No Stupid Questions

Apparently the French sent over a metric system for the Americans to use, but the ship was lost.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system

I've seen numerous sources for this.

Watch some cooking shows on YouTube where they cook from two hundred year old cookbooks. Weighing stuff is a modern thing. All the “ye olde recipes” from Europe and the colonies were done in cups, spoons, and some other volume measurements we don’t use anymore like “jills”. (If they even bother to specify meaurements.)

The imperial system is a nightmare. A lot of us hate it and agree that metric is far easier. I grew up with the imperial system and still don't know the conversions between quarts, pints, ounces, and cups. Blame the French and British, we got it from them!

I'm currently calorie counting in order to lose weight and I weigh everything in grams because it's easier.

"Do Americans not own scales or something?"

For a good long while, no they didn't. For a large fraction of American history a typical home kitchen had no bespoke measuring equipment at all; but tea cups, tea spoons and table spoons were typically available and made to pretty similar sizes, plus if you always used the same ones the proportions would be roughly the same, so meh.

A lot of traditional recipes were written this way, and it has remained so by tradition. A system of inexpensive, easy to manufacture measuring cups and spoons became standard equipment by the mid-20th century, and hasn't changed to this day because it works just fine.

The US government is in the habit of publishing recipes with a deliberately low minimum equipment list. The United States Department of Agriculture for example conducts extensive testing on home canning recipes and methods, and deliberately writes their recipes to be used in poorly equipped kitchens, because the kind of folks who rely on putting up home grown vegetables for the winter don't tend to spend a lot of money on Sharper Image kitchen gadgetry. Flipping through my copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, I find about a third of recipes could be made using nothing but a mason jar or two as your only measuring tool, as most mason jars (excluding the deliberately decorative ones) have graduation marks in cups, ounces and milliliters molded into them.

Most Americans I know don’t even have a scale in their kitchen!

I (an American) always wonder what a cup of spinach is. Like I can really pack it into a cup or not and there is a huge difference.

Because it's quicker to just use a measuring cup than by weighing it out every time, I assume.

I do have a scale, but I mostly use it when portioning out a big chub of ground turkey or beef.

Volumetric measurements, like the imperial system, is largely in place due to tradition.

But no, most people do not own good food scales. They aren't pricey (I think mine was $25), but they are very uncommon. I don't think I've ever seen one in a store.

Cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons in this context are standardized units of measure. It is very common to find at least one set of measuring cups and spoons in a US kitchen. Scales are uncommon.

I use both. For flour, scales are far, far superior. For sugar, it does not really seem to matter. For small amounts, I suspect my tea/tablespoons might be more accurate than my scale...

Not that accuracy matters that much in a recipe using eggs. Chickens aren't necessarily known for precision...

Do Americans not own scales or something?

I do not own a kitchen scale. Outside of baking, volume works well enough.

I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.

I'm not American but this is likely due to tradition. Recipe measures it in cups, you follow recipe, you get used to cups, then when writing your own recipe down you do it by cups.

As an American who has recently learned to love his scale, I'm with you 100%. With that being said, no, many Americans do not have kitchen scales.

I'm always confused by their insistence to use fluid ounces.

An ounce is fine it's a measurement of mass. But how can you measure liquids by mass, when really what you mean is displacement, its like saying fluid kilograms, it's not a thing, it makes no sense.

I know Americans probably know what it means but everybody else doesn't have a clue. If you have 250 fluid oz of something is that like a bucket or a single droplet? Or is it a small booting lake, I have no idea at all.

I'm with you but I get it that sometimes it's convenient. My wife likes what we call "cup recipes" in baking where everything is measured in cups/glasses (this was a new thing couple of years ago where I live). It's very fast and convenient.

But yes, it gets out of hand. I mean "a cup of celery"? ... How? Why?

American here but I do a lot of baking, I do own a scale and prefer to weigh ingredients because I'm amazed at the different quantities of flour I can get from cup to cup depending how packed the flour is or how I scoop it.

Shutout to the one dude who downvoted literally every comment lol I hope you enjoyed it

So many in the comments are talking about volume being more convenient but I find it so much more convenient to put a bowl on a scale, tare it, measure, and set it aside. Sure that’s more steps than using a cup, but when I have to fumble with a cup, a 1/3rd cup, a teaspoon, a 1/2 teaspoon and a tablespoon, all for a single recipe, especially one where dry and wet ingredients are being measured, a pain in the ass. So many little dishes that I may or may not need to rinse and dry between ingredients that call for the same measurement.

For the record I’m an American. I will sometimes ditch a recipe when I see it calls for volumetric measurements.

It really depends what sort of recipes you're making, but for cooking very loose approximations are often fine.

I often have to convert to weight/mass in order to find out how much of an ingredient to buy. I have no idea how many cups an eggplant is. But once I get it home the recipe might as well say "however much eggplant you have."

If I'm truly off, I will typically scale up the recipe adjusting for the extra meat or vegetable content. I'll more or less assume that 1lb of meat is interchangeable with 1lb of veggies. That's not quite true, in particular with salt.

Your mileage may vary though. Some recipes and ingredients are much more sensitive to deviations.

weren't many digital scales out on the prairie when the settlers were looking to make bread

Because it's often easier to measure things by volume, and most cooking dishes do not need precise measurements. It sucks for baking dishes, but for anything that doesn't need to be precise I find it way more convenient to grab a volume measurement than a scale

Eh, it's what I grew up with...

3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon (14.787ml)
1 tablespoon = .5 ounces
8 ounces = 1 cup (236.588ml)
1 cup = .5 pints
1 pint = .5 quarts (473.176ml)
1 quart = .25 gallons

The weird thing is, above 20 ounces, sodas are sold in metric. 1L, 2L, 3L. So is alcohol, 750ml.

Milk and juice are sold in ounces, pints, quarts and gallons.

the truth is americans kind of just do things arbitrarily.

History.

Why do Brits use Stone for weight of people? Same answer.

I switched to weighing everything a few years ago and I when I moved I didn't have to have a set of spoons, dry cups, wet cups. I just use the scale.