mixed measuring units

Recipes say to use cups or tablespoons of butter, but we measure tablespoons and quarter cups by the ruler printed on the wrapper, and call a quarter-pound stick half a cup.

Alas, I use butter only for birthday cakes and Christmas cookies. And I don't know how many years I've been using out of that five-pound sack of sugar.

Oh, to be underweight!

Joy Beeson

Grams is a unit of weight, like pounds, not of volume, like cups. So can't really convert grams to cups. A cups is 8 ounces (this is fluid ounces). If you want to convert a cup to metric, it would be liters. 8 fl oz = 1 cup = 0.24 Liters.

I don't buy butter by the stick anymore, so forgive me if I am remembering it wrong, but I think the package is 1 pound that would make each stick 1/4 pound. 1 pound equals 16 ounces (this is different than fluid ounces used for measuring volume - I know it's confusing) So one stick of butter equals

4 ounces weight, 16/4. Just be be confusing butter usally has marks on the stick to show tablespoons, and if I remember correctly a stick is 8 tablespoons. This is a volume measurement - like cups. So you can measure butter either by weight 4 ounces or 1/4 pound or by volume 8 tablespoons. 1/4 pound = 4 oz WT = 113 grams. Sorry I don't remember the conversion from tablespoons to cups. Junior high cooking class was a long time ago. But one table spoon equals 15 ml.

This site might help.

While visiting my Irish granny, she tried to teach me some of her recipes. I am american. But imperial verses metric wasn't a problem. Her measurements where handfulls of this, pinches of that, or skoches (or how ever you spell it) and I finally though there was one I had a chance of getting right, when she called for a "cup" of something. But it was a certain teacup on the side board with the broken handle. Of course then it came time to put it in the AGA. No temperature measurements. Unfortunatly her recipes didn't survive her, at least not though me.

Then my mother had the brilliant idea to volunteer me to make chocolate chip cookies. Guess she figured since I never took out the cookbook at home I could do it from memory. She didn't realize the recipe was printed on the bag of tollhouse morsels. So there I was trying to remember measurements, not that is mattered since I didn't have any measuring devices anyway. no chocolate chips. Good think no one had ever eaten them before, so they didn't know what to expect.

Joy

Just to bring things up to date, I have a cookbook, copyright 1996, wherein the author frequently lists among the ingredients "a whisper of black pepper". No, she doesn't say how many turns of the pepper mill constitutes a "whisper".

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans

Are you sure that's a recipe for *scones*, Kate? ;)

gabrielle

"four" of what??? ;->

Yup - cast iron (or in my granny's case, a disk of half-inch armour plating left over from a ship-building commission my grandfather was involved in!). Take a look at the Scottish recipes on my web site - there's a picture there of Scots Pancakes being cooked on mine. That's another measureless recipe...

The phan tom "l" eater is back! Crumbs in the keyboard, I think!

It was the "bake on the girdle" that got me...now you're telling me she has a cast-iron girdle? Quite a granny! ;)

gabrielle

Bullet proof, too! :P