5 ms·

Cups vs. grams: why can't American and British cooks agree on food measurements?

can3p 3y ago
The part that blows my mind all the time is that there are all sorts of cups - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit) Mile unit is another one of the same sort - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile with the exception that only two kinds have survived if I'm not mistaken - US mile and nautial mile I guess it can be very simple in US, especially if mug/cup volumes are defined in terms of a "cup" multiples, but in europe I get totally lost when I see the cup unit in the recipe since I din't know what volume it refers to
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes! It includes the Japanese cup (go), familiar to any American who owns a rice cooker.
- ano-ther 3y ago
  The Swedish Mile (= 10km) is still in use and once tripped me up when searching for a used car. They were all wonderfully cheap until I realized that 50,000 on the website actually meant 500,000km driven.
- animaomnium 3y ago
  The volume of 240mL of water. Fill a standard 500mL water bottle to the bottom of the cone: half of that. = 500mL /_\ 2 cups |_| 1 cup |_| zilch * Not to scale.
- jorvi 3y ago
  I always do cup = 245ml. If you then undershoot or overshoot by 5ml, you’re always okay. That Wikipedia page is also missing the Dutch “kopje” (little cup) measurement, which is 150ml.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  The US “statue mile” is also used in the UK (but not Canada, surprisingly to me, as I’d assumed the reverse before I’d visited). As for cooking, US volume measurements are strictly defined, despite the history of where some of the unit names came from. So it should always be possible to convert to metric volume if you know it’s a US recipe.
- fanf2 3y ago
  The USA had two different miles until a year ago: the international standard mile (based on Carl Edvard Johansson’s inch), and the US Survey mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#US_survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#US_survey
dsq 3y ago
Cup is a universal measure of volume. It works for flour, sugar, liquids. Whereas grams is different volume for each material and requires a scale. I suppose one could use a metric quantity, but 'liter' is too big and 'deciliter' is too small. I am a non-USian, but still think that 'cup' is the best measure of volume for cooking/baking. And there is a compromise! Most of the measuring jugs I buy have cups on one side, and common materials in grams on the other. So there is no real problem.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Liquids can be accurately measured by weight. The converse is not true -- powders cannot be accurately measured by volume. 2 tsp of kosher salt contains the same amount of salt as 1 tsp of fine salt. And every brand is slightly different. The only way to accurately know if you're using the same amount of salt as the recipe developer is if the measurement is by weight.
  - ryanjshaw 3y ago
    Then there's the people who write recipes telling you to chop 1 cup of a vegetable, or "X medium-sized Ys". I never understood the aversion some people have to weighing things.
    - adql 3y ago
      They are eyeballing everything, then have to make a recipe out of it. The recipe didn't include all of the "fixing" of the spice/salt balance they do during cooking.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Weight also opens up question. Is that pre or post preparing? Like removing parts or skins and so on?
      - joshstrange 3y ago
        That’s interesting. I’ve never once thought of weighing (or measuring by volume) something before chopping it up. Maybe I’m just not thinking of the right ingredient? For me, weight solves one of the biggest issues which is “large potato” or “large onion”, WTF is “large”?
thefz 3y ago
Isn't a cup a measure of volume while a gram a measure of weight, though?
- Karellen 3y ago
  Yes, as the article points out in paragraph 2: > There is a chasm between Europe and America’s kitchen cultures. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume, not weight, to make measurements in their kitchens. Cooking with cups is volume-based and relies heavily on visual cues – everyone knows what a cup of granulated sugar looks like; less so 200g or 7.1oz – while the metric system is weight-based.
  - thefz 3y ago
    Yes, I have seen it, it's just a confusing title.
amiga386 3y ago
What this, and US exceptionalism seems to miss, is that it is not a 50/50 divide, 50% US customary units and 50% metric units. It is every country in the world (including the US, officially, in 1975) discarding their entire history of traditional units, in favour of globally standardised weights and measures. Don't you think French chefs miss their chopines and boisseaux ? It's every country in the world, vs the holdouts of the USA, Liberia and Burma. There are plenty of other troubles with making universal recipes! They often rely on ingredients that one country takes for granted while they're an expensive specialty in your country; sometimes they're the key ingredient that make the recipe work, other times it's just what they had to hand, and you should substitute with local equivalent. Or when a chef says "435g of beans" that's because their country customarily sells tins with 435g of beans in them, and they just use one customary tin and base the rest of the ingredients around that volume. If your tins are 400g or 500g, what you really need is the recipe localised to match your customary supplies. We'll never get away from the customary practises of every country, but we could at least be precise when writing them down?
- konfusinomicon 3y ago
  it makes the Liberian Burman American fusion cuisine chefs happy and thats all that matters
- cjs_ac 3y ago
  Also: * Some ingredients have different names in different countries * We should probably specify the animal, rather than just writing 'milk' and 'eggs'
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >we could at least be precise The biggest lesson I've ever had in cooking is that literally nothing is precise. Measurements like "a pinch" (a pinch of salt) are the epitome, but even the ingredients themselves aren't precise and uniform. Cooking becomes a lot easier and the food better when you throw out any and all notion of precision. The proper way to cook is grab some pot or pan, grab ingredients, throw them in, and cook. Trying to make cooking precise is a fool's errand.
s_dev 3y ago
I don't think such precision is necessary for typical 'cooking' but baking is different -- it's just straight up chemistry and the ratios are not just useful guides but vital to getting recipe right.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone 3y ago
