A pinch, a handful, a glass…

There are people who, as soon as they pick up a recipe, immediately reach for the kitchen scales. They weigh the flour, check the sugar, measure the milk “to the drop” and, if the recipe calls for 5 grams, then 5 grams it must be, even if it means spending half an hour adding or removing ingredients to reach the perfect amount. Then there are those who happily leave the scales in the drawer and prefer to cook by “feel”: a handful, a pinch, a generous spoonful, a glass… and off they go. Two seemingly very different ways of cooking, yet both deeply rooted in tradition and equally focused on the end result.

Our grandmothers’ kitchens rarely knew the precision of grams. Recipes were passed down by word of mouth, and quantities were entrusted to their hands and experience: a knob of butter, a handful of rice, a handful of flour, half a glass of water… all instructions that may make us smile today, especially when we are faced with the most difficult question of all: exactly how big is that glass?

And yet, for someone with experience, cooking “by eye” certainly did not mean cooking at random. Precision simply took a different form. It was built over the years, by learning to recognise the consistency of a dough, the colour of a cream, or the right softness of a preparation. After making the same cake dozens of times, perhaps there was no need to know that the flour had to weigh exactly 250 grams: a quick look at the dough was enough to understand whether it needed a little more.

This is precisely one of the most fascinating aspects of old-fashioned recipes: they left room for intuition and experience. They were not instructions to be followed to the letter, but guidelines to be interpreted. And often, it was this freedom that made each preparation slightly different from the next, giving it that unmistakable homemade character that we still love to find in the food we taste today.

The problem arises when that recipe is passed on to the next generation. For the person who has always made it, “a glass” is a precise measurement; for someone reading it for the first time, much less so. A glass can be large or small, filled to the brim or only to a certain level, while a “handful” inevitably depends on the hand of the person preparing it. As a result, the same recipe can turn out differently every time.

And perhaps that is precisely the beauty of old-fashioned recipes: that “as much as needed” which seems so imprecise to us today actually tells the story of a way of cooking based on experience, habit and sensitivity. A kind of cooking where there was no need to know everything down to the gram, because often all it took was to look, taste and trust your own hands. A way of doing things that has been passed down along with the recipes and that, even today, reminds us that cooking is not just a matter of numbers.