Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (21 page)

The cup’s ascendancy was helped by the kitchenware itself: the gradual emergence of specially manufactured measuring cups with gradations for half cups, quarter cups, and so on. Catherine Beecher talks of ordinary teacups and coffee cups, but in 1887, Sarah Tyson Rorer noted the recent appearance “in our market” of “a small tin kitchen cup.” These cups were sold “in pairs, at various prices . . . one of the pairs is divided into quarters, and the other into thirds.” This is recognizably the measuring cup as it continues to this day.

By the 1880s, it had become common for cookbook authors to give cup conversions, so that cooks could do without scales altogether. Maria Parloa, a popular cookery
teacher based in Boston, gave the following conversions in 1882, using a “common kitchen cup holding half a pint”:

The problem with all these conversions was how to interpret them. Exactly how solid is “solidly packed” meat? How do you distinguish a “generous” from a “scant” pint of liquid? And what on earth is a “heaping cupful”?

Mrs. Lincoln, another Boston cook, and Fannie Farmer’s predecessor as the head of the Boston Cooking School, attempted to weigh in with some qualifiers. A spoonful, Mrs. Lincoln noted, not altogether helpfully, was generally supposed to be “just rounded over, or convex in the same proportion as the spoon is concave.”

What Fannie Farmer did was to take these measures and remove all interpretation from them. The knife with which she leveled the top of her cups eliminated all doubt, all ambiguity. Cups must not be generous or scant, heaping or packed. “A cupful is measured level. A tablespoonful is measured level. A teaspoonful is measured level.” This exactitude offered the cook a sense that cookery had been elevated to the level of science.

Farmer’s method was indeed a huge improvement over the heaping and scant measures of previous writers, so perhaps we can forgive her for failing to spot the fact that the entire system of cup measures was flawed.

Fannie’s fixation with level measures in the kitchen reflected how late she came to cooking. She was born in Boston in 1857, one of four daughters of a printer (a fifth sister died in infancy). She never did much cooking at home. Fannie would probably have become a schoolteacher, like her three sisters, except that while still at high school, she was struck down with an illness, probably polio, and after a period of paralysis, was left permanently weakened, and with a limp. It looked for a while as if she might never leave home. In the 1880s, aged twenty-eight, she took on a job as a mother’s helper in the home of a friend of the family. There she developed an interest in cooking. In 1887, she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School, one of several new schools across the country aimed at teaching middle-class women how to cook. She must have done something right, because seven years later, she was running the school, dressed in a white cap and a white apron that stretched all the way down to her ankles.

The Boston Cooking School taught Fannie Farmer to cook with the purpose-made measuring cups that had lately become available. And she in turn recognized no other method. Her entire approach was about offering cooks a sense that they could do anything, so long as they obeyed the rules and followed her instructions to the letter: absolute obedience would lead to absolute proficiency. As a latecomer to the kitchen, Farmer had none of the natural instincts to fall back on about how much of any ingredient was needed and how long to cook it. Everything had to be spelled out. She would go so far as to stipulate that the pimento garnish for a certain dish be cut three-fourths of an inch long and half an inch across.

The idea was to create recipes that would be absolutely reproducible, even if you knew nothing about cooking: recipes that “worked.” She inspired the same kind of devotion as Delia Smith in Britain today. (“Say what you like about Delia,” people often remark, “her recipes work.”) Evidently, plenty of people found Farmer’s level measures comforting, given her colossal sales (her 360,000 copies sold put her in the same league as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which had sold
more than 300,000 in the months after publication). So long as you had your cup measures and your case knife, these were recipes you could trust, and the admirable thing about a Farmer recipe was that you could repeat it time and again with roughly the same results.

Whether we would want to achieve Farmer’s results today is another matter. Her tastes have not worn well. She was fond of such things as spaghetti timbales (soggy cooked pasta reheated in a mold with salmon forcemeat) and avocados filled with oranges, with truffle decoration and a condensed milk sauce. This brings to mind the food writer Elizabeth David’s comment: “What one requires to know about recipes is not so much do they work as what do they produce if they do work?”

 

S
ome of Fannie Farmer’s faith in her own system came from the fact that she had rejected entirely the archaic instructions based on analogy that had constituted almost all kitchen measuring up to her lifetime. Since medieval times, recipe writers had dealt in such currency as fingerbreadths of water and butter the size of a pea, a nut, or an egg. The most universal analogy seems to have been that of the walnut. For Farmer, cup measures were superior to fingers and walnuts because they were both more accurate and more precise. In many ways she was right. Instructions such as “an egg-sized lump of butter” drive lots of rational people to despair. Today, the cookery forums on foodie websites are full of frustrated home cooks trying to ascertain the exact dimensions of a lump of dough the size of a walnut. Is it one tablespoonful? Or two?

Yet for hundreds of years, these comparisons were the main idiom of measurement in the kitchen. Here is Hannah Wolley, author of the
Queen-like Closet,
in 1672, with a recipe to make “pancakes so crisp as you may set them upright.” The recipe in its entirety reads: “Make a dozen or a score of them in a Frying-pan, no bigger than a Sawcer, then boil them in Lard, and they will look as yellow as Gold, and eat very well.” This is not a recipe at all in Fannie Farmer’s terms. Wolley does not tell us how to make the batter, or how long to cook it.
How hot is the lard? How much of it should we use? How many pancakes do we “boil” at once? And how do we drain them?