  But chemistry requiring fairly strict ratios need not imply you can use the same amounts of ingredients every time. For example, recipes using fruit often require water that partly comes from the fruit. Use older, drier, fruit, and you’ll need to adjust amounts to keep the effective ratio the same. Maybe add a sip of water or milk, use less starch to bind stuff or heat things a while shorter. Temperature and humidity of the air also can affect what the ideal ratios are.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  I don't agree. You're baking for humans, right? Well, humans can't tell the difference between e.g. bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration. It's just bread to them. You have to introduce a very big variance to get over human biases ("mmm that sourdough bread is delicious" - and it turns out it's sourfaux, so now what?). Cooking ingredients are mostly not standardised and you can't exactly measure taste anyway (or touch, or smell) which is the effect you're going for, so exact measurements are not going to have the same importance as, dunno, mixing exact proportions of ingredients for nitroglycerine.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    You can easily tell the difference between bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration if they've been cooked for the exact same length of time. Only if you cook the 85% slightly longer will it be hard to tell.
mauvehaus 3y ago
Commercial recipes in the US are pretty commonly by weight. You wouldn't want for example to vary your recipe for pasta sauce by half a pound of onions from batch to batch because of the varying sizes of onions. Am not a professional cook (far from it), but borrowed a couple of cookbooks from someone who was to learn a little about how professional cooks work and approach their trade.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Cups are only practical for small amounts anyway, such as 2 cups or 1/2 cup. A commercial sized recipe calling for 10lb or flour or 2lb of chopped onions would be highly inconvenient to measure by cups, even if you did have the necessary set of cups in big sizes (10 cups, 50 cups, etc). Much easier to measure large amounts by weight.
mynegation 3y ago
There is no doubt in my mind that measuring weight in well defined units is superior to measuring volume in some not so well defined units. In baking - precision is critical. There are many other instances when measuring weight just makes sense - when I make a pudding, it is pointless to add “10 tablespoons of chia”, I just pour chia seeds in the container on the scale until it reaches 120g for example. Same for blended foods. Pretty much only advantage of volumes is that they are much easier visualized and can be approximately measured without any gear at all or with a very cheap and accessible container (cup, spoon etc), and quickly.
incomingpain 3y ago
Here in Canada it's so much worse. You can literally find recipes that use both for the same type of ingredient. In my kitchen, you must have both cup measuring and a kitchen scale. Canada uses both metric and standard. We drive at km/h But we are 6'1" 222 lbs. Our drivers license is in cm, but nobody knows their height in cm. Buying a house, it'll be meters of road frontage, but sq ft inside. In the summer we use Fahrenheit and during the winter it's Celsius.
- mynegation 3y ago
  > In the summer we use Fahrenheit and during the winter it's Celsius. News to me, as a Canadian. I agree with everything else though!
- joshstrange 3y ago
  The switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius is wild. Generally, I’m a huge fan of the metric system for everything except temperature. I dislike temperatures having a decal point that you can “feel”.
  - mynegation 3y ago
    I assure you it is a matter of habit. I have no problems associating ranges of Celsius temperature with the comfort levels.
  - wezdog1 3y ago
    Good luck feeling 0.1⁰C
  - incomingpain 3y ago
    >The switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius is wild. In the summer, a too hot day is 100f. Makes sense. I immediately know the difference between 70, 80, 90f. How to dress changes between 70f and 90f. But if you were to operate in celcius. We're talking 21c, 26c, 32c. I have no way to understand such a small range. But then in winter. When it's FREEZING aka 0c. I can easily judge then based on the relationship to 0c. Whereas if you operate in f, it's like 31f. I dont get that range.
School-Cotton 3y ago
I’m sure it matters for baking (which I’ve never tried). But for normal cooking, don’t people just throw in random amounts of everything that are vaguely close to the quantity stated in the recipe? That’s what I do at least and it’s never caused me to ruin a meal. The tolerances really are not that tight. Also, most recipes I see include stuff like “one large onion” that is even less precise than a volumetric measurement. It’s hard for me to imagine getting out a scale just to be sure I really put in 100g instead of 120g of something. Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this?
- Ekaros 3y ago
  No. But there are some cases where 20% could affect consistency of product. One thing that comes to mind is hollandaise sauce and similar sauces. Where ratio of fat to other stuff could change consistency. But then we don't exactly measure eggs so it is bit moot...
- 23B1 3y ago
  It really depends on a lot of variables; experience, location, ingredients, season, taste. Starting out it's good to learn measurements then you can advance to cooking with proportions and tasting your ingredients to see what works. As you mentioned this is more important in baking, confectionary, things that require specific temperatures etc. Try tempering chocolate w/out a thermometer or baking a croissant 'on instinct' and it'll be a bad time :)
- vanviegen 3y ago
  > Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this? Do you take out a scale when you need to add an ounce of something? Same for 100g, when you're accustomed to it. For me it depends on which ingredient I'm working with.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    > Do you take out a scale when you need to add an ounce of something? I have never needed to add an ounce of something. American recipes never really tell you to do this. The only thing they use weight for is large amounts of bulk items (e.g. a pound of chicken thighs).
jmpman 3y ago
This was one of my first use cases for ChatGPT - converting recipes into grams. Major quality of life improvement.
- troupo 3y ago
  I'm now using "recipe for X, for N people, metric units" all of the time.
  - wink 3y ago
