Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
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Apparently the French sent over a metric system for the Americans to use, but the ship was lost.
I’ve seen numerous sources for this.
OP is asking about volume vs weight, not metric volume vs imperial volume.
If the US had adopted the metric system it wouldn’t matter.
And that still doesn’t answer the question.
You do know that metric measures both volume and weight, right? A cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram.
You do know that only water weighs on gram per ml, right?
This is a great fact for if you’re trying to make hot water soup from a recipe written in metric volume measures and you only have a scale.
You might get away if you’re just trying to measure apple juice or something else that’s mostly water, but good luck making Rice Krispie treats
While we’re making soup, let’s base the entire temperature scale on water, too.
You can still list an ingredient using one or the other on a recipe. It may be a simple conversion, but 1:1 is still a conversion.
And one pint of water is one pound.
You’ve completely missed the point, which is that most of the world measures ingredients (like flour for instance, where one pint is not one pound) by weight and not by volume.
A pint of water is not one pound, its 1.04318, which is a significant difference.
In what widely-used context is a .04318 difference significant?
Not soup. Not bread.
I don’t think even concrete would suffer noticeably from that difference.
Canada uses a mixture of imperial and metric, but not weights, so that’s an entirely false conclusion you’ve come to.
And that doesn’t help much, that’s only at sea level and a certain temperature, go do some baking with those exact conversions on a mountain and your cake won’t turn out at all.
someone should make an alternate history tv show where the ship made it. bonus if it’s of a parody kind.
Watch some cooking shows on YouTube where they cook from two hundred year old cookbooks. Weighing stuff is a modern thing. All the “ye olde recipes” from Europe and the colonies were done in cups, spoons, and some other volume measurements we don’t use anymore like “jills”. (If they even bother to specify meaurements.)
“the” and “ye” are amusingly redundant next to each other.
I was positively intrigued the day I learned “ye olde shoppe” is pronounced exactly the same way as “the old shop”.
“A handful of this, a sprig of that, a penny weight of some other stuff”
5 rods to the hogs head.
Bartenders routinely measure mixed drink additives in “barspoons”.
My grandmother in law has a biscuit recipe that starts with “fill the bowl with flour”. What bowl? The bowl she’s been making biscuits with for 50 years.
Point is, people left to their own devices will use whatever measurement is handy.
Jiggers. 1.5 oz. Or a pony shot (small end of the jigger) 0.75 oz.
The imperial system is a nightmare. A lot of us hate it and agree that metric is far easier. I grew up with the imperial system and still don’t know the conversions between quarts, pints, ounces, and cups. Blame the French and British, we got it from them!
I’m currently calorie counting in order to lose weight and I weigh everything in grams because it’s easier.
This isn’t about imperial vs metric, it’s about measuring by mass vs volume. A good example here is flour. Weighing out 30 grams (or about 1 ounce) of flour will always result in the same amount. On the other hand, you can densely pack flour into a 1/4 cup measuring cup, you can gingerly spoon it in little by little, or you can scoop and level. When you do this you’ll get three different amounts of flour, even though they all fill that 1/4 cup. Good luck consistently measuring from scoop to scoop even if you use the same method for each scoop.
Something something elevation and atmospheric pressure resulting in a proper measurement across altitude… Or something.
Blame the French and British, we got it from them!
Like 99% of the world, the French and British long ago managed to overcome the imperial system. Actually, the French spearheaded the metric world.
America just failed, time and again, to follow the times.
The british didn’t quite overcome the old ways of measuring. They still use miles, pints, stone, and so on.
Companies just need to print the metric amount on the box as well.
We like mixing them up too. Tyres are measured using three numbers, two of which are in mm, the other (wheel diameter) is in inches.
The british didn’t quite overcome the old ways of measuring.
Not completely, agreed, but they are miles ahead of the Americans. :-)
8 ounces to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon.
And now to commit that to memory for the nth time…and immediately forget it.
Volumetric measurements, like the imperial system, is largely in place due to tradition.
But no, most people do not own good food scales. They aren’t pricey (I think mine was $25), but they are very uncommon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a store.
I think you’re.right about tradition. I have a set of recipes from 3 generations ago. It’s been converted over the generations from a list of ingredients to “a fistful of flour” to “a juice glass of broth” to “1/3 cup of butter” as it was passed to me. Maybe my contribution will be to convert it to weight and pass it to my kids for them to finally convert it to metric weights.
I’m amazed they are that uncommon. Here (UK) you can walk into a supermarket and pick them up for less than £20.
“uncommon” is an overstatement, you can get them pretty much anywhere that has pots and pans. It’s uncommon in that most people don’t bother owning one, not that they’re hard to get
I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.
I’m not American but this is likely due to tradition. Recipe measures it in cups, you follow recipe, you get used to cups, then when writing your own recipe down you do it by cups.
Cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons in this context are standardized units of measure. It is very common to find at least one set of measuring cups and spoons in a US kitchen. Scales are uncommon.
