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.
I've seen numerous sources for this.
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".
5 rods to the hogs head.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ding ding ding!
If you'd use metric, then weight & measurements on measuring cups would be basically the same. Like, 1 liter or milk or water is exactly 1 Kg. Using arbitrary measurements like "cups" or "feet" are just confusing and prone to error.
Milk has a specific gravity slightly higher than 1, so that isn't accurate.
Also, "cups" and "feet" aren't arbitrary. They aren't part of the metric system, but a cup is a standardized unit of volume and a foot is a standardized unit of length.
1 liter of milk weighs more than 1 kilo. Milk is denser than water therefore 1 liter of it has to weigh more than water.
Edit: I just looked it up and 1 liter of milk is 1.03 kilos.
Water isn't the only ingredient. One liter of flour is not nearly one kilogram. More importantly, the mass of one liter of flour varies a lot depending on how much it settled in the container. That's why weight is always the better way to measure ingredients.
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.
The metric system uses a similar principle. 1 liter is a kg of water. It's just named better.
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
Literally never had a problem with any recipe, ever. This is a non-issue.
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.
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 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.
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?
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. 🤷♂️
Shutout to the one dude who downvoted literally every comment lol I hope you enjoyed it
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.
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?
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.
General rule when measuring by volume is to not pack it unless the recipe says to.
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.
Stubborn, i guess
This is what they use. Still a horrible way to measure things.
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.
Adam ragusea has some good video explaining both why we use volume and why we don't use metric
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.
How do you convert cups to weight accurately when a cup of one thing might weigh more than a cup of a different thing?
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.
Tradition, and its dumb as hell since we have set the official definition of every "imperial measure" to metric we just keep using the silly ones.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=yduDPjzkXI7G6rJH
This. Explains. It. All.
We can't measure in feet or inches because it would be ambiguous about how wide to make it
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.
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.
the truth is americans kind of just do things arbitrarily.
"merica bad" ok edgelord
Because measuring by weight is simply a waste of time. Full cup have exact measure dump. Simple.
Why would you ever add an extra step or two for no reason??
Assuming you're not trolling, flour has variable density depending on how you scoop or squish it. Packed or unpacked brown sugar?
Cups are great, the real annoyances are pints, quarts and gallons. Really no reason to use any of those when you can just state it in cups. Then we threw in fluid ounces for that extra layer of confusion and conversion.
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.
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.
🤔
Have you converted fuck-tonnes to metric?
What do you do for nuts and bolts? Isn't that stuff harder to get?
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.
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.