    "recipe for X" is usually just as ill-defined. Yeah, maybe I do prefer slightly larger than average portions but most recipes I find on the internet for 4, are actually for 3. Unless they aren't and it's more like 6. But I mean if you keep making it you can just adjust that, same as the units. (Not even taking into account that people like to add side salads, or have some bread with their main, or an appetizer, or a dessert.. maybe my "bigger" portions just assume not a single addition)
francisdavey 3y ago
Older British cookbooks - some of which were passed down to me in the family - also use cups. Sometimes volume measurements are easier and cups are fairly handy. Quite a lot of standard issue mugs in the UK are cup-sized, or roughly. However, in contradiction to least one remark about the universality of cups, they are not. British cups are, like US cups, half a pint, but British pints are larger. A British cup is 10 fluid ounces while a US cup is 8 (or thereabouts, I am not sure how standardised it is). So I have to remember to adjust by a factor of 20% when working from a US recipe in the UK, or just convert to weight. Where I live now a "cup" is typically 200ml unless I am measuring rice into a rice cooker.
- laurencerowe 3y ago
  While ounces are the same, fluid ounces are different! > An imperial fluid ounce is 1⁄20 of an imperial pint, 1⁄160 of an imperial gallon or exactly 28.4130625 mL. A US customary fluid ounce is 1⁄16 of a US liquid pint and 1⁄128 of a US liquid gallon or exactly 29.5735295625 mL, making it about 4.08% larger than the imperial fluid ounce. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_ounce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_ounce
  - francisdavey 3y ago
    Indeed. Worse, the ounce, as a unit of mass, has two different meanings in English law, one of which is so obscure and differs so very little from the internationally agreed quantity, that it is hard to believe that it could ever matter, but strictly if you are thinking about the law of food labelling - and I do sometimes - then you always have a slight twinge at the thought.
  - fanf2 3y ago
    The US customary fluid ounce is based on the Queen Anne wine gallon of 231 cu in. The Imperial weights and measures reform in the 1820s defined a new gallon equal to the volume of 10 lb avoirdupois of water at s.t.p., which was about the same as the old ale gallon. The Imperial pint was changed to be 20 fl. oz. instead of 16 fl. oz. so that the metric-style correspondence between mass and volume also worked for ounces.
23B1 3y ago
There's no law in the U.S. that you must use imperial units, and I'm not aware of any serious professional that does. It's also such a silly argument coming from the brits who swap their units almost randomly: https://ibb.co/0cB4tgd https://ibb.co/0cB4tgd
- jdpedrie 3y ago
  Every carpenter I’ve met uses sixteenths of an inch, and every metal worker uses thousandths.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    Neither of those jobs require serious tolerances
    - jdpedrie 3y ago
      Sounds to me like what you meant to say is that your criteria for determining whether someone's profession is "serious" is whether they use metric or not.
      - 23B1 3y ago
        Sounds to me like you're not commenting in good faith. Begone, nerd.
sbrorson 3y ago
The reason Americans use cups and spoons (instead of e.g. grams) to measure ingredients is a matter of history. Tradition says Fannie Farmer wrote the "Boston Cooking-School Cook Book" in 1896, and for the first time in a cookbook used precise measurements (instead of "a jigger of this" or "a pinch of that") to specify how much of each ingredient to use. Nobody at that time would have a weight scale in their kitchen, so Ms. Farmer measured her proportions using tools which were readily available in any kitchen -- cups and spoons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Farmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Farmer Her cookbook achieved immediate success and she became a household name in America. Even I had heard of her, long before I became a feeble student of history. Her measurement system is totally entrenched in American cooking culture, so I expect it won't ever be displaced by metric measurements except perhaps amongst high-end commercial kitchens and with people who want to make the effort to convert to grams and liters when cooking.
wfleming 3y ago
I saw a funny collision of imperial & metric measurements a while back. My BIL went through an Irish soda bread phase and wanted to learn to bake it himself. I suggested he find a recipe that used weight instead of volume, at least for ingredients like flour. He went off and found a YouTube video by some Irish lady, tried her recipe, and was very disappointed with the result. I watched the video to help him debug and when this lady measured small quantities like salt and soda with a teaspoon she used an actual tea spoon, as in a spoon you’d use to make tea, not a “teaspoon” like a specifically-sized baking measuring implement. So no wonder the recipe didn’t turn out for him, who knows what her “teaspoon” worked out to actually be. But it was very funny to me to run into this weird disconnect of a modern European “x grams of flour” combined with the very traditional “this spoon I happened to have in the drawer” (which of course is how measures like cups and teaspoons got started but I didn’t expect to see anyone use that approach in a published recipe this century).
Digit-Al 3y ago
The "cup" size for measuring ingredients is massively confusing as there is the US Customary Cup at about 236mL, the US Legal Cup at 240mL, the Metric and Canadian Cups at 250mL, the Imperial Cup at about 284mL, the Latin American Cup (which has multiple sizes), and the Japanese Cup at 200mL. As if that wasn't confusing enough, I seem to have measuring cups that want to make things even more confusing. Firstly, the 1 cup is labeled as being 250mL and the 1/2 cup is labeled at 125mL, which conforms to the Metric Cup size; however, the 1/3 cup is labeled at 80mL and the 1/4 cup shows 60mL, both of which would give a 240mL cup size, which is the US Legal Cup. As if that wasn't bad enough, if I fill the cup and pour it into either of my two measuring jugs, it actually only holds 200mL, which is the Japanese Cup size.
interludead 3y ago
My granny do not need anything to cook
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Volume is too imprecise. It can vary. E.g. flower. 1 cup can mean a lot based on how rough the ride is from the factory to the store. Salt & sugar have same issue. Based on grain size volume can differ while weight (and thus cooking properties) are maintained. (Yes, you use big chunks of sugar for Liège waffles, but that's an exception).

