Cups vs. Litres
October 12th, 2007
It’s funny - as I’ve been working through recipes for the cookbook and for our demonstrations, I’ve come up against the problems we had in our early days with using cups as measures. We only use litres and grams for production here, and now I remember why!
The “imperial” or UK pint is 20 ounces. A US pint is 16 ounces. A UK cup is 10 ounces, and a US cup is 8 ounces. The problem is that here in Ireland, depending on the manufacturer of the measuring cup, it might be US or UK. That’s a 20% difference in volume!
We had so many recipes come out wrong in the early days. We knew the standard here was imperial, so we did our calculations. What we didn’t expect was that we were sometimes using US measuring cups. We couldn’t understand how recipes could come out so differently, until we finally figured it out.
I wonder how many people out there have been disappointed with the results of recipes that might be US measures and they have a UK measuring cup, or vice versa.
So… I’m going metric only in the cookbook, with a conversion page. Believe me, what ever you might think of metric, it’s far safer!
Technorati tags: measure, recipe, Imperial, metric, conversion
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October 13th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Hell’s teeth! There are Imperial cups?
That at least gives me the glimmerings of a retrospective excuse for some of the horrible things to eat I’ve made using cup recipes.
October 18th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I have been through this circle *erk, so I know your pain.
I eventually had to buy a scale and just measure everything!
October 19th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Weighing certainly is the best way, unless the quantities are small enough…
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I just saw this posting, and was wondering if the recipes on your blog that use cup measurements are UK or US cups? For instance, the Bailey’s Ice Cream — I made it a few days ago using 8-oz cups (I never knew there was a difference) and it was delicious, but now I’m curious about whether I followed the recipe properly or not!
November 4th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
You see the problem? What makes it worse is that we started with US measures, so that’s what we stuck with, even though that makes little sense here in Ireland. That’s why it’s metric now! Anyway, if it tasted good, well then, that’s the ultimate measure!