One of the best things about the slow return to normality l is that I can once again have food cooked for me by a professional, and eat it in a restaurant. I will confess that I do not enjoy cooking. However, I prefer this form of suffering to the misery of a substandard and lukewarm meal delivered to my front door an hour late by someone who probably fell off their bike or moped en route.
When I do cook, I tend not to follow recipes. I put things that I think go together and it usually turns out somewhere between passable and good.
Back when the UK was switching to metric units in the 60s and 70s, one of the common arguments against transition was that cooking in metric would be "strange, and make things taste different". Unsurprisingly, this argument does not hold, because cooking is about proportions. It therefore follows that it does not matter whether recipes use metric or imperial - as long as the proportions are the same.
Although this blog favours the use of metric units, I will not argue that using imperial units are inherently worse for cooking. It is true that they are less precise (fractions of an ounce are less precise than grams, for example), but precision is not biggest issue with using imperial recipes.
The key complication is clarity. More specifically, actually using the right measurements. We live in the digital age. An age where information is freely, readily and instantaneously available. If you want to find a recipe, it is at your fingertips. All of this is very positive, but given the ubiquity of American websites, it inevitably means that a number of recipes will be specified using US customary units.
For dry measurements, US customary and imperial measurements are aligned. This is not the case for liquid measurements. This adds an extra layer of possible confusion. It becomes very easy for someone in the UK to read an American recipe, and add 3 (imperial) pints of water to a dish, rather than 3 (US) pints - a difference of 285 ml. The table below illustrates the differences between the imperial system and US system for liquid measurements.
| Unit of Measurement | Imperial System | Metric Equivalent | US System | Metric Equivalent |
|---|
| 1 ounce | 1 (fluid) oz. | 28.41 ml | 1 (fluid) oz. | 29.57 ml |
| 1 gill | 5 (fluid) oz. | 142.07 ml | Not commonly used | |
| 1 cup | n/a | n/a | 8 (fluid) oz. | 236.59 ml |
| 1 pint | 20 (fluid) oz. | 568.26 ml | 16 (fluid) oz. | 473.18 ml |
| 1 quart | 40 (fluid) oz. | 1.137 L | 32 (fluid) oz. | 946.36 ml |
| 1 gallon | 160 (fluid) oz. | 4.546 L | 128 (fluid) oz. | 3.785 L |
The unnecessary complications of the imperial and US customary systems measurements are not just limited to differences between their liquid measurements which share the same name. In both systems, dry measures have the same names as liquid measures, but are entirely different units. The example of this is the (fluid) ounce, which is different to the (avoirdupois) ounce. The former measures volume whilst the latter mass, but they are both ounces.
The metric system is designed to be universal. A kilogram is a kilogram. A litre is a litre. These do not vary based on the country in which one finds oneself, and there is only ever one form of any unit. In addition to the reduced likelihood of confusion between units of the same name, using metric units has a number of practical benefits. I have already already mentioned precision, which is a significant benefit. Being decimal makes also metric recipes much easier to scale up or down depending on the intended serving size. However, the most understated benefit of cooking using metric units is never having to guess what a wretched cup is.
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