The part that blows my mind all the time is that there are all sorts of cups - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit) Mile unit is another one of the same sort - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile with the exception that only two kinds have survived if I'm not mistaken - US mile and nautial mile I guess it can be very simple in US, especially if mug/cup volumes are defined in terms of a "cup" multiples, but in europe I get totally lost when I see the cup unit in the recipe since I din't know what volume it refers to

steveBK123 3y ago
Yes! It includes the Japanese cup (go), familiar to any American who owns a rice cooker.
ano-ther 3y ago
The Swedish Mile (= 10km) is still in use and once tripped me up when searching for a used car. They were all wonderfully cheap until I realized that 50,000 on the website actually meant 500,000km driven.
animaomnium 3y ago
The volume of 240mL of water. Fill a standard 500mL water bottle to the bottom of the cone: half of that. = 500mL /_\ 2 cups |_| 1 cup |_| zilch * Not to scale.
jorvi 3y ago
I always do cup = 245ml. If you then undershoot or overshoot by 5ml, you’re always okay. That Wikipedia page is also missing the Dutch “kopje” (little cup) measurement, which is 150ml.
skywhopper 3y ago
The US “statue mile” is also used in the UK (but not Canada, surprisingly to me, as I’d assumed the reverse before I’d visited). As for cooking, US volume measurements are strictly defined, despite the history of where some of the unit names came from. So it should always be possible to convert to metric volume if you know it’s a US recipe.
fanf2 3y ago
The USA had two different miles until a year ago: the international standard mile (based on Carl Edvard Johansson’s inch), and the US Survey mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#US_survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#US_survey

