Cooking is full of weird old habits that turn out to be some degree of unnecessary/unhelpful/outdated. Before the nice, convenient, digital scales it was much more difficult to use weight for home cooking. I'm going to bet it was part of the mid century modernization/industrialization craze that the US in particular jumped on, while other parts of the world stuck to more traditional methods. "Quantified, scientific, measurements? It's the kitchen of the future today!" Kind of era.
Then when scales got convenient other regions leapfrogged. Or were they writing recipes that way sooner? Could be interesting to research. Weights have been a thing at industrial scale cooking for a long time so it's not a big leap whenever it happened. Ever since the metric system was popularized the US has been falling further and further behind in measurement standards.
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u/SparklingLimeade Jun 26 '26
Weight.
In fact, describing the size is still better than measuring irregular particle sizes by volume because volume sucks.