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I'm a metric user : first in UK (after we converted from imperial pounds and ounces to kilos and litres) and in Oz .. where we have a combination of cups and metric. a UK tablespoon is 15 mls, an Australian tablespoon is 20mls - how's that for a confusion .. makes a difference too!! Yes we can avail ourselves of measuring gadgets with both mls and ozs labelled .. but that doesn't overcome the UK/AUs tablespoon issue. Our cup if 250ml, the US cup is 240 ml...

So many variations given both USA and Australia  were colonised by folks from UK!! Culture wars??

Originally Posted by: debkellie

I'm a metric user : first in UK (after we converted from imperial pounds and ounces to kilos and litres) and in Oz .. where we have a combination of cups and metric. a UK tablespoon is 15 mls, an Australian tablespoon is 20mls - how sthat for a confusion .. makes a difference too!! Yes we can avail ourselves of measuring gadgets with both mls and ozs labelled .. but that deosn't overcome the UK/AUs tablespoon issue. Our cup if 250ml, the US cup is 240 ml...

So many variations given both USA and Australia  were colonised by folks from UK!! Culture wars??

Okay... so it gets even stranger

I am a metric militant especially when working with baker's percentages as the metric system makes conversion trivial indeed baker's percentages are almost obsolete. Switching between different bases base 14, base 16, base 20, etc no can't be doing with that! When I was a software engineer I avoided using binary, octal, hexadecimal if I could get away with it.

I am even more a weight warrior as using weights (and yup I weigh water) makes for reproducability. Even if cooking ratehr than baking. It is a habit and not one I am prepared to give up for volume measures or worse eyeballing.

Yes metricated recipes do still include various spoon measures. Experienced this today when making a pork terrine as the author called for 100ml of white wine but 3 tablespoons of armagac. Weirdly the author is a French chef! Bizaarely the ingredients for the watercress soup I made yesterday called for 180g of watercress, 1 potato, and 1 onion! How large a potato? How big the onion?

I think the continued use of spoon measures in the UK (and maybe Europe too) is caused by digital scales not being sufficiently precise. Many are ±1 gram. In addition to my domestic digital scales I use a precision scale which will go to ±0.1g however my current device does not respond below 1 gram. (An earlier one started at 0.1g.)

And yes complete contrarily we in the UK still measure distances in Imperial. Although we have essentially given up on chains and furlongs. Younger generations are more adept with mertic distances. For older generations anything above 500 metres and we revert to miles and yards. Spirits are still fispense in gills.

I am in Australia. We are quite adept at using both metric weights and volume measurements. I prefer volume in cooking except when baking. Recipes tend to mix both, so I will often have measurement cups and scales on the counter at the same time. I generally don't use measuring spoons - I've been cooking long enough to wing it. But my measuring spoons have both US Tablespoon and AU Tablespoon.

I don't speak oz/lbs and have to convert every time. I don't speak Americanisations such as "sticks of butter". I can never remember what a stick is and avoid recipes that use them.

Confusingly, I often think in inches for small measurements - 2 inches is more intuitive to me than 5 cms, for some reason. Longer distances are in metres and kilometers.

One other small point - cookbooks that specify a combination of oz/lb, metric measures and volume measures need to be checked before you trust the book, especially as Australia has a different cup size and Tablespon size. I have a baking book where the volume measurements are way off, even allowing for the different cup sizes.

Since I use Japanese language cookbooks and sources for half of my cooking, I have a Japanese cup as well as American ones.  200 ml equals 1 Japanese cup.  They also use term kosage which means tsp and osage which means 1 T.  Distsnce there are all metric.  

Originally Posted by: RogerP

I don't find anything odd in using teaspoons and tablespoons alongside metric measurements - it's quick and intuitive to grab a spoon, I'd never thought of measuring a small quantity of liquid with a digital scale.

I agree, this makes most sense to me. Especially if you're talking about adding small quantities of liquids or spices into an existing pot that's bubbling away on the stove: it's easier to do this with spoon measures than with ml/g. Generally I'd say that we use spoon measures for liquids/powdery things that can be easily measured with spoons, but once you start getting over a certain quantity, or you're dealing with "chunky" ingredients then switch to g/ml.

As a professional scientist (British) who worked in metric for over 40 years but originally learned to cook in Imperial... I consider I'm pretty good with both!  As has already been said, the basic units - grams and kilograms are straightforward especially when you bear in mind that Britis and Europeans weigh ingredients on kitchen scales mostly 

personally I have a set of good digital scales and I use them for measuring virtually all ingredients, including water and watery liquids, since for kitchen purpose 1ml water = 1 gram water  I find the digits much easier to read than the markings on a jug  

of course we use spoons and cups, as others have said - I actually possess a set of double ended measuring spoons, metric at one end and Imperial at the other, the difference is slight but just about perceptible  

The thing is to stick to one system within a recipe, and also not to try to convert with excessive accuracy - my double ended spoons show that while there is a difference, you probably won't taste the difference between a single 15ml spoon of sugar and a half ounce spoon of sugar (it might make a difference in some older recipes that use multiple spoonfuls of an ingredient, but probably not with most of them). Similarly the 10ml difference between my metric 250ml cup measure and yours which is roughly 240ml, is probably within the range of operator error - how tightly packed etc  

 It makes me smile when I see blog recipes where US measures have been converted to exactly 71ml or 93g  of course, the arithmetic is correct but we generally work to the nearest 10 or 25, depending on scale  It's sometimes good to do the exact conversion before rounding as a sanity check, especially if you need to maintain the proportions of dry ingredients to eggs or something like that  

As the great Peg Bracken said, you are probably not splitting the atom for dinner  

Wondering whether one of the writers from Saturday Night Live is participating/reading this thread as there was a sketch in the 28th October 2023 episode on this very tangled topic. Indeed there were several lines in the dialogue that could have been lifted straight off this thread.

