Flipping through cooking magazines and studying various recipes, you can often come across the term "handful". Old, "grandmother's" recipes are completely full of such recommendations, because in their time there were no relatively convenient measures, no kitchen scales, no exact marks on measuring cups. So they measured everything in handfuls and pinches, bringing the dishes to the ideal purely in taste.
But what is a handful? And can this term be used today?
What is a handful
The term is derived from the word "handful" and means palms folded together in the shape of a boat. The fingers should be tightly closed so that what is typed in the hands does not spill out through the gaps.
A handful is the space that is formed when the palms are folded together.
Also, a handful is often called the space formed by one palm, also folded in a "boat". Although, to be honest, it's only half of a full handful.
Another handful can be called not folded palms, but what fits in this space.
A handful is inaccurate
The term "handful" will probably go away soonto rest, because it is as inaccurate as a "pinch" of something. For one pinch, you can take one gram of a substance, or five. Little difference? What if you s alt something?
A handful is a very inaccurate term, because you can pick up palms full of berries, or you can just cover the skin slightly. Both will be considered a handful, but the weight of the berries in these two cases will be very different.
There is still confusion with a full handful (when two palms are folded) and a half, which is also popularly called simply a "handful" (when one palm is folded "boat").
Test "Three Cakes"
Imagine three people cooking the same recipe to make the same cake. According to a fictitious recipe, we need:
- 2 handfuls of flour;
- 2 eggs;
- 1 glass of water;
- a pinch of s alt.
The cake is prepared by an adult man and woman and a little girl. What will they get?
The proportions will, of course, be observed as they cook, however, everyone will get different sizes of cakes, since everything depends on the size of the palms.
So, the girl will cook the smallest cake, because she has the smallest palm. This means that her handful will also be the smallest.
And she'll be lucky if her cake comes out at all, because only flour was measured in handfuls, and the rest of the ingredients are the same.
A woman's cake will come out of the usualsize.
A man will have the largest and most likely the driest due to the large amount of flour.
So the conclusion is clear: a handful is very inconvenient!
