My total guess is weighing scales used to be expensive / inaccessible for the common home baker and one of the first popular recipe books thus used volume, became wildly popular, and indirectly taught a generation of home bakers that baking recipes are by volume, not weight.
I feel like this is just a remnant of a time where a container with a bunch of lines on it was cheaper than a sufficiently accurate scale. It might just go away over 1-2 more generations.
I wanted to believe my opinion is popular yet recipes I’ve seen are almost in volume and I don’t know why.
Baking is chemistry for sure.
My total guess is weighing scales used to be expensive / inaccessible for the common home baker and one of the first popular recipe books thus used volume, became wildly popular, and indirectly taught a generation of home bakers that baking recipes are by volume, not weight.
While it’s chemistry, there is a bit of an art to it, and you can be off by a bit and still have perfectly good bread.
I feel like this is just a remnant of a time where a container with a bunch of lines on it was cheaper than a sufficiently accurate scale. It might just go away over 1-2 more generations.