PS: I am refering to the Washington Dream sketch. https://www.independent....s-measures-b2438663.html

Originally Posted by: Fyretigger

It’s funny you should mention that. I’ve recently seen recipes that will call for cup fractions of one ingredient while calling for tablespoons of a similar consistency ingredient that totals to the same cup fraction. For example, calling for 1/4 cup flour and 4 tablespoons of sugar. I understand when you have the measure neatly works with the ingredient, like tablespoons for butter when that is marked on the stick wrapper, or teaspoons for spices when the spoon likely fits into the jar. But some I’ve seen are pretty random.

I agree with you - I meant either Imperial or metric when I wrote sticking to one system, but  the arbitrariness of some listed measures is weird. Sometimes it's a good indication that you are getting a description of what the author actually does but sometimes it feels like carelessness.  It I too have seen 4TBS where I'd write a 1/4 cup or 60ml, in a recipe that uses more logical measures for the rest  

We find tablespoons of butter a very odd measure - we have bought butter and other solid fats in h half pound or more recently 250 gram blocks for so long, and it's easy to cut 2oz from a half pound block (slightly less easy to cut 50 g from 250g) and some have approximate weights marked on the wrapper. I wish I had a cookie for every Brit to whom I've explained that a US stick of butter is 4oz not 8oz. 

My personal sticking point is the cup measure of grated cheese in US recipes - it's so approximate. Like butter, I'll have generally bought block cheese by weight, so for most purposes given a weight I can easily estimate how much to cut off and grate. If I have bought ready grated cheese, that too will be sold by weight, so I'll either weigh it out or estimate how much of the package to use

Someone Tweeted a recipe for latkes - very precise, 1/4 tsp of this, 1/2 tsp of that, so many eggs - then 4 potatoes, grated. No clue as to how big the potatoes should be or the variety which might help, Yukon Gold being I thing bigger than most U.K. varieties

“ It makes me smile when I see blog recipes where US measures have been converted to exactly 71ml or 93g of course, the arithmetic is correct but we generally work to the nearest 10 or 25, depending on scale It's sometimes good to do the exact conversion before rounding as a sanity check, especially if you need to maintain the proportions of dry ingredients to eggs or something like that “ It makes me crazy— recently I made a plum tart where the dry ingredients were in precise grams like ‘63’ and even the egg in the crust was in grams! Now that is ridiculous. I can’t remember the source of the recipe but I’m thinking it was US.

I didn't want to disparage the source w/o confirming: it was Bouchon Bakery, Thomas Keller or one of his pastry chefs. It is in Imperial also, so I think this is an example of taking metric conversion to absurdity.

Originally Posted by: StokeySue

Someone Tweeted a recipe for latkes - very precise, 1/4 tsp of this, 1/2 tsp of that, so many eggs - then 4 potatoes, grated. No clue as to how big the potatoes should be or the variety which might help, Yukon Gold being I thing bigger than most U.K. varieties

Was reading about this a few years ago and apparently it's a convention not to put specific measurements for imprecise ingredients like onions, potatoes, carrots etc because if a recipe called for say 250g of potato and the cook only had 210g they probably wouldn't make the recipe or if they had 273g they'd cut 23g off and throw it away. Reality is for those ingredients a bit more or less doesn't matter, whereas salt/chilli etc would. I've noticed Ottolenghi amongst others saying "3 potatoes or about 400g"  which in my view is a step in the right direction.

Originally Posted by: Indio32

Was reading about this a few years ago and apparently it's a convention not to put specific measurements for imprecise ingredients like onions, potatoes, carrots etc because if a recipe called for say 250g of potato and the cook only had 210g they probably wouldn't make the recipe or if they had 273g they'd cut 23g off and throw it away. Reality is for those ingredients a bit more or less doesn't matter, whereas salt/chilli etc would. I've noticed Ottolenghi amongst others saying "3 potatoes or about 400g"  which in my view is a step in the right direction.

I can sort of see that when it's a case of adding one onion to a stew, but when you are making a 2-egg quantity of latkes more information would be helpful, pretty much essential to me - it was an American recipe and we have different potato varieties, and different ways of grading them 

There are ways round - Sabrina Ghayour, for example, is very good at giving gram or ml amounts but making it clear that she's only giving them as a guide to how big a handful she means and Ina Garten will give amounts such as 3 carrots, 2 cups when chopped (I'm making it up, maybe not realistic) but I've heard her say if after you've chopped 2 it looks like the right volume, stop, but the heap looks a bit small after 3, add another  That makes sense to me even as someone who doesn't really use cup measure  - people who use them routinely can often just estimate the pile of chopped veg near enough to decide whether to chop another  

Originally Posted by: RogerP

I'm in the UK and don't usually find it a problem to use whatever system is on the page - metric, imperial or cups - although I suspect most home cooks here don't have a set of cups to use. I don't find anything odd in using teaspoons and tablespoons alongside metric measurements - it's quick and intuitive to grab a spoon, I'd never thought of measuring a small quantity of liquid with a digital scale. But overall, when I'm cooking, I'm seeing a recipe as a suggestion or a guide, not as a set of precise instructions that must be faithfully followed. I might adjust things based on what is available in the kitchen that day or my taste, so I'm not worried about being a few grams off. That's part of the pleasure of cooking.

I subscribe to these words. Here in Spain we use metric, but I have books from other countries like most people here, so I find recipes too in metric, imperial or cups, yes and I am neither very worried about being super precise.