Why do Americans measure everything in cups?
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?
Apparently the French sent over a metric system for the Americans to use, but the ship was lost.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system
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.
Measuring by weight has only been a thing for cooking since digital scales became cheap.
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"
I see someone watches tasting history
My favourite is when the book told him to put on a "good amount" of something
5 rods to the hogs head.
Back in my childhood (60+ years ago) we had recipes that called for a “breakfast cup’ of this and a “teacup” of that. And yes, we did have actual breakfast cups and teacups, which had significantly different volumes. What kind of cup do they use in the US I wonder?
Jiggers. 1.5 oz. Or a pony shot (small end of the jigger) 0.75 oz.
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.
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.
Jokes on you. When we measure flour on the moon, it's the same as on earth. You just don't understand our advance measurement technique with your primitive weighing.
Joke aside, scales on earth measure force and show mass on the assumption of the gravitational pull on earth. On a moon colony, you'd use measuring scales with a different value for the gravitational pull, and get the same values for mass as on earth.
Edit: Also, if anyone finds this stuff interesting to think about. You can measure mass without any force of gravity, but having the measuring device accelerate (e.g. shake) the stuff you want to measure. From "F=ma", knowing F and a, you get m.
Something something elevation and atmospheric pressure resulting in a proper measurement across altitude... Or something.
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.
Not completely, agreed, but they are miles ahead of the Americans. :-)
I am converting my life to metric, actually. All of my CAD work is in metric and all of my chemistry glass is thankfully in metric. Thinking in longer distances is something I need to get used to though.
The imperial system is just a waste of time, TBH. I am sure there are a ton of people that can work fractions in their head but I just gotta ask: Why, and what is the point?
Measuring and planning with metric is just so damn easy and no extra steps are generally needed. When I need to convert 1000mm I just move the decimal over a bit and get 1km. EZ.
🤔
1Kmm
(kilomillimeter)
I was hoping that might at least get a chortle or two. ;)
You did good, perhaps a bit too subtle. You got me anyway
K is Kelvin. Kilo is k.
That's just cold.
When all of your factory tooling and off the shelf parts are in imperial, you use that. :shrug:
Have you converted fuck-tons to metric?
The occasional shit-loads, sure. But dealing with metric fuck-tons is a pain in the ass.
I think in metric it would be a fuck tonne
No, it's just one megafuck.
I keep using this example: In the wood shop, I'm going to cut a bridle joint. Requires cutting boards into thirds of their thickness. Metric lumber is often milled to 19mm thick. What's a third of 19mm? You want to show me which line means 6.3333mm on a metric tape measure? US Customary lumber is milled to 3/4" thick. What's a third of 3/4"? You want to show me which line means 1/4" on an inch tape measure? Now let's cut a half-lap joint in that same lumber. In metric that works out to 9.5mm, there's also no line on a typical metric tape measure for that. But there is a line for 3/8".
I'd much rather build furniture in inches than millimeters because in the wood shop I have to divide or multiply by powers of 2, 3 and 4 way more often than powers of 10. It is in this context that the inch standard which is subdivided by powers of two rather than ten arose, and it still works very well.
Metric users often correctly accuse Imperial or US Customary (though the two share names of units they are not identical) users of making excuses or relying on workarounds, in the context of woodworking joinery I find it's the reverse. "Of course we don't use 6.3333mm, you just know to cut the cheeks 6mm and the tongue 7mm. 6+6+7 is 19."
I'll grant you, doing stoichiometry in ounces and pounds would be a fucking nightmare. But woodworking joinery? Nah I'm doing that in fractional inches.
While neat, I believe your lumber example is misleading in the context of metric vs imperial. Woodworking is extremely imprecise compared to many other types of engineering and using that system for those problems may be ideal.
Deliberately using 1/3rd of 19mm to get 6.33333mm is not as a complex problem as it may look at first glance. 6.333mm IS 1/3rd of 19mm just with more precision. The nature of woodworking requires fairly large tolerances and .3333mm is likely within any tolerance range you would work with. Hell, even +/-3.333mm (10x) is probably within spec in many cases.
Your example conversion from 1/4in to 9.5mm is irrelevant unless you are working a project that is deliberately converting imperial to metric. If a project is designed in metric the measurements and reference points are going to be rounded to metric. The same goes for designs that are in imperial. While it's possible to design identical pieces in each measuring system, it's not ideal. Tolerance can compensate for most small differences and you will get two extremely similar pieces.
From your standpoint, everything has been imperial and you make design choices around how imperial works. It just makes sense to you. Design conversions from imperial to metric won't make any sense and the "natural math" of each system is lost. If you were raised on metric, the same situation would apply I suppose.
You explained the biggest complaint of imperial as a positive: fractions. Pure math is just easier then fractions when working up and down ranges of precision. Divide 10cm by 2? 5mm. 5mm by 4? 1.25mm, etc.. Problems like 19mm/3 are irrelevant because of allowable tolerance. Every exact measurement is not abstracted by a 16th or 8th or 32nd or 64th....
Admittedly, I am no woodworker. However, I am curious if someone from the EU could chime in on this problem from their perspective.
I didn't convert a quarter inch to 9.5mm. First of all a quarter inch is somewhere around 6.5mm. I divided 19mm by 2. Just like I divided 3/4" by two to get 3/8".
I'm talking woodworking here, not carpentry. .3333mm is ~1/64", which is the maximum error I would allow in making a joint. I usually work well within that. Missing by 3.3333mm on a feature specified to be 6.3333mm is an abject failure. That's an error of over 50%.
PVA wood glue contracts as it dries, so it doesn't fill gaps well. The looser the fit, the weaker the joint. I aim for a friction fit. Most of the time with glue on the mating surfaces the joint must be tapped together with a mallet.
Your reading comprehension is what I've come to expect from Lemmy. I repeat myself for the slow kids at the back: because I often have to divide my work into halves, thirds or quarters and rarely into tenths, fractional inches in powers of two are more convenient in this application.
Remember folks, in metric, 5/2=2.5, 5/3=doesn't matter because "tolerances." That's one of those excuses I was talking about.
Do keep trying to lecture me about something you don't even slightly understand. It's adorable.
Chill. We both wrote walls of text and there are going to be misunderstood details. If we want to talk about details, I called out my ignorance of woodworking and why imperial is likely good for what you are talking about.
My overall points, and I'll summarize this time, is that:
Wood working (carpentry? Whatever.) is not exact.
Dividing 19mm by 3 is a weird example. Your example did a better job of highlighting a math peculiarity, TBH. (My first thought is that the cut was was going to account for any minor errors.)
Fractions suck. You are comfortable with them, but I see them as a useless layer of an outdated measuring system. We made our points, for and against. Cool.
A key point that I didn't call out specifically is that imperial does not work in high degrees of precision easily without eliminating fractions. It's possible, and vocalized, but not generally written. 1/1000" as a good example.
While I was awaiting your reply, I also thought of the abuse the imperial system has suffered over the years. A 2x4 is not a 2x4. In reloading (another hobby of mine), .300 actually means .308. .223 could mean .222, .223 or even .224. However, .222 always means .222. I am forced into imperial for safety and consistency reasons. (Don't even get me started on 'grains', wherever the fuck that came from.) For some reason, the metric system is now mixed up in that field as well and it's a mess.
The word "misleading" was chosen with purpose and doesn't mean that you writing with malice. It seemed, true or not, that conversions got mixed up in this which would even confuse an MIT graduate.
Woodworking is the trade of building furniture and cabinetry, carpentry is the trade of building structures. A woodworker built your dining room table, a carpenter built your dining room. The two trades have some overlap in skills and knowledge but they are different skill sets. As for exactness...let me put it this way. A lot of woodworkers balk at using pencils to mark their cuts because the width of a 0.5mm mechanical pencil lead is considered too great a margin for error. A single bevel marking knife is used to apply a score mark with a perfectly sharp edge to the wood.
It is typical for metric woodworkers to mill boards to a finished thickness of 19mm. It's also a common thickness for plywood in metric land. I think it was chosen because it is close to 3/4". Many common woodworking joints such as mortise and tenons, bridle joints, etc. require dividing the board into thirds; a typical mortise for example is a rectangular hole or slot in a board 1/3rd the board's thickness. So working in metric with 19mm stock, you either have to cope with measuring, marking, and cutting 6.3333mm, or having to "just know" to cut a 7mm mortise with 6mm of wood on either side.
Meanwhile working in US Customary (which is not the same as Imperial) using wood milled to 3/4" stock, a third of 3/4" is 1/4".
19mm/3 isn't a weird example, I didn't pull that number out of thin air.
DIFFERENT SCENARIO: Now I'm going to make a half-lap joint which requires cutting the stock in half. Cutting a metric 19mm board in half gets you 9.5mm. Cutting a US Customary 3/4" thick board in half gets you 3/8".
For this application, fractions genuinely don't suck. There are advantages to using fractions in work like this, namely that you can do integer math on the numerator or demoninator rather than floating point arithmetic. Plus, measuring and marking tools being marked in powers of two rather than ten is more convenient in a field where most of what you're doing is halving and quartering dimensions.
Sure, precision metalwork is done in thousandths of an inch or even ten-thousandths of an inch, and I personally prefer machining in metric.
