“A smidgen is just a teeeenie, little bit…
3 smidgens make one pinch.
4 pinches equals one little bit.
4 little bits equal one midlin’ amount.
3 midlin’ amounts equal one right smart and it takes 5 right smarts to make a whole heap.” -Jed Clampett of Beverly Hillbillies
A smidgen is the single, slightly oversized bite of food you have after finishing your first serving and are basically full but it tastes too good to stop eating.
OK, just a smidgen more...
Followed in our family by "a stopper" if it is exceptionally good.
It wasn't really limited to rural Ireland. MPH was on all speed limit signs and was because all vehicles were imported from the UK where MPH were and still are standard and the entire Irish fleet didn't yet have dual speed markings on the speedometer. Once they did then the signage was exchange countrywide within weeks, if I remember correctly. Distance signs were changed slowly over a longer period as it wasn't so critical to the safety of driving.
Stones and feet for people's weight it still used in common parlance, again not limited to rural Ireland. This is just the inertia of tradition. Doctors and such professionals would always use metric now of course.
With the exception of pints of beer which is still the standard today, food and groceries were already metric in the 90s. Source: I grew up in rural Ireland ;)
"This town wouldn't be so bad if a quart of milk were still a dollar. Or even if a quart of milk... was still a quart" - Cowboy Junkies, Horse in the Country
We still buy milk and draught beer by the pint in the UK and mph/yards are used on the road. Height is almost always in feet and inches whereas body weight might be stone or kilos depending on personal taste. Most other things are metric and have been for a while but there's a few random exceptions, bridges use both feet/inches and metres!
I’ve decided to entirely disregard the suggested measurements provided in recipes, which means that I guess I’ve decided not to follow recipes at all anymore.
Except for bread, but as soon as I can commit a recipe for bread to memory, I’m through!
Baking is chemistry so amounts matter. In most cooking though, they aren’t critical.
I like some family recipes from India: if you get a list of ingredients up front at all, no amounts will be specified. And in the middle you’ll see “add the milk” when no milk had appeared in the recipe up to that point.
At a Python conference many years ago, around the year 2000, Eric Raymond gave a keynote. This was when his "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was widely discussed, and he was pushing the then new term "open source".
He used as an analogy how you can go to <fancy restaurant>, taste something amazing, and ask for and get the recipe. Yet even though you could make it yourself, you'll still visit the restaurant because they have the skills and practice to make it more easily than you could.
By analogy, he argued, even if you release under an open source license, you'll still get people hiring your services because that's more effective.
Someone in the audience objected. He pointed out that he had worked at <fancy restaurant>, that the recipes deliberately omitted detail, and that staff had to sign an NDA - it was nothing like "open source".
I already had my doubts about Raymond's understanding of things. That was the final nail.
One example of this is that Brewdog release quantities and precise instructions and notes so that enthusiasts can homebrew their favourite beers. I know because one of my colleagues spent a lot of money on computerised brewing gear and always has a homebrew or two in progress because he likes experimenting and tweaking things slightly.
But these people also still go to the pub to drink them on a night out or buy them in a can from time to time. The truth is that it's actually a lot of hassle to do homebrew well so that it tastes consistently good, and even ignoring the expensive equipment my friend has, he still probably pays more per pint to brew his own than just buying it pre-made. Obviously, he does both because he enjoys the process.
> I’ve decided to entirely disregard the suggested measurements provided in recipes, which means that I guess I’ve decided not to follow recipes at all anymore.
When I want to cook something new I'll grab several recipes and compare the ingredients and relative measures to get a meta-concept of what constitutes the fundamental essence of that dish. I use that as a base reference but actually cook by intuition/taste.
For me a recipe is mainly a list of ingredients, with the execution being a matter of personal preference.
You're in luck - delicious bread can be made from a simple recipe with no suggested measurements. You'll need a large mixing bowl, a kitchen scale, and four ingredients:
- Put some flour into the bowl[1]. Make a note of its weight.
- Add 2% of the flour's weight in salt.
- Add 0.5% of the flour's weight in yeast[2].
- Add 70% of the flour's weight in warm water[3].
Stir until you get a rough, sloppy dough.
Cover bowl with plastic wrap and leave to rise for 8-10 hours.
Set your oven to 450°F / 230°C.
Put in a Dutch oven, without its lid, to warm.
Scrape the bowl out onto a floured surface.
Dust your hands with flour and shape the dough into a ball.
Cover with plastic and let sit for 30 minutes.
