Those are measurements that require two fingers and/or the palm of your hand.

A novelty i suppose. Somehow i ended up with a set. Silly, but, i keep one in my baking soda as i just need a pinch added to cooking garbanzos.

Those spoons are useful to people who buy supplements (vitamins, etc.) in bulk powder form (rather than capsules). Not much cooking use for them, IMO. I mostly eyeball herbs & spices but use measuring spoons for leavening ingredients.

They might be especially useful for ingredients like xanthan gum, citric acid, ... where a little too much can go terribly wrong. And they're useful for garden seeds, of course. :)

Good point, party-music.

They are so funny, I actually have one of those! I got it a few years ago at a garage sale. mine only have 3 though...

season, those are super cute -- love the depth of the them. What I really want is a measuring spoon with a LONG handle that reaches down inside a box of baking soda! I think it's a PITA to get out even when the box is half full! lol!

I think the actual measurements are:

pinch = 1/8th teasp.

dash= 1/16th teasp.

and

smidgen = 1/32nd teasp.

I have them ( received as a gift) and love them but don't use often.

I also have the ones that Season55 showed, but I already had a 1/8 tsp measuring spoon, and I do use that one quite a bit. I hardly ever use the other ones, but I do use them occasionally for salt, as I often reduce salt by half or three fourths, but more lately I've just been omitting it altogether.

I have a set of spoons like those, too! Too funny!

Thanks party music! they are long enough to reach the bottom of the baking soda box. Yay! They are super useful.

Sleevendog is right. They first appeared as a novelty a couple of decades ago. Some have actual measures. Others don't.

Haha yes! I had a similar reaction when I found a set of these in a cheese making kit I was given. Until then I didn't even realize they were real measurements.

Look into a colonial days cook book. The measurements are the standard along with instructions like: "Stoke the oven, wait until hot, and cook until done"....

I read that this is also where the idea of a "Cookie" originated. You would place a small amount of cake or bread into the oven and you could determine if the oven was too hot or cold and get an idea on how long to leave your loaf in the oven. After it was cooked, the test unit was often for the delight of the kids and was known as a cookie.

https://whatscookingamerica.net/History/CookieHistory.htm

I read that this is also where the idea of a "Cookie" originated. You would place a small amount of cake or bread into the oven and you could determine if the oven was too hot or cold and get an idea on how long to leave your loaf in the oven.

I've read that, too, but I have to wonder about it, since an experienced cook could tell just by putting a hand into the oven. Leaving something in there long enough to cook would have meant that the oven temp might be very different than it was when you put the "cookie" in.

For those who needed temp approximations for modern recipes for wood stoves, the way in the 20th century was to put a little flour into a pan and stick that in the oven and you can get an approximation by how brown it gets in five minutes. There used to be tables in the back of the Farmer's Almanac for that up through the 1980s. I had to cook on a wood stove in the 1970s, and it would never have occurred to us that we had to bake a cookie to know if we could bake cookies.

I used to brown a tray of flour to make turkey gravy. Your thought about being able to test the temperature other than placing a cookie sample has merit but lacks poetry and the kids don't get the treat either. (:

Writersblock, while my mother taught me to judge the heat of a pan or oven with my hand, I don't think that's accurate enough for baking, especially with a stone oven which could take half a day to fully heat. I can't imagine it was anything like your modern woodstove. I could definitely see using dough scraps to test heat/yeast reaction rather than messing up all the bread for the village. It's unlikely to have been sweet, as sugar was far more precious than flour, which was still pretty precious. I don't know if the story is true, but I could see it being possible.

The origin of the word, however, is from the Dutch for "little cake" and far more recent. Most of the world uses "biscuit" (twice baked) which goes back to making dry preserved breads like ship's biscuits--and is still the meaning behind biscotti, but just try finding commercial biscotti, nowadays, that has the traditional hard texture, rather than pretty much a standard cookie.

Some times my rough measurement for temperature is Reddening of the skin, Slight removal of a layer of skin, blistering, and have not reached burning bone but I think we have diverged from the original topic.... (:

AAAACK!

I just rewrote a recipe that called for a pinch of salt. I entered 0.3 grams. I can only imagine that someone is going to say "0.2g, how the $ do I measure that?" (: