Cooking Weights And Measures
In recipes, quantities of ingredients may be specified by mass (commonly called weight), by volume, or by count.
For most of history, most cookbooks did not specify quantities precisely, instead talking of "a nice leg of spring lamb", a "cupful" of lentils, a piece of butter "the size of a walnut", and "sufficient" salt. Informal measurements such as a "pinch", a "drop", or a "hint" (soupçon) continue to be used from time to time. In the US, Fannie Farmer introduced the more exact specification of quantities by volume in her 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.
Today, most of the world prefers metric measurement by weight, though the preference for volume measurements continues in the United States ("almost exclusively"), North America, Australia, and Sweden. Different ingredients are measured in different ways:
Liquid ingredients are generally measured by volume worldwide.
Dry bulk ingredients, such as sugar and flour, are measured by weight in most of the world ("250 g flour"), and by volume in North America and Australia ("1/2 cup flour"). Small quantities of salt and spices are generally measured by volume worldwide, as few households have sufficiently precise balances to measure by weight.
Meats are generally specified by weight or count worldwide: "a 2 kg chicken"; "four lamb chops".
Eggs are usually specified by count. Vegetables are usually specified by weight or occasionally by count, despite the inherent imprecision of counts given the variability in the size of vegetables.
Read more about Cooking Weights And Measures: Metric Measures, Weight of Liquids, United States Measures, British (Imperial) Measures, Special Instructions
Famous quotes containing the words cooking, weights and/or measures:
“... cooking is just like religion. Rules don’t no more make a cook than sermons make a saint.”
—Anonymous, U.S. cook. As quoted in I Dream a World, by Leah Chase, who was quoted in turn by Brian Lanker (1989)
“... the prevalent custom of educating young women only for marriage, and not for the duties and responsibilities consequent on marriage—only for appendages and dead weights to husbands—of bringing them up without an occupation, profession, or employment, and thus leaving them dependent on anyone but themselves—is an enormous evil, and an unpardonable sin.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)
“thou mayst know,
That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time;”
—George Herbert (1593–1633)