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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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.
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.)
Most Americans I know don’t even have a scale in their kitchen!
I (an American) always wonder what a cup of spinach is. Like I can really pack it into a cup or not and there is a huge difference.
Everything. “How far to the restaurant?” “18 cups or so”
'The music is too loud, turn it down a few cups!"
I do actually like weight better for measurements, have a scale and that IS easier, agreed. But most recipes don’t need to be so exact, and not everyone has a scale so volume measurements work. I just use a regular spoon for teaspoon and have cup measures, a small coffee cup here is 8oz, we have some of those too.
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But what if you’re baking, then the measurements are important
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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.
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I have a cup that’s imperial on one side and metric on the other.
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.
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.
Because it’s quicker to just use a measuring cup than by weighing it out every time, I assume.
I do have a scale, but I mostly use it when portioning out a big chub of ground turkey or beef.
If you’d use metric, then weight & measurements on measuring cups would be basically the same. Like, 1 liter or milk or water is exactly 1 Kg. Using arbitrary measurements like “cups” or “feet” are just confusing and prone to error.
Milk has a specific gravity slightly higher than 1, so that isn’t accurate.
Also, “cups” and “feet” aren’t arbitrary. They aren’t part of the metric system, but a cup is a standardized unit of volume and a foot is a standardized unit of length.
Exactly. How is a foot anymore arbitrary then a meter?
Or a cup anymore arbitrary then an ounce?
Imperial measurements were based on arbitrary things, metric has specific scientific definitions for their weights.
1l of water is 1kg at sea level, why the fuck is kings foot size the defacto foot?
Imperial measurements were based on arbitrary things, metric has specific scientific definitions for their weights.
What do you mean? A pound is legally defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.
And the kilogram is defined:
The kilogram, symbol kg, is the SI unit of mass. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10^−34 when expressed in the unit J⋅s, which is equal to kg⋅m^2 ⋅s^−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ΔνCs.
These are all currently defined off of the same universal constants, just with different multipliers, which are all arbitrary numbers: 6.62607015 is just about as arbitrary as 0.45359237. Hell, the number 10 is arbitrary, too, so we still use a system for time based on dividing the Earth’s day into 24 and 60.
Like, I get that there’s some elegance in the historical water-based definitions derived from the arbitrary definition of length, but the definition of “meter” started from about as arbitrary a definition as “foot” (and the meter was generally more difficult to derive in the time of its adoption based on the Earth’s dimensions).
If you have to ask that you have no idea how metric works
Until a few years ago, a kilogram was defined by a block of metal.
From 1799 to 1960, the metre was defined by another block of metal. Before 1799, it was defined by a measurement that was hard to verify.
That kind of sounds arbitrary.
Just buy cup and spoon measures. It simplifies the whole process. You already own metric measures, so what’s the difference.
Edit: What’s all this then? Down votes? How is this not the most effective solution? Did it come off as condescending? That was not my intention.
If the issue is that you dont understand the cup and spoon measurements, then just buy a cheap set of measures.
You learn what a cup is. You dont have to translate american recipes every time you want to make something (which doesn’t translate to nice round numbers anyway) which saves time and reduces stress and you can still use metric measures for anything else.
If a recipe describes 8 cups of flour, how many grams or kilograms do i need to buy then?
If you owned a cup measure you might have some idea.
If a recipe calls for 8 cups of flour you will need a bigger baking tin.
Unless you’re baking cakes from scratch for fun or trying to make aesthetically perfect macarons, I just don’t really see a reason to use a scale.
With cup measurements, it’s scoop, level, dump. I hate having to fuss around with getting perfect measurements of ingredients; it’s the second-most boring part of cooking.
I really subscribe to Adam Ragusea’s methodology of “cooking by feel”, and just so happens it aligns with how my own culture treats cooking as well.
So how do you measure, let’s say, chicken breast with a cup?
Chicken just isn’t gonna need to be that precise. It’s not an ingredient that mixes with others in that way. That being said, chicken is an item that most recipes would mention by weight. Nobody is going to actually weigh out the chicken; they’ll just go with a close measurement, or use potentially use the packaging it came in for reference.
