dollop

OK, how much is a dollop?

Does it matter what it’s a dollop of? Is a dollop of mashed potatoes more than a dollop of whipped cream?

Don’t tell me to look in a dictionary. I’m asking you what you think without looking at the book. Anyway, I have looked in a dictionary. Several, in fact. Here are the definitions of dollop in Merriam-Webster:

1. chiefly British : an indefinite often large quantity especially of something liquid
2. a lump or glob of something soft or mushy
3. an amount given, spooned, or ladled out : portion
4. a small lump, portion, or amount
5. something added or served as if in dollops

So. Is it a large amount (1), a small amount (4), or just a portion (3) or glob (2)? An 1819 definition quoted by Oxford says “a dollop is a large quantity of any thing,” but current usage suggests that a dollop doesn’t go as far as it used to.

If you do an image search for dollop on Google, you will mainly find images of a dollop of whipped cream, which is that amount of whipped cream that fits on a piece of pie and rises to a peak. It’s larger than, say, a Hershey’s Kiss, but it’s surely less than the amount of whipped cream I put on a piece of pie when using the canned sort: hold can upside down and dispense for at least three seconds while laughing maniacally.

And yet my Marge-Simpson’s-hair-shaped pile of whipped cream is still less by volume than the amount of mashed potatoes that would be described as a dollop. Why? In part because a serving of mashed potatoes is by habit, custom, and good sense much more than a serving of whipped cream. And also, and relatedly, in part because we use a bigger spoon for the mashed potatoes.

I don’t know about you, but for me, “dollop” expresses the singular gesture of splopping one good serving of some heapable mass off a serving spoon onto a plate or other surface, such that it might plausibly make the sound “dollop.” It doesn’t have to be food – I suppose one could talk of a dollop of oil paint or mortar or wet cement – but it typically is food.

Of course, that’s entirely an impressionistic personal sense; there’s no reason to think that’s where dollop comes from. We don’t know exactly where it does come from – its origins are lost in the mists of time – but, starting in the 1500s, the oldest senses of dollop (often spelled dallop) meant ‘patch, tuft, or clump of grass or weeds’: for instance, “Dallop, rank tufts of growing corn where heaps of manure have lain” (R. Forby, Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary).

I’m tempted to say that the sense transferred from the vegetation to the manure, but I don’t know that. Indeed, there’s nothing to say with absolute certainty that the modern dollop comes right from that. It could be mere coincidence. By 1830, dollop was already being used to mean ‘large quantity’ or ‘big shapeless lump’. And over the intervening years… well, you know. The sense has become ever more formless and impressionistic. As Lenie (Midge) Johansen’s Dinkum Dictionary puts it, a dollop is a “shapeless and messy lump of food” – and I don’t think that’s an exclusively Australian definition.

But if I’m going to ask you how you use dollop, I should really ask, do you use it? Is it a part of your active vocabulary? You may have an aunt or grandmother who uses the term, but would you say “Give me dollop of mashed potatoes”? Or is it more a word that you just expect to hear or see in certain contexts – such as recipes and food reviews?

Magazines, newspapers, and websites, in that order, are the top three places you’ll see dollop, if the results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English are indicative. It’s not quite a tawny-gourd-ism like pontiff or temblor, but it seems to be used by the kind of people who write things like “munching thick crusty slabs” and other slightly self-conscious feature article stylings. 

And what do they say comes in dollops? As I look through some of the results from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I find that dollops can be of yogurt, ice cream, mascarpone, pesto, mayonnaise, packaged coleslaw (really, People magazine?), cornbread mixture, hot sauce (really really, People magazine? hot sauces are too runny to dollop in my world), and other things that go into recipes (and in Country Living magazine, a dollop of peppermint filling is about 1.5 tablespoons, a dollop of orange cream filling is about 1.5 teaspoons, and a dollop of preserves is about 1 teaspoon), along with hair mousse, shaving cream, shampoo, moisturizing foot cream, and such manners of thing; also, in extended senses, of melting snow, tritium, and land (a small island); but then also, and fairly often, you can have “a dollop of” such abstract things as cuteness, comedy, drama, fun, government intervention, and “old-fashioned sex-and-violence soap opera” (thanks, Newsweek).

So, in other words, a dollop is, generally, a nonspecific quantity that can be added all at once (in one gesture) of something that can be seen as a thick but fluid mass. You can’t have a dollop of steak (oh, I hope not), and you can’t have a dollop of wind (can you?), and not everyone would say you can have a dollop of soup. You can usually fit a dollop into your mouth, but that’s not the defining characteristic. And a dollop is not precisely shaped: it looks about the same from any angle. Which is one more way the word dollop is apposite… rotate the word 180 degrees and it still looks about the same.