Measurements
-
Before you read this: this may sound slightly nerdy, but I'm trying to understand how things work, and sometimes I'm baffled about how such a simple difference like the way things can be measures can make such a difference.
When I'm cooking I usually prefer to use measurements in grams and millilitres - for me they are are so much easier to calculate and rescale. However, for stuff like flour and sugar I've gotten so used to measurements in cups that I could probably convert units in my sleep. But now I face a different kind of problem: non-powdery kind of ingredients.
I'm tempted to make this Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumble from Smitten Kitchen, I just have one problem - how much are 1 quart strawberries and 1 1/2 cup rhubarb? You see, I can easily find out that 1 quart equals 1.36 liters - but how does that translate into strawberries? Around here, strawberries are sold per gram, usually in 500 g boxes, but it really depends on the size of the strawberries how full such a box ends up to be.
And 1 1/2 cups rhubarb - well, you wouldn't take a knife and a cup to a supermarket and then cut a rhubarb into pieces to measure it, would you? I suppose you just estimate, and if you're bad at it you'll always have leftovers, or not enough? And if you'd finely chop the rhubarb, you'd get to use more of it, right?
PS: My physicist boyfriend just argued that fruit contains so much water that their weight in grams should roughly equal their volume in millilitres, and that we should therefore buy 1 kg strawberries and 350 g rhubarb - which sounds like an awful lot of strawberries relating to rhubarb. Also, this assumes that the strawberries and the rhubarb are measured as liquid, i.e. puréed - but they're not, right? So if I take the bubbles of air in a box of strawberries into account that would leave me with... 500 g strawberries? And maybe 200 g or 300 g rhubarb? -
For me, a dish like this is so different from baking a cake - where precise measurements really matter. I would guess that you could use a lot more - and somewhat less - and still have a very respectable crumble. Really, this dish is two separate layers, and so it likely doesn't matter. But I was similarly annoyed this afternoon when a soup recipe asked for one potato, no size indicated. Maybe this is where cooking is more of an art, and less of a science.
-
This is the bane of North American cooking - volume instead of weight. It's nice to see some cookbook authors are trying to add weights, but it's still woefully lacking.
I would suggest taking a 1 litre container and putting strawberries into it loosely to approximate a quart basket of strawberries (in North America they are sold in pint and quart baskets). A quart in volume is actually just short of a litre in volume (0.95 approximately). You could then get a rough weight for future cooking.
1 1/2 cups of rhubarb is about 350 ml in volume. I would cut it roughly into pieces about 2 cm long and measure the volume then. This is probably one or two large stalks (I don't know how large your local rhubarb grows).
I'm working on a new ingredients feature (still working on it!) for Cookbooker which will allow everyone to add weights as well as volumes for any recipe on the site. It would be great to build up a database of idea measurements for recipes, though I presume there would still be some disagreement about what exactly 'one potato' would be... -
@LL, you are absolutely right that precise measurements often don't matter. I made a rhubarb crumble recently, though, that turned out much too soggy; but maybe that was because no cornstarch or flour was added to take up the liquid?
Re: poato - when nothing is mentioned I suppose it should be a medium-sized one. What did you do and how did it turn out?
@Andrew, thank you for the information!
> in North America they are sold in pint and quart baskets
I suppose that makes sense, and makes things a lot easier. Do they have scales, just in case someone would want to know the weight? I'm trying to imagine how it would be the other way around.
And I'm very curious about that new feature - does that mean that we'll be entering recipes, or only ingredients?
Eventually, we bought 500 g of strawberries, had to throw about 100-150g away, and a few rhubarb stalks (I don't think we weighed or even counted them), and it turned out perfectly. See the results here. -
It sounds like your crumble was awesome (and how do I embed a link like that, anyhow?). Although I've always used our stupid cups, I recently baked something where I weighed the dry ingredients, and it was so much easier!
-
@friederike - glad it worked out well! There are always scales in supermarkets here, but they are usually only roughly accurate. Many fruits and vegetables are sold by weight if you are buying them loose, but it's quite common for berries to be sold in containers priced by container.
For the new feature, there will be space to enter the ingredients, to help in searching and in reviewing a recipe before you decide to make it or not. There won't be anywhere to publicly put the recipe instructions as that's getting too close to reproducing the recipe itself (something which we will not do), but there will be a private notes section where you could put in instructions for yourself. -
@LL
easy: (a href="url")text(/a) with triangular brackets like < instead of the round ones. Italics is (i)italics(/i) or (em)emphasis(/em), bold is (b)bold(/b) or (strong)text(/strong), (u)underline(/u) all with triangular brackets. You can also nest tags, i.e. (em)(a href="url")text(/a)(/em) to get a link in italics. Just remember to always close a tag using '/' + the same code as the opening tag, and when nesting first close the tag you used the latest - basically like one of those Russian dolls. (i), (b) and (u) is HTML, (em) and (strong) is XHTML.
@andrew
Sounds great! I was anticipating that we could do something similar with tags, but that would of course be without quantities... By the way, when searching for recipes, would it be possible to mark books we own in a way, with a checkmark or a colour or something similar?
And actually, I got used to using cups (and especially spoons!) during the last year or so. Having cup measurement spoons and a converting table on a magnet helped a lot! -
This is why I have so few American cookbooks! Even when they call for a cup of something, it's an American cup. The Brits are gradually going metric, but at least they never specify berries by the quart.
