Measuring Butter

Quite a number of Averil's recipes ask for butter "the size of an egg" or of a walnut. I asked Great-Grammy about how much that was. Here is her answer:

Here's my own bright idea. Put an egg in a measuring cup. Fill with cold water to make 1 cup. Take out the egg and put in enough butter to make one cup again. You can, of course, use the egg in the cake. You can do the same thing with margarine since water won’t affect it. I suspect most of our eggs are larger than what they used to use, so you could use a smidgen less butter.

This is the way I measure Crisco for pie crust. If I need 1/3 cup, I fill the measuring cup with 2/3 cup water and add Crisco until the cup is full to the one cup level.

I tried Grammy's experiment, starting with an egg. It was a little complicated because butter floats. I used a knife tip to hold it down.

One large egg displaces about 1/4 cup water. It took 3 tablespoons of butter to make up that amount.

In the recipes, I suggest "2 or 3 tablespoons" because I suspect the eggs Averil was using in the 1930s would be called small these days. (I used a large egg because our local supermarkets don't sell small ones.)

Walnuts from the store also float and it takes more than a knife tip to hold them down. I used my thumb and forefinger, trying to submerge the same amount of finger with the walnut and the butter.

"Butter the size of a walnut" is about 1 1/2 tablespoons.

The friendly neighborhood squirrels left us a black walnut. It is smaller than an English walnut (and it didn't float). It displaced about 1 tablespoon of butter.

Now I need to do something clever with a pound of walnuts in the shell.