dsq 3y ago

Cup is a universal measure of volume. It works for flour, sugar, liquids. Whereas grams is different volume for each material and requires a scale. I suppose one could use a metric quantity, but 'liter' is too big and 'deciliter' is too small. I am a non-USian, but still think that 'cup' is the best measure of volume for cooking/baking. And there is a compromise! Most of the measuring jugs I buy have cups on one side, and common materials in grams on the other. So there is no real problem.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Liquids can be accurately measured by weight. The converse is not true -- powders cannot be accurately measured by volume. 2 tsp of kosher salt contains the same amount of salt as 1 tsp of fine salt. And every brand is slightly different. The only way to accurately know if you're using the same amount of salt as the recipe developer is if the measurement is by weight.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  Then there's the people who write recipes telling you to chop 1 cup of a vegetable, or "X medium-sized Ys". I never understood the aversion some people have to weighing things.
  - adql 3y ago
    They are eyeballing everything, then have to make a recipe out of it. The recipe didn't include all of the "fixing" of the spice/salt balance they do during cooking.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Weight also opens up question. Is that pre or post preparing? Like removing parts or skins and so on?
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      That’s interesting. I’ve never once thought of weighing (or measuring by volume) something before chopping it up. Maybe I’m just not thinking of the right ingredient? For me, weight solves one of the biggest issues which is “large potato” or “large onion”, WTF is “large”?

thefz 3y ago

Isn't a cup a measure of volume while a gram a measure of weight, though?

Karellen 3y ago
Yes, as the article points out in paragraph 2: > There is a chasm between Europe and America’s kitchen cultures. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume, not weight, to make measurements in their kitchens. Cooking with cups is volume-based and relies heavily on visual cues – everyone knows what a cup of granulated sugar looks like; less so 200g or 7.1oz – while the metric system is weight-based.
- thefz 3y ago
  Yes, I have seen it, it's just a confusing title.

amiga386 3y ago

What this, and US exceptionalism seems to miss, is that it is not a 50/50 divide, 50% US customary units and 50% metric units. It is every country in the world (including the US, officially, in 1975) discarding their entire history of traditional units, in favour of globally standardised weights and measures. Don't you think French chefs miss their chopines and boisseaux ? It's every country in the world, vs the holdouts of the USA, Liberia and Burma. There are plenty of other troubles with making universal recipes! They often rely on ingredients that one country takes for granted while they're an expensive specialty in your country; sometimes they're the key ingredient that make the recipe work, other times it's just what they had to hand, and you should substitute with local equivalent. Or when a chef says "435g of beans" that's because their country customarily sells tins with 435g of beans in them, and they just use one customary tin and base the rest of the ingredients around that volume. If your tins are 400g or 500g, what you really need is the recipe localised to match your customary supplies. We'll never get away from the customary practises of every country, but we could at least be precise when writing them down?

