MORE RANTS ON A HANDFULL, A PINCH, DRIZZLE, DASH, SQUIRT, CONSISTENCY & RESTAURANT CRITICS.

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Recipe instructions are often vague despite Julia Childs’ obsession with regularizing everything.

“A spoonful.” Which spoon? If the recipe was early 20^th-century in UK or USA then every household had the spoon.

This one

A soup spoon when there were ones that didn’t spill (no rounded edges) consommédown one’s tie. When we still had those.

And that’s a hodgepodge of thinking because hochepot was a soup. A real mix.

Image: Wikipedia

And my thinking is often a “confused mixture, jumble, or random assortment of different things.” Like ideas.

Then there’s pinch and dash, a sprinkle, drizzle, and squirt. The latter now clearer now that there are special bottles.

A Handfull

And what is a handful?

Or two.

Image: Getty

We all know what it is when it’s an unruly child with chocolate covered hands running up and down the corridor of a plane that has been in the air for twelve hours. When it is a command in a recipe, it can produce despair. As in whose hand? But our answers to the problem should be Dorothy Parker’s:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

She is more the ‘what-the-hell’ school pf cooking. Or ‘how-bad-can-it-be’ attitude and go ahead and cook.

Remembering at the same time Mark Twain’s: The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening.

Consistency

Where we expect to see consistency says a lot about human delusion.

Quite rightly we expect it from In-N-Out Burgers, Honda, Hermes, Lora Piana, Paris’ Chez Georges, Swatch, Swiss underwear, Mares dive regulators, Charvet handkerchiefs, Ralph Lauren alligator shoes, Kiehl’s, and Bentleys.

So why do we expect a restaurant to be at the same high level every day when we know perfectly well that everything conspires and is in league to make sure it does not happen?