Legit, if that’s confusing to you, maybe take a step back and take a formal cooking class.
It doesn’t matter what system you use, a unit of volume is a unit of volume. Doesn’t matter what’s in it, it’s in a container that holds that volume of any given thing. If that thing is all air or water, or other liquids, the thing being measured will have less gaps in that volume, but that’s irrelevant because recipes using units of volume take that into account.
If a recipe calls for a litre of flour, would you still be confused?
Now, if you’re just objecting to volume measures instead of weight, that’s a different issue as well, but equally irrelevant because the recipe will still be calibrated for that weight, so if you don’t have a scale, you’re equally screwed.
People seem to forget that it’s a fairly recent thing to have any accurate measures in recipes at all. And even more recent that a home cook is going to have access to accurate scales. It’s one of the things food historians have to deal with. You go back past the 1900s and good luck finding anything standardized at all. I used to have my grandmother’s collection of measuring spoons that had accumulated in her family. Even the ones from the result early 1900s weren’t exactly identical in volume when tested against each other
The recipe books from England during that era weren’t better than US ones. Nor were the French recipes.
Measuring by volume came well before weights in cookbooks across all Europe and the americas.
So, if that’s actually confusing for you, that cups/liters/whatever is a container full of the ingredient, you must be a very new cook indeed. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very simple concept
If a recipe calls for a litre of flour, would you still be confused?
To be honest, yes, that would be weird to a European. Flour is usually measured in weight and not volume. Volume is usually used for liquids only over here. And volume is not very helpful for another reason: if I need 12 cups of flour, how many bags of flour do I need to buy? They are sold per kg here. Do they sell flour by volume in the US?
You’re in Europe. If you’re cooking an American or British recipe, you’ll have to convert things. Same as you would if you were cooking a recipe that’s using other measures, though since those aren’t likely to be in European languages at all, unless they’re much older, I can’t imagine the average person trying to.
Volume is plenty helpful, as I said, because you don’t really need anything complicated to use it. A vessel with lines on it is about as simple as it gets. Hell, most recipes issuing volume measures don’t even need precise measures at all, there’s a ton of wiggle room in them.
I’m kinda weirded out that you skipped all the parts about how and why various forms of measure moved into recipes and basically repeated the same complaint, tbh.
A lot of recipes would benefit from being moved to weight rather than volume. And that’s regardless of what units are involved. But, they then become something one tier more complicated. A pound of potatoes is more precise than two medium potatoes. But precision doesn’t matter with potatoes because you aren’t going to waste half a potato to get exactly one pound.
Flour isn’t any different until you get into baking, and even then the degree of precision needed isn’t what you’d need in a chemistry lab. You can do all kinds of baking just by eyeball; using volume is just more precise, and weight another step more precise.
That’s why it doesn’t matter than flour is sold by the pound and used by volume or grams. You buy bags of flour and store them so that you have them ready. It’s a staple food. If you need to have an unusually large amount by volume, you’re going to go buy another bag, or two, or three.
If the recipe uses grams, you use a scale that has gram units. If it’s by ounces, that’s what you use. If the recipe calls for deciliters, or milliliters, the same just as it would be by cup. Conversions are just part of cooking. It always has been.
Maybe, if you can get every country in the world to start translating their recipes into a standardized recipe language, you could eventually get to where conversion isn’t part of it. But it wouldn’t be as simple as just doing everything by weight. There’s too many ingredients like potatoes or eggs where the unit is the item itself. The waste involved would be absurd.
Seriously, it isn’t rocket science, it isn’t a chem lab. Grab a conversion chart, have some fun.
I was joking, I read your comment, there’s just not much substance in it, only about a cup. You got a little bit carried away there. You seem to love cooking and celebrate the whole process. Good for you. But not everyone has the luxury to spend eons to decipher inefficiently written recipes and convert ancient hieroglyphics into actually useful measurements. Converting all the measurements to what is actually useful is an unnecessary (mild) annoyance. It doesn’t make the food better, it just makes the whole cooking process less enjoyable.
Legit, if that’s confusing to you, maybe take a step back and take a formal cooking class.
