Unpopular Opinion
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In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that's a given.
This stupid "How many grams is a f-ing cup of again?" is a pain in the a...
Years ago I printed out a copy of a weights and measures chart with common ingredient substitutions and taped it inside a kitchen cabinet. I've found it incredibly convenient.
And this is how we become our grandparents. 🥴
Normally liquids are pretty standard, but I picked up a gallon of milk the other day and thought I must be sick or something. I handed it to my partner and she was along the same lines that it was extremely heavy. Not sure what happened there, but usually they weight around 4kg, this one had to be a lot more, 6kg maybe. I needed extra money to pay for some debts, so I was working instacart at nights. So I probably picked up 50 of them a week, always felt the same, this one... Not a single clue how it weighed so much, I figure if it goes bad the sun of the ingredients should be the same, its a closed environment.
Now that is strange. Did you open it?
Nah, I gave it to one of the Kroger employees telling them something must be off. The date was the same as the rest on the shelf, but I wasn't going to open it in the store
Heavy cream weighs less, about 95%, than what water weighs. I can’t really think of a liquid that I would expect to weigh 50% more than water. I remember reading once about something called “heavy water”. Maybe that is what they were referring to?
"Heavy water" is water molecules where the hydrogen atoms have an extra neutron, and pure heavy water is only about 10% heavier than regular water. Also, not something people should be drinking a lot of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water
I do like when recipes give me liquids by weight as well. One tool for measuring everything is nice.
Here the metric system comes to help: almost any liquid in the kitchen is about as dense as water, so 1ml = 1g.
Oils are a bit less dense, but there you just subtract 10%, i.e. 100ml rapeseed oil is about 90g.
Honey is a far outlier with 1.4g/ml, but it usually given in grams.
If you live in a place that uses cups, the container the food comes in typically has both measurements as part of the nutrition facts on the back label. US nutrition facts are per-serving not per-100g like the EU, so for flour for example, it will have "serving size 1/4 cup (30 g)". The main exceptions are items meant to be eaten in their entirety like a candy bar or, unfortunately, liquids, which give you milliliters.
Luckily, I live in a metric country, and nobody uses cups for measuring except from my wife who waters the plant with two cups of water.
The problem always arises when I find an American recipe with such fantastic measurements like "two cups of spinach". Yes, that is a real one.
Volumetric leafy greens are the worst, lol. I guess salad greens don't matter too much cause it doesn't really change anything, but something like basil, you probably want relatively accurate. Same thing with shredded cheese, it can be a huge difference to the recipe if you grate the cheese through the large holes on a box grater vs something like a microplane.
I think, especially in American recipes, cups are basically the missing link between "grandma recipes" and modern "accurate" recipes. Everyone has gotten recipes handed down that call for "some onion" or "1 handful of nuts". It's fine for lots of recipes: no one is going to actually measure out 200 grams of onion for a stirfry, they'll just grab an onion and chop up the whole thing.
I share the idea that this is indeed based on recipes from ancient times, but the rest of the world has moved to the 21st century (actually, we even did this for most part of the 20th century already). I think this is in line with the "we will not use metric" attitude of Americans.
Okay I grew up using cups and find scoopscrapedump more convenient than trying to get the exact amount on a scale, BUT You are so right about 2 cups of spinach! Or really any leafy green, even worse than lumpy nutts or variously sized berries! Considering how much a cup of spinach can vary depending how you pack it, (not to even get into fresh/wilting/deflated/cooked and grown/baby leaves!) I grab 2 handfuls, although your hands may be a different size. Or I use as much spinach as I have, unless I want to save some for whatever reason.
That was the point. The recipe stated exactly that "two cups of spinach" without mentioning the state or kind of it. While it could have benefited greatly by including words like "fresh", "cooked", or "blended", it simply shows that volumetric is not exactly the best measuring method for such things.
While I agree (see previous) I think weight would be similarly unhelpful without specifying the state, since water (or the lack of it when cooked) is so much a part of the mass. If you are going to cook it in a quiche or fritter for instance, you should start by wilting it, or thawing if frozen, and then squeezing as much water out as possible. But in a salad you disturb it as little as possible, to keep the volume and mass, and feel like you're eating something even though it's mostly water.
Brazil got a weird twist on that: metric everywhere, except for most kitchen ingredients. Including stuff like "a can of milk" (milk is not sold in cans here), "a requeijão glass of [ingredient]", so goes on.
Good that I have not tried to get into Brazilian cooking so far.
Yup, it is that messy.
On a lighter side, although cups/Tbsp/tsp are still in use, they got padronised to 240/15/5ml.
Which does not help with non-liquid foods, as their density varies widely.
Yeah, it doesn't. Specially not for stuff like butter, as it's really hard to measure a "normal" tablespoon.
(It could be worse though. My grandma's measurements were basically "put an amount of [ingredient]", "aah, you eyeball it", or "enough to fill that dish". I guess cup/tbsp/tsp is a progress from that.)