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?
Adam ragusea has some good video explaining both why we use volume and why we don’t use metric
https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY?si=ZJ7sKhOdiHxozSUO
Another video that explains stuff on the imperial system that fits.
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
- “Volume is visible”
- “You gotta scoop your stuff out with something, so it might as well be by something that measures volume”
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:
- “Amounts” of cooking ingredients is mass, so if you want to measure that, you… might as well just measure that, ie weight.
- Amounts that make sense to measure by weight, you measure by weight.
- Spices, and stuff that makes sense to measure by volume, you measure by teaspoon, pinches, or what not. Rarely is the accuracy there all that important, tbh.
