Why do Americans measure everything in cups? - eviltoast

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?

        • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          You do know that metric measures both volume and weight, right? A cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram.

          • ccunning@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            You do know that only water weighs on gram per ml, right?

            This is a great fact for if you’re trying to make hot water soup from a recipe written in metric volume measures and you only have a scale.

            You might get away if you’re just trying to measure apple juice or something else that’s mostly water, but good luck making Rice Krispie treats

          • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            You can still list an ingredient using one or the other on a recipe. It may be a simple conversion, but 1:1 is still a conversion.

          • tate@lemmy.sdf.org
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            9 months ago

            And one pint of water is one pound.

            You’ve completely missed the point, which is that most of the world measures ingredients (like flour for instance, where one pint is not one pound) by weight and not by volume.

              • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                In what widely-used context is a .04318 difference significant?

                Not soup. Not bread.

                I don’t think even concrete would suffer noticeably from that difference.

          • SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Canada uses a mixture of imperial and metric, but not weights, so that’s an entirely false conclusion you’ve come to.

            And that doesn’t help much, that’s only at sea level and a certain temperature, go do some baking with those exact conversions on a mountain and your cake won’t turn out at all.