Fire & Knives

Bruce, a chef I trained with, had his own system of measurement. A ‘little’ of something was definitely more than a ‘hint’ which was in turn decidedly less than a ‘pinch’. Though he’d grown up and trained in New Orleans, he was suspicious of the ‘soupcon’ and never used it. It took at least two ‘shitloads’ to make a ‘whole shitload’ and ‘a gracious plenty’ meant pouring something from a sack. I once got in huge trouble over a bunch of thyme….

‘You said a bunch!’

‘Yeah. As in ‘a whole bunch of thyme’. I didn’t mean a whole bunch of thyme’.

I’ve never felt the need for greater accuracy in measurement than Bruce taught but I’m aware that others do. For this reason, I’ve decided, as a service to cooks everywhere to finally put the whole system on an empirical footing. No matter what your own arcane system is, every cook uses a basic pinch. If, therefore, I could create a base quantitative measure for it - a kind of ‘International Standard Pinch’ (ISP) - then each cook’s own system would translate. I see international awards, statues in my honour in capital cities, the first Nobel prize for cookery.

Observation has shown that pinches are taken either with the tips of thumb and two fingers or between the ball of the thumb and top knuckle of the forefinger. For the sake of experimental simplicity we’ll plump for the first option, the three-digit grab. This is the most convenient for extracting things from narrow necked jars.

Perhaps the largest variable is that we could characterise as ‘intent’ in the person making the pinch. The culinary world is divided into those who, on receiving the instruction ‘add a glass of wine’ will add one glass and then free pour at least another half and those who will pour nearly a full glass in, vacillate over the last quarter then pour it back into the bottle. The first type, let’s call them ‘profligates’, are likely to take larger pinches than the second type, let’s call them ‘tight’. We will need to test the spectrum defined by these two extremes to obtain the average pinch.

As luck would have it, I am a confirmed profligate, while my partner is as perfect an example of the tight as one could ever wish to meet. I also tested a dozen foodie friends, amateur cooks and professional chefs. This is by no means a statistically robust sample but it's as far as I'm prepared to take it. After asking a grill cook in my local breakfast joint if he'd be prepared to have his pinch measured and being offered physical violence by his dishwasher, I feel I've taken this as far as investigative journalism requires

By an amazing stroke of good fortune I live in a centre of excellence for the accurate measurement of small quantities of herbs and powders. London’s fashionable Camden Town has long had a thriving trade in narcotics and has some of the best-stocked emporia for drugs paraphernalia in Europe.

It would be difficult to recommend my supplier as the shops and stalls in Camden avoid anything as legitimate as names. If you come out of the station heading north, it's the third one on the left. Ignore the scrum of red-eyed entrepreneurs, hissing their wares, and duck in past the glass case of hookah pipes.

Inside, the shop is vast and strangely peaceful. Clutches of Dutch students, their bondage shirts pressed by their mothers, stand in silent wonder staring at the huge vitrines. And little wonder - the array of technology for intoxication is truly bewildering; doubly so as drugs are never mentioned, either on packaging or by the canny salesmen. I confess I was tempted by the titanium herb grinder, because it looked genuinely useful, and by the 'herbal aromatherapy inhaler', because it looked like an enormous bong.

After protracted haggling I bought a 'Diabolo™ Fuzion FP50 Professional Digital Mini Scale'. This, according to the mellow gentleman behind the counter, was designed for 'gardeners who might want to weigh leaves' and was accurate to 0.01g.

Back in the kitchen, I took twenty pinches of Maldon salt and placed each on a standard extra-large cigarette rolling paper. This was less for the purposes of experimental consistency than because they came free with the scales. The first and last five samples were discarded to obviate any initial effect of developing technique and any manual fatigue towards the end. Each sample was weighed and the results entered into a complex spreadsheet of my own devising.

My own pinches varied widely from as low as .51g up to 1.61g. In this experiment they averaged at 1.10g which was at least statistically pleasing. On the other hand further experiments have proved that I can't get two pinches within 25% of each other even if I'm trying. My normal carefree, Bohemian strewing habits mean I will have to continue to ignore recipes and rely on tasting.

My partner returned results of astonishing consistency and terrifying restraint averaging .55g with .08g error either side. I snort with contempt.

The extremely compact and concealable nature of the 'Diabolo™ Fuzion FP50 now came into its own. At lunch with a friend - a phenomenal cook - in a Soho dim sum restaurant - I was able to whip out the scales during a lull in the gavage and perform field research.

This was, frankly, weird. The scale has a blue neon digital readout, the staff spoke no English, we were surrounded by paper lanterns and the detritus of Chinese new year. It felt like a scene from Blade Runner. His average was .72g. His margin of error .18g. I put the former down to his natural Northern restraint, the latter to his creative nature and unrestrained lifestyle.

Further tests at a variety of odd locations added meat to the bones of the experiment. The FP50 was whipped out wherever there was a saltcellar and a friendly cook could be persuaded to spare 2 minutes and slowly two trends emerged.

1. The individual pinch is based entirely on character. It's as tediously reliable as those quizzes in women's magazines that extrapolate your psychological profile from your choice of cocktail. The conclusions are obvious but suffice it to say, I intend, in future, to only drink with those who pinch an average exceeding .95g.

2. Accuracy and repeatability in pinching is entirely random amongst the sample. Some professionals vary in a way that makes one wonder at the consistency of their output. Some amateurs are frighteningly consistent.

The average, for what it's worth, was .78g

One interesting point, though, has arisen from this research - inspired, I confess, by a conversation with my new best friend at the head shop. Drugs have defied decimalisation because of the wonderfully simple technique of halving a mound of anything. A quantity of known weight can be split in half with, shall we say, a credit card and the exercise can be performed under the most trying of conditions - let us say the lavatory of a Soho member's club - with as great an accuracy as a costly scale

The trick of scraping an ingredient into a line and dividing it by length is, in my friend's opinion, sorely underutilised in the domestic kitchen.

It could be argued that the old eighths, quarters, sixteenths method of measurement, devised long before the FP50, would give us the greatest accuracy of all with minimal effort. I know, it's just a foolish whim, but I just long to hear Delia Smith say,

"Rack out a gram of salt and chop three lines into a pan of boiling water"

Note

The observant reader will have noticed that final weight will vary according to the density of the ingredient pinched. We have chosen to conduct this experiment with pinches of salt and can only suggest you do the same.