Half a Gill?

Presque Isle's New Lighthouse Park includes the 1905 Keeper's House.  When the lighthouse property was handed over to the Township by the Coast Guard, the Presque Isle Township Historical Society (PITMS) was organized to renovate the 1905 House and then operate it as a museum.  Renovation took several years of hard, dirty labor.

The 1905 House is open May-October and staffed by
volunteer docents, including myself.

Then the place had to be furnished.  All the original furnishings had long since disappeared, since the house served for many years as a Coast Guard barracks, nicely decorated in U.S. Government Issue.  Therefore, as renovation ended the call went out for period furnishings.  PITMS wanted the place to look as it might have in 1915.  Gradually a houseful of furniture, pictures, books, and dinnerware was assembled.  Among the artifacts are many of the things one might have found in a 1915 kitchen.

Last Saturday, as I prowled the house between visitors, I chanced upon a cookbook lying open on the kitchen table, with its pages turned to a recipe for Raspberry and Currant Tartlets.  Ingredients included pastry, raspberries, currants, sugar, etc., all of which one would expect.  But then it specified a half-gill of water and a gill of cream (if desired).  Now, I've cooked since I was a boy, but I've never seen a recipe calling for a gill of anything!

The recipe for Raspberry and Currant Tarts.

Clearly, this is a unit of measure.  Nosing around, I found that a gill (not the fishy kind) is 4 fluid ounces (or 118.294 milliliters).  A pint is 4 gi (abbreviation for gill), and thus a gill is a quarter-pint.  So why, I wonder, is Walmart not selling plastic gill measures in their kitchen junk section?  I guess gills have gone out of fashion in cooking, if not in the lake. •••