How much really is a glug?
Here I am, in the middle of prepping, reading the above recipe. I’m not particularly fond of cooking to start with. I don’t have time nor the desire to research what a glug is, other than I know the sound oil makes when you pour it from a great big bottle. Are all bottles the same size though? Do all oils glug at the same rate? And please define “a few.” I’m sure this recipe annoyed me far more than it should have, but here we are.
I understand a dollop, dash and a squeeze of lemon, and a pinch and a splash. They are imprecise, general cooking terms. I can “salt to taste.” But I’m not down with heating a few “glugs” of oil in a pan. It’s a sound, for God’s sake. A sound.
Maybe the chef wants to be homey or chummy, the kind of guy you’d feel comfortable inviting for toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Who cares how much cheese or tomato you use. Or maybe they cook by the seat of their pants. Maybe how much they use of any one ingredient doesn’t matter.
Who needs a recipe anyway?
Hey, I could make up my own measurements. Add a palmful of pepper! Give it a sneeze of salt! Throw in a fistful of cilantro! Heat a dog’s bowl of oil! This is a slippery slope.
Or I could embrace the fact that not everything in cooking or life can be, or should be, minutely measured.
Nah. As a writer, I’m okay turning verbs or sounds into nouns, but I just can’t abide glug. I need specificity. Plus, a glug is too cutesy. A keen editor would ding glug as a little darling that you should kill.
The blame for glug goes to:
California Olive Ranch says chef Jamie Oliver coined this term. In his cookbooks he refers to “a good glug of olive oil,” and “a couple of glugs of extra virgin olive oil.” To me, that sounds like a lot of oil. When asked, Oliver’s spokesman Peter Berry said, “There’s no real ‘definition,’ as such but everyone knows what a glug is.”
The hell we do.
1or 2 Tablespoons. Who cares?
Merriam-Webster says a glug is “a small amount of liquid especially when poured from a bottle.” What’s this “especially?” Also, your idea of a small amount and mine are likely different.
I learned this from working in a frame shop–a customer would bring in their kid’s artwork, announce that they didn’t want to spend “a lot” of money, and end up ordering a $425 custom frame job. “Small” and “a lot” are subjective.
Chef Jan Bennett from London has a website titled A Glug of Oil. She says “I don’t believe in measuring exact amounts when making a recipe; unless of course, it’s baking and that’s only because by law you have to, or the recipe just won’t work. But for general cooking, I make up as I go along and only make a note for the purpose of writing recipes for this blog.” She says a glug of oil is “probably just over a tablespoon.”
But wait!
The Local Palate, which says measurements are often more guideline than rule, defines a glug as “About 2 tablespoons. That is, the amount required to coat a pan, or until the bottle audibly glugs.”
A chef on Food52 writes, rather glibly, “A glug is a measure of an amount you feel in your heart. The people who write up recipes make approximations all the time. They don’t know the people that you want to make happy with your bread, or roast chicken or schnitzel. A glug means you have to put something of yourself into it.”
So, yes, we must feed our souls. Not everything can be measured. I get it. But it’s not that hard to write “coat the pan with oil,” or “use about 2 T of oil,” is it?
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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and essays. Her second novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is coming October 27, 2026, from Regal House Publishing: When love letters from a despondent stranger land in her lap, an anxious overthinker becomes convinced she’s the cure, and sets off to save him, and herself, blissfully armed with nothing but magical thinking.
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