dipperful

An old-fashioned American folk measurement meaning as much as a dipper — the long-handled ladle or cup once used to scoop water from a bucket or barrel — can hold. Roughly equivalent to a cupful, it's the kind of measure you'd find in 19th-century recipes, pioneer diaries, and Southern folk cooking traditions. The word has a warm, domestic, frontier-era quality and occasionally appears in historical fiction or when someone wants to evoke a time before standardised kitchen measurements.