Yes it is, for awhile at least. The board is rough sawn out of the log at 2" by 4" and dried at that dimension. Rough sawing doesn't produce a perfect board, and the board will shrink and warp a little during drying, so the dried board is then further flattened, straightened and squared via a milling process which takes about a quarter inch from each face, resulting in a finished dimension of 1 1/2" by 3 1/2". Lumber is priced by their rough cut dimensions because that's how much of the tree the sawyer had to use to make that board.
Back in the day it was common for lumber yards to sell construction lumber in a rough cut state at a true 2" by 4", and the carpenter would mill it himself. Then the railroads happened, and lumber was being shipped from the forests of the West coast back east. Railroads charged for cargo by the ton, and lumber mills could save a mint on shipping by milling the boards to finished size before shipping. This saved carpenters the work of milling the boards themselves. They still called the boards "2x4s" because they were still used for the same purpose. An thus the modern commodity retail 2x4 was born.
Similarly, that 3/4" lumber I keep saying I use: I buy that from my local sawyer rough sawn to 1" thick. I then plane it flat and straight, which takes about an eighth of an inch from each face. So I wind up with a finished board 3/4" thick, which as previously discussed is a convenient size for woodworking.
This is why I think the metric system should be redone in base 12. Or maybe base 36.
Base 10 in general is a mistake.
I mean, you can make the exact same argument the other way round.
My bed is made with boards of 27mm thickness. One third of that would be 9mm. Easy.
Also if you need precision, calipers go down to 50um (micrometer), 1/20th of a mm.
What's half of 27mm?
We can keep doing that dance, it's possible to find similar inconveniences in the fractional inch system, like "what's a third of a whole inch?" but I find that within each system's conventions (like using 19 and 27mm stock versus 3/4" or 1 1/2" stock) you're less likely to run into them working in fractional inches. I think because the wood shop is just a fractional kind of place, I divide by two and three out there a lot.
The machine shop isn't so much, which is why we tend to work in either thousandths of an inch or increasingly in metric. Most CNC machines will gladly accept both.
As for calipers: In the wood shop, I frequently use a set of dial calipers calibrated in 64ths of an inch. Especially with my thickness planer on which one full turn of the handwheel moves the cutter head 1/16", so the major, medium and minor marks on the caliper dial work out to a full, half and quarter turn on the handwheel. The analog display makes the relationship between the calipers and the tool very intuitive in a way that improves accuracy and repeatability largely by decreasing error.
I don't really need precision beyond 1/64", but I do need to be able to tell if it's a thin 64th or a fat 64th or a dead nuts 64th.
I find specific situations where customary units are handy. Fahrenheit has a nicer range for precise cooking temperature, such as for sous vide. 1 degree centigrade is a wider range than 1 degree fahrenheit. Dropping down to milligrades is too precise. Fahrenheit is just right.
Metric is lashed to orders of magnitude precision, and it gets in the way here. Being able to convert things, like knowing how much energy it takes to heat 1 cubic centimeter of water by 1 degree centigrade, also isn't useful in the kitchen unless you're doing some deep molecular gastronomy shit.
It's OK to use different measurement systems in different contexts. Purity is not a virtue.
What do you do for nuts and bolts? Isn't that stuff harder to get?
Not really. Most every hardware shop has them these days. Amazon is about my only other source, but quality/usability is a gamble in the M1-M2 range for some reason. The number of small bolts and nuts in that range that are cast badly seems to be high for me. That seems really odd, actually.
Kits are the way to go, usually. I have a full assortment of nuts and bolts from M1 up to about M6 at many different lengths. I started building a collection when I was modding 3D printers but use them for any other random project these days.
Edit: Local hardware shops generally carry decent assortments from M3 and up. It's more expensive than Amazon but is great if I only need one odd larger size for something random.
You cannot find a metric measuring tape in the US without a lot of effort.
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.
"Do Americans not own scales or something?"
For a good long while, no they didn't. For a large fraction of American history a typical home kitchen had no bespoke measuring equipment at all; but tea cups, tea spoons and table spoons were typically available and made to pretty similar sizes, plus if you always used the same ones the proportions would be roughly the same, so meh.
A lot of traditional recipes were written this way, and it has remained so by tradition. A system of inexpensive, easy to manufacture measuring cups and spoons became standard equipment by the mid-20th century, and hasn't changed to this day because it works just fine.
The US government is in the habit of publishing recipes with a deliberately low minimum equipment list. The United States Department of Agriculture for example conducts extensive testing on home canning recipes and methods, and deliberately writes their recipes to be used in poorly equipped kitchens, because the kind of folks who rely on putting up home grown vegetables for the winter don't tend to spend a lot of money on Sharper Image kitchen gadgetry. Flipping through my copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, I find about a third of recipes could be made using nothing but a mason jar or two as your only measuring tool, as most mason jars (excluding the deliberately decorative ones) have graduation marks in cups, ounces and milliliters molded into them.
