Cooking weights and measures

Common card · No. 422315

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 small apricot", 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 among home cooks in the United States and the rest of North America. 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...

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