same
as a cuarteron of cheese, or flour, or almonds? Is it three troy ounces,
rather than four Castilian (or standard) ounces?
Vicente
(who already has an opinion on this, but wants to bounce it off everybody
else)
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