konfusinomicon 3y ago
it makes the Liberian Burman American fusion cuisine chefs happy and thats all that matters
cjs_ac 3y ago
Also: * Some ingredients have different names in different countries * We should probably specify the animal, rather than just writing 'milk' and 'eggs'
Dalewyn 3y ago
>we could at least be precise The biggest lesson I've ever had in cooking is that literally nothing is precise. Measurements like "a pinch" (a pinch of salt) are the epitome, but even the ingredients themselves aren't precise and uniform. Cooking becomes a lot easier and the food better when you throw out any and all notion of precision. The proper way to cook is grab some pot or pan, grab ingredients, throw them in, and cook. Trying to make cooking precise is a fool's errand.

s_dev 3y ago

I don't think such precision is necessary for typical 'cooking' but baking is different -- it's just straight up chemistry and the ratios are not just useful guides but vital to getting recipe right.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Someone 3y ago
But chemistry requiring fairly strict ratios need not imply you can use the same amounts of ingredients every time. For example, recipes using fruit often require water that partly comes from the fruit. Use older, drier, fruit, and you’ll need to adjust amounts to keep the effective ratio the same. Maybe add a sip of water or milk, use less starch to bind stuff or heat things a while shorter. Temperature and humidity of the air also can affect what the ideal ratios are.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
I don't agree. You're baking for humans, right? Well, humans can't tell the difference between e.g. bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration. It's just bread to them. You have to introduce a very big variance to get over human biases ("mmm that sourdough bread is delicious" - and it turns out it's sourfaux, so now what?). Cooking ingredients are mostly not standardised and you can't exactly measure taste anyway (or touch, or smell) which is the effect you're going for, so exact measurements are not going to have the same importance as, dunno, mixing exact proportions of ingredients for nitroglycerine.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  You can easily tell the difference between bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration if they've been cooked for the exact same length of time. Only if you cook the 85% slightly longer will it be hard to tell.

mauvehaus 3y ago

Commercial recipes in the US are pretty commonly by weight. You wouldn't want for example to vary your recipe for pasta sauce by half a pound of onions from batch to batch because of the varying sizes of onions. Am not a professional cook (far from it), but borrowed a couple of cookbooks from someone who was to learn a little about how professional cooks work and approach their trade.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Cups are only practical for small amounts anyway, such as 2 cups or 1/2 cup. A commercial sized recipe calling for 10lb or flour or 2lb of chopped onions would be highly inconvenient to measure by cups, even if you did have the necessary set of cups in big sizes (10 cups, 50 cups, etc). Much easier to measure large amounts by weight.

mynegation 3y ago

There is no doubt in my mind that measuring weight in well defined units is superior to measuring volume in some not so well defined units. In baking - precision is critical. There are many other instances when measuring weight just makes sense - when I make a pudding, it is pointless to add “10 tablespoons of chia”, I just pour chia seeds in the container on the scale until it reaches 120g for example. Same for blended foods. Pretty much only advantage of volumes is that they are much easier visualized and can be approximately measured without any gear at all or with a very cheap and accessible container (cup, spoon etc), and quickly.

incomingpain 3y ago

Here in Canada it's so much worse. You can literally find recipes that use both for the same type of ingredient. In my kitchen, you must have both cup measuring and a kitchen scale. Canada uses both metric and standard. We drive at km/h But we are 6'1" 222 lbs. Our drivers license is in cm, but nobody knows their height in cm. Buying a house, it'll be meters of road frontage, but sq ft inside. In the summer we use Fahrenheit and during the winter it's Celsius.

