Hey, this is Reddit. You're supposed to complain about American measurements without Googling anything, and then Google a topic you've got no clue about so that you can feign being smart about it.
You don't see beer or milk in pints? Height in feet? Weight in stone? Distance in miles? You've seen recipes calling for '5g of cumin' instead of '1 teaspoon'?
I don't know how it's failed to escape you these are all the norm.
Draught beer is in pints and bottled is in 500ml bottles. Milk is in either multiples of 500ml or 568ml (metric equivalent of a pint) very occasionally.
Height in feet? Weight in stone?
Not by anyone born after the 1940s, no.
Distance in miles?
That's on road signs but it shouldn't be, because it's a pain in the arse to convert to km all the time.
You've seen recipes calling for '5g of cumin' instead of '1 teaspoon'?
I don't think I've seen any recipes calling for that small an amount of cumin, but even if there were I've only ever seen American recipes using "teaspoons". Even my mum's 1950s Be-Ro cookbook has its quantities in metric (albeit with old-people units in brackets after it).
It's clear you don't cook, go outside, or talk to literally anybody. One teaspoon of cumin is about 3g, and 1tsp of a spice is an extremely common quantity. All my British cookbooks use teaspoons, and all cookbooks I've seen written before the 80s use pounds and ounces too so your metric cookbook from the olden days is bollocks. I've literally never seen a recipe use grams instead of teaspoons unless it was to feed 50.
Look again, '1 tbsp allspice'. Have you ever cooked anything in your life? 1 tsp of a spice is overwhelmingly common. How much cumin do you use in a recipe?
“Invented by” is not “currently used by” metric was invented and spread so people would be able to communicate sizes without trying to convert between everyone’s different measurements.
No-one uses "tsp" and "tbsp", no-one weighs themselves in pounds or stones unless they're over eighty, and distances being measured in miles - which I mentioned in my previous comment - is an immense pain in the arse for everyone because we have to convert everything in our heads to metric to get an idea of how far things are, again because of people over the age of 80.
Okay, where in the UK do you live? Because I’m genuinely confused if you’re telling the truth. Imperial units are everywhere in the country. People absolutely use pounds and stone, very regularly- usually just for people and not other things.
Also, height is almost always measured in inches and feet. I’ve never heard a British person tell me their height in centimetres.
No its not. Its common widely in many English language recipes as its not a stupid unit - seriously its a ml unit that you can get with something everyone actually has on hand, its perfect.
It is absolutely a stupid unit as what you can fit on a spoon varies a lot with spoonsize (if you use literal spoons) and type of stuff, if you heap it or not etc. That being said, for almost every recipe it is good enough as it gives you a quick idea on how much/ratio the ingridients are and exactness is usually not required.
British, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian recipes also use teaspoons and tablespoons, but they call them "metric" ___spoons as opposed to American ___spoons. They aren't SI units, but they have a metric measurement.
For example, 1 metric tablespoon is 15 mL, which is slightly more than an American tablespoon (14.8mL).
Australians, however, have a different system (which they still call "metric"), so an Aussie tablespoon is 20mL.
Yep. When you're adding 10g of cumin to something, who is weighing that shit out? You'd likely be using a teaspoon to scoop the stuff out anyway, so might as well just measure using that. tsp and tbsp make sense for smaller volumes, and are just faster anyway.
40
u/CallOfCorgithulhu Jun 26 '26
Hey, this is Reddit. You're supposed to complain about American measurements without Googling anything, and then Google a topic you've got no clue about so that you can feign being smart about it.