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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I’ve always measured in ⅓ centiliter bottles. I call that unit a Trio.
I consume 4 trios of water a day.
1/3 centilitre? So 3.333ml bottles? You drink only 13ml of water a day?
Yeah but it sounds less cool if you say thirteen point three millilitres than to say Four (4) TRIOS™!!!
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. 🤷
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.
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?
Why are you using weights?
Digi’s are like ten bucks
They are now. Not when people were going out west on wagons. As stated above, it’s because of historical reasons.
Even as a Canadian and raised on the metric system, I prefer recipes in cups and spoons.
As a Canadian you would have been raised on a hybrid… Food and/or construction stuff has always stayed in imperial measures here
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.
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.
No think, grab spoon/cup, dump.
Source: USAian.
Really. But which cup or spoon? I have a shit load of different kind of cups and spoons.
Measuring cups or spoons.
Or, so long as you use the same device across a recipe, the proportions will work.
Its not any random spoon or cup. We all have measuring devices of standardized volumes.
for example:
https://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Measuring-10-Piece-Kitchen-Gadgets/dp/B091JXDLDXIsnt weight easier then? One scale thats it? But then again to each his own.
If you’re baking something that needs exact amounts of certain ingredients, then yeah, a scale is easier. A scale is more accurate, but its slower than using a measured scoop for recipes that don’t require more precision than the scoop provides.
You don’t actually need the full set. If all you have is 1 tablespoon and 1 cup, it will usually be OK to just eyeball the fractions.
This actually clarifies a lot, I didn’t realize there was a misconception that Americans are just using random cups and spoons.
Do Americans not own scales or something?
I do not own a kitchen scale. Outside of baking, volume works well enough.
Not with salt or anything granular. Liquid is probably fine
Salt tends to be used in such small quantities that you’ll get much larger errors on the typical kitchen scale than with measuring spoons.
It works well enough for me. Salt is relatively uniform, so there isn’t that much variance. With spices, the variance of the spice strength is greater than the variance caused by compaction.
Outside of baking, the tolerance required to get a dish to taste good is rather wide.
Salf is the definition of not uniform.
Try a spoonful of table salt instead of sea salt next time and see how well that goes. In grams it does not matter.
I have one kind of salt that I cook with. I know that if I use different kinds of salt, it can affect the flavor and concentration, so I just go with one kind of salt.
Literally never had a problem with any recipe, ever. This is a non-issue.
Oh okay well if you’ve not had an issue then it can’t be one.
Honestly, what is wrong with the people left on lemmy, why is everyone like this. There was a few months there where you could talk and have a conversation. Then all the good people left and we just get… this.
what is wrong with the people left on lemmy
You’re the one causing problems here. The others are conversing normally. Lemmy is fine, chill.
I know it’s easy to misread the tone of text, but I certainly didn’t mean to offend you. It’s true that it is a complete non-issue for me and *millions *of Americans. I’m simply stating a fact and in no way judging you or criticizing you for asking the question. I’m giving you an answer from my perspective.
Never have I ever thought “oh it would be so much easier to pour my flour into a bowl on a scale” rather than just scoop out a few cups.
Unironically, I do in fact do this all the time. I make large batches when I bake, so it’s easier to just tare and measure everything directly in the stand mixer bowl instead of scooping 16 cups. It’s also less clean up afterwards!
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.
someone should make an alternate history tv show where the ship made it. bonus if it’s of a parody kind.
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.
Cups are used in various countries even outside the USA. We’d still see cups, the cups would just be 200–250 mL in volume.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
I’ve seen “cups” used to mean anywhere between 225ml and 250ml. It’s very confusing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
