Europe’s weights system is baffling for American cooks used to volumes and cups, but will metric’s accuracy eventually tip the scales?
‘Scales make me so much saner’: Samin Nosrat, American author of Salt Fat Acid Heat and presenter of the Netflix show of the same name.‘Scales make me so much saner’: Samin Nosrat, American author of Salt Fat Acid Heat and presenter of the Netflix show of the same name.
There is a chasm between Europe and America’s kitchen cultures. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume, not weight, to make measurements in their kitchens. Cooking with cups is volume-based and relies heavily on visual cues – everyone knows what a cup of granulated sugar looks like; less so 200g or 7.1oz – while the metric system is weight-based.
Cups are thorny territory for anyone who edits recipes for audiences on both sides of this transatlantic divide. The conversion to a metric weight depends on almost countless variables, from the ingredient you are measuring – but also within ingredient categories – to how tightly or loosely you pack an ingredient into a cup.
When I was very young, my mother had cast-iron balance scales to which we added weights on one side and dry ingredients to the brass bowl on the other until they were perfectly balanced. Each was then added to another bowl one by one. It was romantic but cumbersome. I remember the day Mum bought digital scales and how they changed the game – suddenly, we could measure all our dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, combine the two and there was a cake in the oven in minutes.
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