I use both. For flour, scales are far, far superior. For sugar, it does not really seem to matter. For small amounts, I suspect my tea/tablespoons might be more accurate than my scale…
Not that accuracy matters that much in a recipe using eggs. Chickens aren’t necessarily known for precision…
Off topic:
I have learned that hens were laying eggs, chicken were the offspring.
Is this a british-american thing or just a common mistake?
Chicks are baby chickens. All hens and roosters are chickens. Does that answer your question?
Yes, thank You!
So why are young women called chicks, even if they’re grown up?
Because slang doesn’t follow rules
I’m always confused by their insistence to use fluid ounces.
An ounce is fine it’s a measurement of mass. But how can you measure liquids by mass, when really what you mean is displacement, its like saying fluid kilograms, it’s not a thing, it makes no sense.
I know Americans probably know what it means but everybody else doesn’t have a clue. If you have 250 fluid oz of something is that like a bucket or a single droplet? Or is it a small booting lake, I have no idea at all.
Fl. Oz are actually nothing to do with weight. They are volume.
For each fluid oz. use 30 ml
It’s only approximate but the official measurements for nutrition actually do it in the US so it’s not a real unit anyway anymore.
Fl. Oz are actually nothing to do with weight. They are volume.
Well yes, but also no. It is a unit of volume, but it comes from the volume that an ounce of fluid (specifically water) uses. Not at all unlike a gram being based on a cubic centimeter of water, which we also call a milliliter. Imperial just makes that a little more transparent, which also makes things a little more confusing.
The metric system uses a similar principle. 1 liter is a kg of water. It’s just named better.
I’m with you but I get it that sometimes it’s convenient. My wife likes what we call “cup recipes” in baking where everything is measured in cups/glasses (this was a new thing couple of years ago where I live). It’s very fast and convenient.
But yes, it gets out of hand. I mean “a cup of celery”? … How? Why?
I much prefer when they just estimate how many of the particular vegetable I should probably use. A cup of celery? Like 1-2 celeries?
Shutout to the one dude who downvoted literally every comment lol I hope you enjoyed it
Because it’s often easier to measure things by volume, and most cooking dishes do not need precise measurements. It sucks for baking dishes, but for anything that doesn’t need to be precise I find it way more convenient to grab a volume measurement than a scale
I would agree with this if components were sold by volume as well. I don’t really bake, but the only thing I can recall showing a volume was shredded cheese. And even still, it’s always about X cups. Otherwise, I’m buying a premixed box and doing what the label tells me to do. Sure, I’m happy to not get fleeced with shrinkflation putting fluffy shredded cheese in a 2 cup bag, but it’s still a bit of a mismatch
If you get into baking bread, you buy a scale. It doesn’t change the problem with volume vs weight, because American flour is sold in pounds, and the recipes are all in grams or bakers ratios.
What it does help with (in bread baking) is consistently and speed. It’s much faster to dump 500g of flour in a bowl than to measure out that many cups.
For almost everything else, cups are faster and easier.
History.
Why do Brits use Stone for weight of people? Same answer.
Not quite the same as Stones and Kilogrammes are both units of weight. Using cups is like weighing somebody using those luggage size baskets in the airport.
Because you can’t pack a scale and weights on a cart as easily as you can a set of cups?
Most baking doesn’t require the precision of weighing. They are rough proportions, not an exact science.
An experienced baker, or really any kind of chef, will learn over time to make minor adjustments based on a lot of stuff. Maybe a bit less sugar, to taste. Maybe a difference in the brand or exact type of ingredient compared to what you’re used to. Maybe it’s a particularly dry day and you need to add more moisture to the dough.
If it’s something I have a lot of experience with I don’t even bother with measuring at all, just eyeball it.
I do this, and my brother who is an amateur chef thinks it’s witchcraft. Baking is not hard to eyeball or make by feel, people.
I’m a trained chef working the trade for 30 years. 2 years in vocational school, a year for cooking and a year for bakery/patisserie. I’m a really confident cook - the concept of different cuisines, the basic ingredients and seasonings, no probs. Baking is still a rocket science for me. My current head chef said baking is fun if you know what you are doing but I’m still after 30 years not fully confident about the consistency.
My advice to anyone is start with pancakes. Make a few different recipes and pay attention to the differences. Then make them without a recipe. Switch up ingredients, sub in whatever you feel like, play with ratios. Once you have a handle on that, move to sourdough, cookies, or piecrust. Then do muffins. Leave cakes for last, because they are the most finicky. You’ll be baking with confidence and without a recipe in no time.
I’ve heard that several times from different people… That chefs often don’t like baking. Or are at least sceptical about their abilities (or the process.)
Precise measurements are still helpful for learning. When I first started baking bread I had to measure by weight to get 60, 65, or 70% hydration, but at this point I can figure it out by look and feel, at least for the specific flours I’m familiar with.
I always try to search either for metric recipes or “tech cards”, cus trying to follow imperial recipes is a frigen nightmare. My cup is 300 milliliters, hell if I know what volume cups they use.
This is what they use. Still a horrible way to measure things.
😭😭😭
Because it’s quick and the tools to measure volume are cheap and simple and for cooking for a few people in a home kitchen it works well enough.
