Пролистывая кулинарные журналы и изучая различные recipes, you can quite often come across the term "handful". The old, "grandmother's" recipes are full of such recommendations, because in their times there were no comparatively convenient measures, no kitchen scales, no exact marks on measuring cups. So they measured everything with handfuls and pinch, bringing the dishes to the ideal purely to taste.
But what is a handful? And is it possible to use this term today?
What is a handful?
The term is derived from the word "handful" andmeans palms folded together in the form of a boat. The fingers should be tightly closed so that what is typed in the hands does not pour out through the gaps.
A handful is the space that is formed when the palms are folded.
Also a handful is often called the space formed by one palm, also folded "boat". Although, to be honest, it's only half of a full handful.
Another handful can call not palms folded, but what has fit into this space.
A handful is inaccurate
The term "handful", probably, will soon leave onpeace, because it is just as inaccurate as the "pinch" of something. For one pinch you can take as one gram of substance, and five. Is there a small difference? And if you solish something?
A handful is a very inaccurate term, becauseyou can collect full palm berries, and you can only cover the skin lightly. 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 half, which is also simply called a "handful" (when one palm is folded with a "boat").
Test "Three cakes"
Imagine that three people cook the same recipe in order to make the same cake. According to the invented recipe, we will need:
- 2 handfuls of flour;
- 2 eggs;
- 1 glass of water;
- a pinch of salt.
The cake is prepared by an adult man and woman and a little girl. What will they have?
The proportions will, as far as cooking is concerned, of course, be met, but the cakes will all have different sizes, since everything depends on the size of the palms.
So, the girl will cook the smallest cake, because she has the smallest hand. This means that her handful will also be the smallest.
And she will be lucky if her cake comes out at all, because only handfuls of flour were measured, and the rest of the ingredients are unchanged.
The woman's cake will be of normal size.
At the man it will be the largest and, most likely, the driest because of a plenty of a flour.
So the conclusion is unequivocal: a handful is very inconvenient!
