How big is a pinch of salt?

A pinch of salt is an amount that can be picked up between the thumb and forefinger.

And that's about as much use as a sore a**e is to a tailor to quote my Great-auntie Vi.

I thought thank heavens for google. When you need an answer to a question like that it's so easy to just type it in and up will pop the answer. Much easier than trying to work out what I would need to look up in a book.

Except when google fails you. That's not strictly true. It's not so much that google failed me as the fact that there isn't a definition of a pinch. Not an accurate measurable one anyway. 

Then I tried referring to imperial weights and measures. It's probably one of those ancient words I thought, that we had to learn in school like gill and peck. No, it's not. I did discover however that the Scottish gill is a quarter of the imperial gill and that four Scottish gills equal one mutchkin.

I also learned the derivation of the folk song Good Luck to the Barley Mow, which makes sense of the fact that whenever I've seen it performed it involves the singer having to drink beer in between each stanza.

But no conclusive definition of a pinch.

I worry, you see, because the instructions for feeding the goldfish specify a pinch. Now sometimes my pinch is enough to feed a blue whale; other times it's not enough to feed a tadpole. I suppose it all balances out: the goldfish is still alive anyway.

I used to have an original Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book but it disappeared - at the time when my grandmother was selling everything to fund her bingo habit - but there doesn't seem to be any reference to the measurement in it other than in the ingredients.

But you know what it's like: you look up something on google and that leads to something else which in turn leads to something even more obscure.

So ... salt spoons were used when salt was brought to the table or in the kitchen as block. You also have marrow spoons - for scooping the marrow out of bones not for the vegetable as I first thought - moustache spoons and runcible spoons.

I thought the runcible spoon was made up by Edward Lear but it is a combination of spoon and fork, and a moustache spoon has a little silver strip above the bowl to allow gentlemen with handlebar moustaches to drink soup without getting it all over the place.

Incidentally if you decide to collect marrow spoons beware of forgeries. That's a marrow spoon in the photo.

And now I really must do something more practically useful ...