Interestingly, although the French invented metrics, their recipes (the ones I've read ayway) include some mysterious measurements. -
@friederike: sorry for the delay in replying to this; missed your question. In the search results you should see a little book icon instead of a green 'plus' icon for any books you own. However, I must admit that the search results display as a whole is rather badly done. It works, but it's less than ideal. It is high on my list of things to fix, and I think it would be smarter to have a results page which grouped results from your bookshelf, from cookbooks and recipes in a more intuitive way.
I'll be launching the new recipe features very soon; just squashing a couple of bugs and then I'll let everyone know. -
@ Oh, actually I think the green plus icon is quite nice! But that only applies to book search results, not recipe search results. What I actuall meant is that that same plus icon/book icon system is applied to the recipe search results as well.
Looking forward to the new features! -
I've borrowed Curtis Stone's latest book 'What's for Dinner' from my local library and while the recipes include weight in grams, some ingredients are stated as 'cups'. Nowhere in the book can I find reference to whether this is an American cup. I initially assumed he meant an Australian cup or 250ml but then he is living in the US and probably writing for the US market so perhaps it is an American cup? I can't tell...and his Coles recipes also use cup measures so now I am really baffled :(
-
The question is not where is Stone living but where was the book published. I think he almost certainly means an Australian cup if other ingredients are given in grams, something quite unknown in the US.
FYI, an Australian cup is 250ml, in the UK it is sometimes 284ml (half a British pint), in Canada it's 227ml (being 8 imperial fluid ounces) and the true American cup is half a US pint, or 236.59ml. -
Thanks Bunyip. Yes, I'm aware of the different cup measures for US/UK/Aus.
What I am not understanding in Stone's book is how/why quantities are given in 'cups' and 'grams' for the Australian (Ebury Press) edition and 'cups' and 'ounces' for the US (Ballantine) edition. I am confused as to how the same recipe can use the same 'cup' quantities in both editions...?
For example, below is a sample of the ingredients list for 'Turkey Meatballs with Marinara Sauce':
AUS edition:
1½ cups cubed (1.5 cm) crustless Italian or French bread (about 60g)
2/3 cup of reduced-fat milk
½ cup finely chopped eschalots
US edition:
1½ cups cubed (3/4 inch) crustless Italian or French bread (about 2 ounces)
2/3 cup of reduced-fat (2%) milk
½ cup finely chopped shallots
So, while the size and weight of the bread cubes have been converted between the two editions, the 'cup' measures have not. I can only assume that in all recipes he means an American cup measure as I do believe his books and cookware etc. are aimed at the US market (http://www.curtisstone.com/Kitchen-Products/Prep/Made-to-Measure-Cups.aspx)
-
I think you give the publishers too much credit for precision. In a recipe like that, what's 13.41ml between friends? Or 8.94ml in this case.
You may be right about the books being originally written for the US market, as no Oz cookbook would specify bread by volume in the first instance. Whatever, the main consideration is whether the recipe works. If the mixture's too sloppy because there's an extra teaspoon and a half of milk (I can hear the editor thinking) add another couple of bread cubes.
On reflection, I bet there isn't an editor thinking anything. They'll run the text through some program that converts weights and measures and of course it wouldn't see any need to interfere with "cup". -
I agree that the editors do not really think about the measurements. How many times have I seen a recipe call for 3 tsp of something -- rather than 1 Tbs, or 4 Tbs rather than 1/4 C. It seems as if recipes are re-scaled, converted, etc, with very little thought.
But it does fascinate me that there are such regional differences in measurements. I've read a bit about the history of the 1C measurement, I think in the US it involved Fanny Farmer -- but there must have been others, in different countries/regions, trying to standardize recipes. I'm guessing that recipe units were standardized in different regions, but that its unfortunate that the same name of the measuring unit (e.g. cup) was used. Anybody know about this? -
I don't know if this answers the questions, but lots of old recipes use tea cup, coffee cup, wine glass as a measure.
A further complication of this whole measuring business is the imprecise nature of many measures. For example a cup of walnuts, chopped is not the same as a cup of chopped walnuts. Another situation which demonstrates that weight is a more accurate measure... -
All it needs is for the author or publisher to state which measures he/she is using. Most cookbooks do this and it is beyond me why Curtis Stone or his publisher can't do the same...
-
It was indeed Fanny Farmer back in the 1890s. She wasn't a trained cook herself and she wanted people with little training and limited equipment to have certainty that the recipes would turn out the same every time. Her system caught on, but was never used outside the US. Kateq points out the fundamental flaw. The history of culinary measurements is set out in Consider the Fork and very interesting it is too.
The French may have invented metric measures, but their recipes have some pretty weird terms like coffee spoons. If you're baking you really do have to do it by weight, but let's face it, a lot of modern writers like Nigel Slater expect you to use your own best judgement about things like "large, small, generous pinch, good handful" when making things where precision is not essential. This is hard for newbie cooks, but there's no substitute for experience.
As for Curtis Stone, I do have one of his books and I will refrain from comment for fear of appearing an elitist snob... -
Another issue with volume measurements, I find, is that they can make it harder to reduce a recipe. More often than not I'm cooking just for myself so I need to cut most recipes down to 1 or 2 helpings; as a result I recently found myself having to work out what 1/3 of 1/4 cup of olives should be. Admittedly this was not too difficult (I just measured the 1/4 cup of olives, then put 2 out of 3 back in the jar) but a weight in grams would have been easier to divide, plus this method doesn't work for ingredients like chopped nuts.
Search Discussions
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Categories
- All Discussions228
- Cookbooks100
- Building Cookbooker44
- Advice28
- Challenges29
- Websites8
- Cooking19