Unless you were already very confident in the art of making pancakes, you would get nowhere with Wolley But assuming you did have long experience in batter making and frying, it is an interesting recipe. The fancy imagery—“no bigger than a Sawcer” and “yellow as Gold”—made perfect sense if you knew your way around a kitchen. The end result—for twice-fried pancakes—sounds unusual: a bit like a pancake-doughnut hybrid; a cardiologist’s nightmare, but genuinely useful for someone who wanted to make pancakes “so crisp as you may set them upright.”

Before the nineteenth century, almost all recipes dealt with measurements much as Wolley did. They were aide-mémoires for those already skilled in the kitchen rather than instructions in how to cook. This is part of the reason old recipes are so hard to reconstruct: we have no idea of the quantities; we do not know the rules of the game. Take this one, from the Roman Apicius. It is for “another mashed vegetable” (the capitals are his):

Not to put too fine a point on it, this sounds disgusting: slimy cooked lettuce with two applications of onion, one at the beginning and one at the end. But the quantities and cooking times could make all the difference. Lovage, celery seed, and dry mint are all pungent, aniseed-y seasonings; a pinch of each might be acceptable, a whole spoonful would be horrible. Defenders of Roman cuisine say that there would have been a fine balance among all the strong flavors. We have no way of knowing if they are right.

Compared to this Apician type of recipe, which gives no quantities at all, a “piece of butter the size of a walnut” was a huge improvement.
It sounds vague, but actually it isn’t, relatively speaking. Measurement is always a form of comparison—between the fixed standard and the thing being measured. In ancient societies, measuring began, naturally enough, with the dimensions of the human body. Sumerians in Mesopotamia invented units of length based on their own hands: the width of a little finger; the width of a hand; the distance from the tip of a little finger to the tip of the thumb on an outstretched hand. The basic Greek measure was the
daktylos,
the breadth of a finger. Twenty-four fingers made a cubit. The Romans took the Greek
daktylos
and made it a “digit.”

Cooks in the kitchen did exactly the same thing. The finger was a measure that was ever-present. It was literally handy. “Take four fingers of marzipan,” says Maestro Martino, the most renowned cook of the fifteenth century. Artusi, the Italian best-seller of the late nineteenth century, begins one of his recipes invitingly: “Take long, slender, finger-length zucchini.” Using fingers to measure reflected the tactile nature of kitchen work, in which fingers were used to prod meat, form pastry, knead dough.

If there were fingers, there were also handfuls. To this day, many Irish cooks make soda bread using handfuls of flour and refuse to do it any other way. It sounds like it wouldn’t work because human hands are so variable in size. But the great thing is this: an individual cook’s hand never varies. The handful method may not work as an absolute measure, but it works very well on the principle of ratio.

A ratio is a fixed proportion of something relative to something else. So long as one person uses a single hand, to pick up the flour and other ingredients, the ratios are constant and the soda bread will rise. Some nutritionists today still use the human hand as a unit for measuring portion sizes: a portion of protein for an adult might be the palm of your hand (minus the fingers); for a child, the portion is the palm of a child-sized hand. In many ways, ratios work better in cooking than absolute measures, because you can adapt the recipe to the number of people you are cooking for. Michael Ruhlman recently wrote a whole cookbook founded on the principle of ratio,
arguing that when you know a culinary ratio, “it’s not like knowing a single recipe, it’s instantly knowing a thousand.” Ruhlman’s ratio for bread, for example, is five parts flour to three parts water, plus yeast and salt, but this basic formula can be tweaked to become pizza, ciabatta, or sandwich bread, or it can be scaled up from one loaf to many. Unlike an Irish soda bread maker, Ruhlman constructs his ratios from precise weights, not handfuls; but the idea is the same.

Having exhausted the measuring possibilities of the human hand, cooks turned to other familiar objects. Among these, the walnut stands out for its ubiquity. The “size of a walnut” has been used by cooks as far afield as Russia and Afghanistan; England, Italy, and France; and America. The comparison has been used at least since medieval times. It has been applied to carrots, to sugar, to parmesan fritters, to cookie dough, to fried nut paste, and above all, to butter. What made the walnut so prized as a unit of measurement?

Imagine you are holding a whole, unshelled walnut in the palm of your hand, and its value becomes clearer. Like a finger, the walnut was a familiar object; almost everyone would have known what one looked like. “The size of a walnut” was much more helpful than the other common shorthand, “nut-sized” (which always begs the question: what kind of nut?). Even now, most of us could estimate the size of a walnut pretty accurately, even if we only see them once a year for Christmas. Unlike apples or pears, which come in many shapes and sizes, walnuts are relatively uniform. It is true that there are freakishly small varieties of walnut, notably the French
noix noisette,
no bigger than a hazelnut. Usually, however, when we speak of walnuts we mean
Juglans regia,
which was cultivated in ancient Greece, to which it was imported from Persia. By 400 AD, it had reached China. It was an important crop in medieval France, though it did not reach Britain until the fifteenth century. The great thing about the Persian walnut, apart from its rich oily taste and delicate brain-like kernels, is its constancy of size. Its fruits do not vary much between around 2.5 and 3.5 cm in diameter, a handy quantity. Picture a walnut on a spoon. Now imagine the walnut has transformed
into butter. It’s a decent amount, isn’t it? A walnut is somewhat more than a smidgen and less than a dollop. Much the same as a knob.

In numerous recipes where butter is required, a walnut is indeed just right. In 1823, Mary Eaton used a piece of butter “the size of a walnut” to stew spinach. Mrs. Beeton in 1861 advised walnut-sized butter for broiling rump steaks. Fannie Farmer might protest: how do I know if my butter is really walnut-sized? But the more confident you feel in the kitchen, the less you worry about these things. “Butter the size of a walnut” reflects the agreeable fact that in most forms of cooking—baking partially excepted—a tad more or less of any ingredient is not critical.