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?
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.
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.
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. 🤷
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.
