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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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