It doesn’t matter what system you use, a unit of volume is a unit of volume. Doesn’t matter what’s in it, it’s in a container that holds that volume of any given thing. If that thing is all air or water, or other liquids, the thing being measured will have less gaps in that volume, but that’s irrelevant because recipes using units of volume take that into account.
If a recipe calls for a litre of flour, would you still be confused?
Now, if you’re just objecting to volume measures instead of weight, that’s a different issue as well, but equally irrelevant because the recipe will still be calibrated for that weight, so if you don’t have a scale, you’re equally screwed.
People seem to forget that it’s a fairly recent thing to have any accurate measures in recipes at all. And even more recent that a home cook is going to have access to accurate scales. It’s one of the things food historians have to deal with. You go back past the 1900s and good luck finding anything standardized at all. I used to have my grandmother’s collection of measuring spoons that had accumulated in her family. Even the ones from the result early 1900s weren’t exactly identical in volume when tested against each other
The recipe books from England during that era weren’t better than US ones. Nor were the French recipes.
Measuring by volume came well before weights in cookbooks across all Europe and the americas.
So, if that’s actually confusing for you, that cups/liters/whatever is a container full of the ingredient, you must be a very new cook indeed. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very simple concept
To be honest, yes, that would be weird to a European. Flour is usually measured in weight and not volume. Volume is usually used for liquids only over here. And volume is not very helpful for another reason: if I need 12 cups of flour, how many bags of flour do I need to buy? They are sold per kg here. Do they sell flour by volume in the US?
You’re in Europe. If you’re cooking an American or British recipe, you’ll have to convert things. Same as you would if you were cooking a recipe that’s using other measures, though since those aren’t likely to be in European languages at all, unless they’re much older, I can’t imagine the average person trying to.
Volume is plenty helpful, as I said, because you don’t really need anything complicated to use it. A vessel with lines on it is about as simple as it gets. Hell, most recipes issuing volume measures don’t even need precise measures at all, there’s a ton of wiggle room in them.
I’m kinda weirded out that you skipped all the parts about how and why various forms of measure moved into recipes and basically repeated the same complaint, tbh.
A lot of recipes would benefit from being moved to weight rather than volume. And that’s regardless of what units are involved. But, they then become something one tier more complicated. A pound of potatoes is more precise than two medium potatoes. But precision doesn’t matter with potatoes because you aren’t going to waste half a potato to get exactly one pound.
Flour isn’t any different until you get into baking, and even then the degree of precision needed isn’t what you’d need in a chemistry lab. You can do all kinds of baking just by eyeball; using volume is just more precise, and weight another step more precise.
That’s why it doesn’t matter than flour is sold by the pound and used by volume or grams. You buy bags of flour and store them so that you have them ready. It’s a staple food. If you need to have an unusually large amount by volume, you’re going to go buy another bag, or two, or three.
If the recipe uses grams, you use a scale that has gram units. If it’s by ounces, that’s what you use. If the recipe calls for deciliters, or milliliters, the same just as it would be by cup. Conversions are just part of cooking. It always has been.
Maybe, if you can get every country in the world to start translating their recipes into a standardized recipe language, you could eventually get to where conversion isn’t part of it. But it wouldn’t be as simple as just doing everything by weight. There’s too many ingredients like potatoes or eggs where the unit is the item itself. The waste involved would be absurd.
Seriously, it isn’t rocket science, it isn’t a chem lab. Grab a conversion chart, have some fun.
Tl;dr
Tl;dr is read the fucking comment, your poor attention span that can’t manage what would be a half sheet of paper is not my problem
I was joking, I read your comment, there’s just not much substance in it, only about a cup. You got a little bit carried away there. You seem to love cooking and celebrate the whole process. Good for you. But not everyone has the luxury to spend eons to decipher inefficiently written recipes and convert ancient hieroglyphics into actually useful measurements. Converting all the measurements to what is actually useful is an unnecessary (mild) annoyance. It doesn’t make the food better, it just makes the whole cooking process less enjoyable.
Ffs, ancient hieroglyphics? These units of measure are less than 200 years old