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.
By the way, there's just one size of cups in America?
The things people drink out of are many different sizes of course, but when the word "cup" is used in the context of a measure of volume, then yes, they're called "measuring cups", and the volume is standardized.
Same thing with teaspoons and tablespoons. They're not just any random spoon - when talking about measurements, they have a standardized volume and you need to use a cheap and ubiquitous measuring device if you want to follow a recipe precisely.
Most people in USA do not have a scale in their kitchen, but we do have a measuring cup and a set of measuring spoons.
"cup" is a unit of measure like a foot. It measures volume and it is approx equal to 236 ml.
There also exist metric cups with a round 250 ml, supposedly for easier adoption of the metric system.
A measuring cup is a specific size, about 237mL. There's a whole system of US measurements, actually:
3 teaspoons in a tablespoon
2 tablespoons in an ounce
8 ounces in a cup
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
4 quarts in a gallon
Not all cups are measuring cups; if you are having a cup of coffee that doesn't mean your cup is exactly 8oz. You just infer from context that if someone is talking about ingredients then you should measure them with a measuring cup. (Very commonly you also see cups with graduated markings, which are US Imperial on one side and metric on the other, that go up to 2 cups/500mL.)
fluid ounce, since most liquids used in food are nearly the same density.
/edit to add to this, after a cup most things that are dry are not measure in pints, quarts or gallons. For example, you don't hear anyone say "you'll need 1 pint of flour", they'll just say 4 cups.
I've seen "cups" used to mean anywhere between 225ml and 250ml. It's very confusing.
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.
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'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 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.
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?
So why are young women called chicks, even if they're grown up?
Because slang doesn't follow rules
Yes, thank You!
I do not own a kitchen scale. Outside of baking, volume works well enough.
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.
As an American who has recently learned to love his scale, I'm with you 100%. With that being said, no, many Americans do not have kitchen scales.
Just another one of those things where the rest of world looks at the US and shakes its head. There seems to be a lot of things in the US purely in place based on tradition and logic goes out the window.
But also, there’s no real incentive to change… my brownies taste just fine with a 1/3 cup of oil and a 1/3 cup of water. I am sure they would taste just as good with 80 g of each, but if it works, why change it?
What logic is there in saying grams are better than cups of both work well for the intended task? If I were a professional baker, it’s entirely possible I would have a different opinion, but I (like 99% of Americans) am not.
Oil and water are fine, but flour already starts to be a problem. How densely is it packed?
Then we go on to salt, which can have a lot of different grain sizes (although that is annoying with a scale as well because most kitchen scales are not very accurate with single-digit-grams)
Then it gets really weird when they say to use a cup of grated cheese, because depending on how you grate it it has very different densities
The difference is accuracy.
But what I’m saying is I’m plenty accurate enough with cups… there would be no appreciable difference for my box of brownies.
American here but I do a lot of baking, I do own a scale and prefer to weigh ingredients because I'm amazed at the different quantities of flour I can get from cup to cup depending how packed the flour is or how I scoop it.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing which worries me. I suppose if it's a recipe which doesn't need precise measurements it doesn't matter.
Baking can be troublesome, but it's usually only flour that gets compacted to a problematic degree. Most good recipes will at least specify "sifted". Otherwise, volume works about as well, and the cups and spoons will be standardized measurements with only a dim historical connection to the kind of insanity you may be be picturing.
Mass would probably still be better of course, it's just not quite the literal madness that some think.
There's also volume measurements of things like butter and honey, which are their own nightmare. Yeah, I'm totally going to carve 17 3/4 tablespoons of butter...
General rule when measuring by volume is to not pack it unless the recipe says to.
Shutout to the one dude who downvoted literally every comment lol I hope you enjoyed it
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?
Take a 1-cup measuring cup, chop celery until it's full. That doesn't sound difficult to me. I infer it's merely not what you're used to.
I tend to prefer to weigh ingredients, but I also have measuring cups and spoons and using them is not so onerous. 🤷♂️
But celery is blocky and has gaps and doesn't pack well, the amount you get changes drastically depending on how fine you chop it and on random packing.
I'm not arguing that it's wise. I'm merely arguing that it's not nearly as inexplicable as that comment made it seem.
Why do you care about the tiny variations in volume? Recipe measurements very rarely need to be precise.
/thread
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.
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.