mynegation 3y ago
> In the summer we use Fahrenheit and during the winter it's Celsius. News to me, as a Canadian. I agree with everything else though!
joshstrange 3y ago
The switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius is wild. Generally, I’m a huge fan of the metric system for everything except temperature. I dislike temperatures having a decal point that you can “feel”.
- mynegation 3y ago
  I assure you it is a matter of habit. I have no problems associating ranges of Celsius temperature with the comfort levels.
- wezdog1 3y ago
  Good luck feeling 0.1⁰C
- incomingpain 3y ago
  >The switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius is wild. In the summer, a too hot day is 100f. Makes sense. I immediately know the difference between 70, 80, 90f. How to dress changes between 70f and 90f. But if you were to operate in celcius. We're talking 21c, 26c, 32c. I have no way to understand such a small range. But then in winter. When it's FREEZING aka 0c. I can easily judge then based on the relationship to 0c. Whereas if you operate in f, it's like 31f. I dont get that range.

School-Cotton 3y ago

I’m sure it matters for baking (which I’ve never tried). But for normal cooking, don’t people just throw in random amounts of everything that are vaguely close to the quantity stated in the recipe? That’s what I do at least and it’s never caused me to ruin a meal. The tolerances really are not that tight. Also, most recipes I see include stuff like “one large onion” that is even less precise than a volumetric measurement. It’s hard for me to imagine getting out a scale just to be sure I really put in 100g instead of 120g of something. Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this?

Ekaros 3y ago
No. But there are some cases where 20% could affect consistency of product. One thing that comes to mind is hollandaise sauce and similar sauces. Where ratio of fat to other stuff could change consistency. But then we don't exactly measure eggs so it is bit moot...
23B1 3y ago
It really depends on a lot of variables; experience, location, ingredients, season, taste. Starting out it's good to learn measurements then you can advance to cooking with proportions and tasting your ingredients to see what works. As you mentioned this is more important in baking, confectionary, things that require specific temperatures etc. Try tempering chocolate w/out a thermometer or baking a croissant 'on instinct' and it'll be a bad time :)
vanviegen 3y ago
> Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this? Do you take out a scale when you need to add an ounce of something? Same for 100g, when you're accustomed to it. For me it depends on which ingredient I'm working with.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  > Do you take out a scale when you need to add an ounce of something? I have never needed to add an ounce of something. American recipes never really tell you to do this. The only thing they use weight for is large amounts of bulk items (e.g. a pound of chicken thighs).

jmpman 3y ago

This was one of my first use cases for ChatGPT - converting recipes into grams. Major quality of life improvement.

troupo 3y ago
I'm now using "recipe for X, for N people, metric units" all of the time.
- wink 3y ago
  "recipe for X" is usually just as ill-defined. Yeah, maybe I do prefer slightly larger than average portions but most recipes I find on the internet for 4, are actually for 3. Unless they aren't and it's more like 6. But I mean if you keep making it you can just adjust that, same as the units. (Not even taking into account that people like to add side salads, or have some bread with their main, or an appetizer, or a dessert.. maybe my "bigger" portions just assume not a single addition)

francisdavey 3y ago

Older British cookbooks - some of which were passed down to me in the family - also use cups. Sometimes volume measurements are easier and cups are fairly handy. Quite a lot of standard issue mugs in the UK are cup-sized, or roughly. However, in contradiction to least one remark about the universality of cups, they are not. British cups are, like US cups, half a pint, but British pints are larger. A British cup is 10 fluid ounces while a US cup is 8 (or thereabouts, I am not sure how standardised it is). So I have to remember to adjust by a factor of 20% when working from a US recipe in the UK, or just convert to weight. Where I live now a "cup" is typically 200ml unless I am measuring rice into a rice cooker.

laurencerowe 3y ago
While ounces are the same, fluid ounces are different! > An imperial fluid ounce is 1⁄20 of an imperial pint, 1⁄160 of an imperial gallon or exactly 28.4130625 mL. A US customary fluid ounce is 1⁄16 of a US liquid pint and 1⁄128 of a US liquid gallon or exactly 29.5735295625 mL, making it about 4.08% larger than the imperial fluid ounce. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_ounce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_ounce
- francisdavey 3y ago
  Indeed. Worse, the ounce, as a unit of mass, has two different meanings in English law, one of which is so obscure and differs so very little from the internationally agreed quantity, that it is hard to believe that it could ever matter, but strictly if you are thinking about the law of food labelling - and I do sometimes - then you always have a slight twinge at the thought.
- fanf2 3y ago
  The US customary fluid ounce is based on the Queen Anne wine gallon of 231 cu in. The Imperial weights and measures reform in the 1820s defined a new gallon equal to the volume of 10 lb avoirdupois of water at s.t.p., which was about the same as the old ale gallon. The Imperial pint was changed to be 20 fl. oz. instead of 16 fl. oz. so that the metric-style correspondence between mass and volume also worked for ounces.

