THE MEATBALL UNIT OF MEASUREMENT. Mary Jane did a lot of baking during the Christmas season. One thing she did was to locate her mother’s book of Italian recipes. She was looking for the recipe her mother used to make a kind of chocolate cookie that Mary Jane has fond memories of. The recipe was one a number of recipes which had been cut out of newspapers and pasted in to the book.
Mary Jane called to me that she had found the book and then gave a laugh which brought me into the kitchen. The recipe was for “Italian Chocolate Cookies”. One of the instructions was “Form dough into small balls (a little smaller than a meatball…”)
I think the meatball comparison is very useful. I know that when I see some distance measurements I often find it useful to think of the distances on a football field.
x
I think the meatball measurement is charming but baffling. Meatballs can be so many different sizes. Even within the same batch! It’s somewhat comparable to saying, “Such-and-such is the size of a strawberry.” Whoever made the meatball a unit of measurement had a different experience of meatballs than I have had.