So many in the comments are talking about volume being more convenient but I find it so much more convenient to put a bowl on a scale, tare it, measure, and set it aside. Sure that’s more steps than using a cup, but when I have to fumble with a cup, a 1/3rd cup, a teaspoon, a 1/2 teaspoon and a tablespoon, all for a single recipe, especially one where dry and wet ingredients are being measured, a pain in the ass. So many little dishes that I may or may not need to rinse and dry between ingredients that call for the same measurement.
For the record I’m an American. I will sometimes ditch a recipe when I see it calls for volumetric measurements.
Go back 100, 200 years.
Hell, go back 40 years. Scales were less available, and before digital scales, much slower, take up space, and cost much more than cups and spoons, which you would still need.
100 years ago, even a poor person with little space could have a full set of measuring cups/spoons.
Cups and spoons are sufficiently accurate for anything other than baking. Even with baking, many simpler recipes it's still OK. My mother and grandmother baked many things using cups and spoons.
I still use cups and spoons for anything other than baking - they're sufficiently accurate. Why pull out a scale for things like 1/8 tsp ground pepper? Is that even a gram?
King Arthur, the flour company that's been around over 220 years, publishes numerous recipes that were originally in cups and spoons (because those were the tools 200 years ago), and those recipes are still in cups and spoons. Their muffin recipe is delicious.
English muffins originated in the late 1800s, using volumetric measures - they're still around, still delicious. I've made them, using volumetric measures.
Ever weighed 8oz of water?
It weighs a cup
Hahaha, you win! 🤣
Have an upvote
Although with things like spices, there’s no point in measuring them anyway. Spices are almost always added to taste, so it’s easier to think in terms of ‘x hand movements with the container’.
And yes, I have actually weighed 8oz of water. Well, not specifically 8oz, but I’ve certainly weighed out water to +- a couple grams for a recipe. If a recipe is specific about contents, why would I not measure it out?
Now imagine doing this before cheap digital scales were available. Cheap analog kitchen scales were utter garbage -- inaccurate, wobbly, bulky, and sometimes impossible to tare -- but cheap measuring cups and spoons generally work very nearly as well as expensive ones.
It's a lot easier for me to scoop 1/2 teaspoon of two spices, one tablespoon of another, and 2 teaspoons of a fourth than to measure 1.8 grams of one, 2.2 grams of one, 5.2 grams of one, and 3.8 grams of a fourth. The scoops I can put in the container and level off the top using the same container. The other way, I have to gently sprinkle or slowly scoop and sprinkle so it doesn't go over the required amount.
Way faster for me to scoop, level, dump.
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.
It really depends what sort of recipes you're making, but for cooking very loose approximations are often fine.
I often have to convert to weight/mass in order to find out how much of an ingredient to buy. I have no idea how many cups an eggplant is. But once I get it home the recipe might as well say "however much eggplant you have."
If I'm truly off, I will typically scale up the recipe adjusting for the extra meat or vegetable content. I'll more or less assume that 1lb of meat is interchangeable with 1lb of veggies. That's not quite true, in particular with salt.
Your mileage may vary though. Some recipes and ingredients are much more sensitive to deviations.
If it calls for 200g of aubergine, then you can weigh that at the shop... It's more convenient at that end, and you can get the right amount.
I'm going to estimate 99% of recipes in the US don't give weights for those. It will say one large onion or 3 medium zucchini. There are a few places (serious eats) that tend to give weights but it's extremely rare. If you're lucky you'll get volumes but weights are so rare.
weren't many digital scales out on the prairie when the settlers were looking to make bread
History.
Why do Brits use Stone for weight of people? Same answer.
the truth is americans kind of just do things arbitrarily.
This is a thoughtless take. Do you know how hard it is to do things randomly? It takes way more work than doing things for a reason. Just because you don't know the reason, you assume it's arbitrary? That kind of thinking is why simple rules and instructions don't get followed mucking up entire systems.
From another comment on this thread:
"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."
"merica bad" ok edgelord
Eh, it's what I grew up with...
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon (14.787ml)
1 tablespoon = .5 ounces
8 ounces = 1 cup (236.588ml)
1 cup = .5 pints
1 pint = .5 quarts (473.176ml)
1 quart = .25 gallons
The weird thing is, above 20 ounces, sodas are sold in metric. 1L, 2L, 3L. So is alcohol, 750ml.
Milk and juice are sold in ounces, pints, quarts and gallons.
I switched to weighing everything a few years ago and I when I moved I didn't have to have a set of spoons, dry cups, wet cups. I just use the scale.
https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=yduDPjzkXI7G6rJH
This. Explains. It. All.
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.
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.)
I think it comes down to the fact that cooking is active. You constantly season, add heat, remove heat, and check if it's done. Baking is more passive, you mix things and hope for the best, you can't just add more sugar or flour at the 10 minute mark.