23B1 3y ago

There's no law in the U.S. that you must use imperial units, and I'm not aware of any serious professional that does. It's also such a silly argument coming from the brits who swap their units almost randomly: https://ibb.co/0cB4tgd https://ibb.co/0cB4tgd

jdpedrie 3y ago
Every carpenter I’ve met uses sixteenths of an inch, and every metal worker uses thousandths.
- 23B1 3y ago
  Neither of those jobs require serious tolerances
  - jdpedrie 3y ago
    Sounds to me like what you meant to say is that your criteria for determining whether someone's profession is "serious" is whether they use metric or not.
    - 23B1 3y ago
      Sounds to me like you're not commenting in good faith. Begone, nerd.

sbrorson 3y ago

The reason Americans use cups and spoons (instead of e.g. grams) to measure ingredients is a matter of history. Tradition says Fannie Farmer wrote the "Boston Cooking-School Cook Book" in 1896, and for the first time in a cookbook used precise measurements (instead of "a jigger of this" or "a pinch of that") to specify how much of each ingredient to use. Nobody at that time would have a weight scale in their kitchen, so Ms. Farmer measured her proportions using tools which were readily available in any kitchen -- cups and spoons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Farmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Farmer Her cookbook achieved immediate success and she became a household name in America. Even I had heard of her, long before I became a feeble student of history. Her measurement system is totally entrenched in American cooking culture, so I expect it won't ever be displaced by metric measurements except perhaps amongst high-end commercial kitchens and with people who want to make the effort to convert to grams and liters when cooking.

wfleming 3y ago

I saw a funny collision of imperial & metric measurements a while back. My BIL went through an Irish soda bread phase and wanted to learn to bake it himself. I suggested he find a recipe that used weight instead of volume, at least for ingredients like flour. He went off and found a YouTube video by some Irish lady, tried her recipe, and was very disappointed with the result. I watched the video to help him debug and when this lady measured small quantities like salt and soda with a teaspoon she used an actual tea spoon, as in a spoon you’d use to make tea, not a “teaspoon” like a specifically-sized baking measuring implement. So no wonder the recipe didn’t turn out for him, who knows what her “teaspoon” worked out to actually be. But it was very funny to me to run into this weird disconnect of a modern European “x grams of flour” combined with the very traditional “this spoon I happened to have in the drawer” (which of course is how measures like cups and teaspoons got started but I didn’t expect to see anyone use that approach in a published recipe this century).

Digit-Al 3y ago

The "cup" size for measuring ingredients is massively confusing as there is the US Customary Cup at about 236mL, the US Legal Cup at 240mL, the Metric and Canadian Cups at 250mL, the Imperial Cup at about 284mL, the Latin American Cup (which has multiple sizes), and the Japanese Cup at 200mL. As if that wasn't confusing enough, I seem to have measuring cups that want to make things even more confusing. Firstly, the 1 cup is labeled as being 250mL and the 1/2 cup is labeled at 125mL, which conforms to the Metric Cup size; however, the 1/3 cup is labeled at 80mL and the 1/4 cup shows 60mL, both of which would give a 240mL cup size, which is the US Legal Cup. As if that wasn't bad enough, if I fill the cup and pour it into either of my two measuring jugs, it actually only holds 200mL, which is the Japanese Cup size.

interludead 3y ago

My granny do not need anything to cook

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

Volume is too imprecise. It can vary. E.g. flower. 1 cup can mean a lot based on how rough the ride is from the factory to the store. Salt & sugar have same issue. Based on grain size volume can differ while weight (and thus cooking properties) are maintained. (Yes, you use big chunks of sugar for Liège waffles, but that's an exception).