Put the dough ball into the dutch oven.
Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes.
Remove the lid and bake for 15 minutes more.
Take the loaf out of the dutch oven and let it cool completely.
1) Bread flour is best, but all-purpose will do.
2) Instant yeast is best; "active dry" yeast must be dissolved into the water before mixing into the flour and salt.
3) Warm like a cozy bath; too much heat kills yeast.
Easy bread using bakers ratios. I make this bread all the time. This will take about 2.5 hours from start to finish:
1. Flour 100%
2. Water 60% [0]
3. Salt 2%
4. Yeast 1-1.5% (active dried or instant) [1]
Instructions:
1. mix it all together
2. knead it for 10 minutes (or until it passes the window pane test) [2]
3. let it rise for 1 hour at room temperature.
4. knock it down to release most air. Shape and place in a bread pan. Let it rise again for another 40 minutes.
5. Cook at 220°C (200 in a fan oven) for 40 minutes.
[0] 60% (~65% for brown flour) is the sweet spot for easy to make bread. Any higher and you are going to have to use a "stretch and fold" technique to knead the dough which is more time consuming.
[1] Active Dried Yeast will need to be mixed with some luke warm (blood temperature) water before hand and left to sit for about 10 minutes. Instant Yeast can be mixed straight in with the flour!
> Except for bread, but as soon as I can commit a recipe for bread to memory, I’m through!
You should investigate using "baker's math" for bread. Seriously. It simplifies everything enormously by replacing the need for detailed recipes with formulas more akin to cocktail making (1 part this, 2 parts that). Your recipes become trivial to remember, and also it makes it trivial to scale them to different quantities.
recipe for bread? throw a reasonable amount of yeast and some sugar in a bowl of room-temperature-to-warm water, wait 5-10 minutes, pour in flour while kneading, until you get a wettish dough, let it rise for 30 minutes, then put the dough in the oven on basically any temperature until it looks done
This is my approach too. I only ever measure the liquid - water or sometimes water with a bit of milk. And measure is a strong word - I just fill 2 cup measuring cup I have because that gives me enough for two large loaves. It doesn't seem to matter much how much starter you put into the batch, as long as it's 'enough'. I usually almost-empty my partly full quart jar of starter. A glug of oil or a pat of butter, a small palm full of salt. As long as you add flour gradually until you get the desired consistency, you're fine. Maybe you get longer/shorter rising times, but I usually do cool and slow rising for hours and hours so I don't really notice much of a difference there.
Lol. I grew up in southern Louisiana, the only time I follow a recipe and measure things out is during the holidays when I'm cooking for lot of people.
I wing it, and may have lived dangerously once or twice due to my love of hot foods.
In one of the books I'm reading, it suggests that there used to be a set of codified colloquialisms for measurements of dried herbs etc, that were used by doctors, apothecaries, etc.
It defined a "pugil" as "the amount you can pick up between your thumb and first two fingers".
I wonder how many more of these eminently practical, useful terms have been lost to the centuries. Perhaps they're still in use, in the appropriate fields of endeavor.
One time my grandmother was trying to write down all the recipes of my Portuguese great-grandmother. My great-grandmother was having none of it (being used to oral tradition) and during one recipe while my grandmother was writing down the last ingredient, my great-grandmother dumped some extra water into the dough while her back was turned.
When you cook with Granny in her kitchen, these type of "measurements" become second-nature quite quickly. It's all about the proportions of each ingredient in relation to the others. It was not unusual at all to see Granny shake out an amount of seasoning or some other dry ingredient into her hand and then dump or shake it into a pot, or to just dip a coffee cup into the flour bag and always get the right amount.
I've been trying to cut down on salt and I realized how many recipes are handwaving when it come to the amount of salt. Yes, experience helps, but it can also cause you do add way more than needed, if that's what you've always done. Oftentimes you can halve it without affecting the taste.
This is why for most things, I don't actually add much or any salt during cooking. I've found that it's better to add it when eating. There are exceptions, though, such as in baked goods, brines, etc.
many recipes say use unsalted butter, and add a little salt? how about use salted butter and don't add any more- that's usually enough that it isn't offensively bland
It's worth mentioning one of my favorite language facts of all time: the word dram (small unit still used for a portion of whisky in Scotland), drachma (the pre-euro Greek currency), and dirham (the currency of Morocco) are all cognates.
In some professions where more precision is needed, the preferred unit is the "schtickle." For example, a dentist might say to his assistant: "Chrissy, give me a schtickle of flouride."