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 can do this no problem however my WIFE cannot. If something doesn't have a recipe defined down to a gnats ass then she looses confidence and nearly always screws it up. She's not dumb she just doesn't have the knack. It's sorta like a "green thumb", some people will kill a plant just looking at it while others are seemingly able to grow palm trees in the Arctic.
I'm sure it's trainable but some people just have the ability and others don't. Different people / different gifts and all that.
As someone who once subbed cayenne 1:1 for black pepper in spaghetti sauce, and who has learned to make my own breadcrumbs from failed sourdough, I promise it's a learned skill. It just takes letting yourself fail a lot and not taking yourself too seriously.
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.
😭😭😭
The units used in the kitchen make sense, firstly because cups, spoons and shit are common things found in the kitchen, secondly because precision is not really a priority and thirdly because coocking is about proportions.
I usually take a piss on the american pathetic unit system anyway
Except I have cups in my kitchen that are double the size of other cups and I dont know which ones to use.
I legit can't tell:
You guys DO realize that "cup" is the specific name of a measurement and not, like, telling us to go use whatever mug we have in the kitchen, right?
The comments on this specific thread make me wonder
I was actually not aware of that... Makes more sense now.
I think that an american cup holds something like 230 cm3. Thats a horribly small cup for me (mines range from 250 to 450). I tend to use the ones that have 250 cm3 capacity and thats my definition of cup... or i can always use half a metric pint instead.
All this gibberish about units makes me feel like an idiot, so i will confess: i use a scale and metric cups. 250 cm3 water, or milk are roughly 250g
I would guess use the ones that are sized like most other cups. Like standard mug sized. Although i think its all relative. If you use a certain cup to measure flour, use the same cup to measure sugar.
Otherwise you can buy a set of cup and spoon measures for super cheapnon amazon. They fit in my cutlery drawer.
Almost everything sold in USA is measured in metric and imperial units (technically wrong name, US customary units). You can get by with either.
Also, the measuring by volume can be bad for salts, because different types take up different volume amounts. A tale of two salts by Chef John (foodwishes channel on YouTube) has a nice little video about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGCY9Cpia_A
Measuring cups (special cup and fractional cup sized cups) are pretty convenient.
Although it's worth bearing in mind that a US cup is 240ml, an Imperial (British) cup is 284ml and a metric cup is 250ml.
Stubborn, i guess
As an American who was taught to use cups and had recipe books that used cups, I dunno but it's dumb. A cup of peanut butter?! Like no fucking way I'm scooping that shit into a cup then into whatever I'm making. But I did measure just like that before I knew better. I have a food scale and convert cups to a weight and I will never turn back.
Saves you from having to weigh the stuff. U fill the cup and dump.
Doing by weight means u have to take the extra step of weighing it after it's in a container. What a massive waste of time for no advantage.
Lol no, just weigh it as you pull it from your container. Hell, skip another step and just put your mixing bowl on the scale and zero it out. Weight measurement is so much simpler and accurate than volumetric measurements.
You could put the jar of peanut butter on the scale and measure what amount you're taking out?
Or you place your bowl etc. on the scale and tare after each addition. Doesn't work in all situations (e.g. pan on the stove) but is great for baking.
Look, it's like this..
Method 1: you get a bowl and put it on the scale. You then dump everything into it or you get a new bowl for each ingredient if you need to keep them separate.
Method 2: you get a bowl and a cup. You measure into the cup and dump the stuff in the bowl then wash the cup and then you measure the next thing then you wash again and so on.
Sometimes washing isn't needed, sure. But you still put stuff in the cup then move it rather than putting it directly in the bowl.
With spoons it's even worse because for spices, for example, many of them (at least here) come like this so spoons don't fit...so good luck pouring out of it and into a spoon and not making a mess
How do you convert cups to weight accurately when a cup of one thing might weigh more than a cup of a different thing?
Thankfully the density of most foods is known
Is there a separate conversion chart for every food out there? Seems confusing.
Why a chart? Just throw the stuff you wanna know in wolfram alpha, it'll figure out the units for you
I just yell "okay Google how much does a cup of peanut butter weigh" if Google doesn't get me a good answer usually my husband will run in yelling the conversions he googled so I will stop yelling at the spy-assistant bot. I have encountered few ingredients that I couldn't find a weight conversion for.
Measure it out the hard way once and note the weight. I do that every time I have a recipe using cups just to make my life easier. Once the recipe is properly noted, I can just put a bowl on the scale and hit the tare button after each step.
Fun fact : in France we mesure by weight except for the "gâteau au yaourt". The yoghurt cake is the most basic cake with each family having it's own recipe, a bit like maybe muffins in other places and this cake is entierly mesured in volumes.
