My mother was in town this weekend and can never leave without feeding my inner domesticated beast. In the past it's been bookshelves and cheese-graters, this time it was eensy weensy measuring spoons.

You'd think something as inconsequential as measuring spoons could escape being blogged about. Of course, you'd be wrong—especially if you were also someone who had committed to blog every day for two weeks and you had drank a lot of coffee at 8pm on a Sunday night and hadn't posted yet. Under these conditions, you just may start to imagine deep philosophical dilemmae contained in scones, bellybutton rings, and mason jars.

These were not just any measuring spoons, they had the measurements for a drop, a smidge, a pinch, and a hint. In case you didn't know, those were in order of volume smallest to largest. Yes, a hint is bigger than a smidge. I've been subscribed to Unclutterer for a while now and my guess is that these fantastic spoons would qualify me as a hopeless clutterer. Since we spent many minutes in Sur la Table and I made it out the still proud owner of zero ramekins, I'm counting the foray as a success.

And yet (two coordinating conjuctions back-to-back for extra emphasis!), how is a pinch any different from a foot? What is a foot anyway? It's not some universal carved-in-stone measurement. After reading through Wikipedia articles on the subject, it seems that best guesses say a foot is simply 12 inches (as the "ynche" predates the foot). And an inch was just the width of the base of the fingernail until formalized in 1958 as 25.4 millimeters.

The meter is slightly less subjective, as it represents one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. It was first calculated in 1798 and remarkably close (within 1/5 of a millimeter) to what we now calculate via satellite. The next time you drop that interesting bit of knowledge at a party, please remember—if only to yourself—that you know it solely because I decided to blog about spoons.

Perhaps the formalization of the smidge is just another victim in civilization's continued efforts to dehumanize our conceptualizations of the world (or at least our baking) and replace them with cold, hard science. But if it improves our risotto, is it all worth it?