No think, grab spoon/cup, dump.
Source: USAian.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Leftpondian
I'm from the UK but we have a set of cups for old recipes (and American recipes)... Honestly it's easier in a lot of cases to measure stuff out, I like it. What's really annoying is that US and UK cups are DIFFERENT SIZES.
Cups is a volumetric measurement. Honestly I'd be fine with switching to liters for measurements, or deciliters or whatever makes sense. Gravimetric measurements never made intuitive sense to me.
Perhaps that's because it's what you know best and are used to. Volumetric measurements of anything that doesn't have a fixed density make no sense to me. What the hell is one cup of broccoli? Even a cup of flour can have wildly different ammounts of flour. My least favorite though is butter, how the hell am I supposed to measure out 3 tablespoons of butter? Melt it all on the stove and pour out what I need? I find it incredibly unintuitive.
In the US, sticks of butter have tablespoon measurements printed on the label, like this: https://www.errenskitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/butter-sticks.jpg
Most people leave the sticks of butter in the fridge with the wrappers on. If you want X tablespoons of butter, you cut through the wrapper and butter at the right mark.
I'm not saying it's an ideal system (I also prefer recipes that use weights) but it works.
How does this confuse you? Get a measuring cup, scoop up brocoli. If it's a large, whole broccoli, the recipe will say that.
Adding an extra step to weigh everything is stupid.
You keep saying that, but it's not an extra step. Weighing the food is in place of the volume measurement, not in addition.
Using volume measurement: start cutting broccoli. Add to a measuring cup until you get the right amount.
Using weight measurement: cut broccoli. Add to scale until you have the right amount (actually I would usually weigh out a single large piece, then chop it all at once - same amount of effort).
How do you transfer the food from the cutting board to the scale?
Put empty cutting board on scale. Press tare. Put broccoli on cutting board. There you go, you have just measured the weight of broccoli without taking it off the cutting board. You can’t do that with a cup.
You don't NEED to do all that with a cup. You know how you measure a cup of brocoli? You put it in the damn cup. You don't need to move the broccoli off the cutting board or tare your cutting board before cutting or even press any buttons. Take broccoli, add to cup. Stop when cup is full.
How do you transfer the food from the cutting board to the measuring cup?
You put it in the cup. Which also measures it. You don't have to press any buttons or tare anything. You just keep adding broccoli until cup is full.
I brought up broccoli specifically because I recently wanted to know the nutrition facts of broccoli, and the initial google results were for 1 cup, and not 100g as is standard in I guess everywhere that uses metric. I have absolutely no idea how much broccoli that is, not only because I'm not used to it, but the dimensions of the cup and how finely chopped the broccoli is matter quite a lot in terms of how much actual broccoli we're talking about. It's just so ambiguous.
Some good answers here, thanks everyone, I've learnt some stuff today. 🙂
Thanks for actually being interested in the discussion.
I kinda feel like in the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter. Sure we could measure by weight, but outside of a few ingredients prone to density variation it gets us by, and really there's just no impetus to change. 🤷
Adam ragusea has some good video explaining both why we use volume and why we don't use metric
To anyone who tries watching the first one, just skip ahead to 6:50 where he actually starts explaining his reasoning. I can summarizer them here
The third one was too dumb for me to follow. Something about if you measure stuff by weight, you end up with large portions.
The fourth one was just absurd. No one measures spices by weight... So not being able to measure 1.2g of cinnamon or what not, just isn't a thing.
Alright. I'll stop there. The arguments presented go from fairly bad, to dumb, to made up stuff no one does. The arguments against them are so easy to express:
https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY?si=ZJ7sKhOdiHxozSUO
Another video that explains stuff on the imperial system that fits.
Silly question: are all cups the same volume? I didn’t bother to measure but the cup i use to scoop rice seems very different in size from the one I use for dog food…
A measuring cup is literally designed to be a consistent volume.
Not like a drinking cup or whatever
Yeah, a measurement cup is half a pint. They are defined volumes
A cup is 8 oz
US pint* which is 473 ml. Not to be confused with the UK pint, which is 568 ml.
A rice cup is 3/4 US customary cup.
Measuring by volume is fewer steps. You fill it up to the line, done. Much easier than guessing, checking the weight, adjusting etc.
I don't think Americans are the only ones who do it the easier way...
Measuring by weight is great for pros who want to work fast. Most people are not pros.
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.
Most cooking can be done by feel, I dont know why people are dumping on this.
But baking is straight up edible chemistry, people who are more precise always get more consistent results.
I don't see the point of consistent results outside of a commercial setting, but that is an entirely subjective view. I personally find more enjoyment in testing and tweaking and changing things up, even in baking.
If you happened to like one of your test bakings particularly then you couldn't reproduce it as accurately unless your method is consistent enough. So you wouldn't benefit that much if the test was success, I suppose. But I don't really do much baking so I don't know how difficult it is to get it right and how much it matters.
I do jot down the volume measurements that I use any time I bake (approximate, never exact, since I adjust little by little based on how sticky my cookie dough or how wet my pizza dough feels), and using that gives me consistent results already if consistent results are what I want.
There's not enough variation in the ways I scoop my flour or salt or baking powder or sugar that would net me results that are noticeably different to my previous batches.
I just find this method more fun. Perhaps people prefer to skip the step of cooking by feel and adjusting their flour amount based on how wet their dough is, etc., and just prefer to follow exact steps to get to an end result; I myself find the challenge fulfilling.
I agree with the sentiment: a lot of cooking does not require great precision, so a scale is not often necessary. but I think at that point you should be able to dispense with measuring equipment altogether and just go by feel for most things. A lot of cooking for me is throwing an amount into the pan that feels right, and I don't see a need to measure cups of things.
If I'm baking, accuracy is necessary and I will always reach for the scale.
I guess the point I'm making is that measuring in cups represents a kind of midpoint in the precision-convenience trade-off that I just personally don't find very useful.
I see your point!
I go entirely by feel most of the time and only use cup/spoon measurements as a first step when I'm making batters or cookie or pizza doughs before adjusting based on how the dough is turning out. At that point it's less of a measurement tool and more of a scooping tool to me.
So how do you measure, let's say, chicken breast with a cup?
Breasts are often measured in cups
Just maybe don't chew those ones.
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.
Chicken breast is generally measured in "pieces".
If you're measuring a whole chicken breast by weight, what are you going to do if a piece exceeds the weight called for in the recipe? Are you just going to cut off the excess bits? And where would those excess bits go? The bin? The freezer, perhaps, but which recipe would call for "just a sliver of chicken"? Would you rather not just keep that excess weight in and have a bit more chicken in your meal just to avoid all the fuss?
I wouldn't measure chicken at all.
If you're tracking hoe much you eat (which you should do) you'll need to measure how much chicken you're eating.
Also I regularly cut chicken breasts in half so I can have 1.5 pieces to make 2 meals with roughly 190g of chicken each.
Because we adore being different and difficult just for the hell of it.
Because it’s a few dozen times faster? You can literally reach into a container and take out one cup and that’s it. Works for me ost liquids or grainy stuff. Not from US btw.
Only if you have cup sized cups. Otherwise it's just gonna throw your ratios off
We have measuring cups, along with similarly standardized spoons and liquid measuring cups (same measurement just a different form factor).
Everyone who cooks has at least one set. I literally never had (nor needed) a scale in the kitchen until I started baking, in my forties.
What you don't got a cup
16 tablespoons or 48 teaspoons.
Hehe, not to offend anyone but I think Americans just like crazy units that are either cumbersome, difficult to convert or in this case imprecise as most ingredients vary in density, depending on which flour you chose and how you put it into the cup.
My guess is unwillingness to improve anything and an inability to learn for a subset of people.
I mean weighing things used to be more difficult and required you to move these weights around and was more complicated than just taking a cup of something. But nowadays we have electronic kitchen scales for 10€. And they don't require you to have a set of cups, spoons and get everything messy with butter.
I think the whole baking is quite different and convenience products like pre-made and refrigerated cookie dough or self-raising flour are far more prevalent than where I live. But we also buy lots of pre-made pizza dough and cake mixes here so there is that.
I like using my scale, but it's a cheap PoS and shuts off after 10 seconds of inactivity. I really need to upgrade to a better one.
I prefer my mechanical scale.
I'm honestly surprised that this solution to my problem never even occurred to me. I guess I'm gonna go look for a decent mechanical scale now. Any recommendations?
I have this one but an older version. I’m going on 7 years with it. I went through 4 or 5 digital ones before I gave up. Really love it.
https://www.wayfair.com/Starfrit--Starfrit-Gourmet-Retro-Mechanical-Kitchen-Scale-SRFT080211-L1257-K~STPR1224.html?refid=MX79646047917459-STPR1224&device=m&ptid=4583245529214077&targetid=pla-4583245529214077&channel=BingPLA&network=s&query=best%20mechanical%20kitchen%20scale&msclkid=7945dd5797f51d53d449bb4e631b91c7&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=WF.P.US.G.Tools%20(Mobile%20SCA)&utm_term=4583245529214077&utm_content=49_1257_0~%5BGLOBAL%5D%20Kitchen%20-%20%5BCooking%20Tools%5D%20Kitchen%20Scales
Awesome, thanks.
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.