Cups vs. grams: why can't American and British cooks agree on food measurements? | Hacker News Reader

Cups vs. grams: why can't American and British cooks agree on food measurements?

theguardian.com

What this, and US exceptionalism seems to miss, is that it is not a 50/50 divide, 50% US customary units and 50% metric units.

It is every country in the world (including the US, officially, in 1975) discarding their entire history of traditional units, in favour of globally standardised weights and measures. Don't you think French chefs miss their chopines and boisseaux ?

It's every country in the world, vs the holdouts of the USA, Liberia and Burma.

There are plenty of other troubles with making universal recipes! They often rely on ingredients that one country takes for granted while they're an expensive specialty in your country; sometimes they're the key ingredient that make the recipe work, other times it's just what they had to hand, and you should substitute with local equivalent. Or when a chef says "435g of beans" that's because their country customarily sells tins with 435g of beans in them, and they just use one customary tin and base the rest of the ingredients around that volume. If your tins are 400g or 500g, what you really need is the recipe localised to match your customary supplies.

We'll never get away from the customary practises of every country, but we could at least be precise when writing them down?

>we could at least be precise

The biggest lesson I've ever had in cooking is that literally nothing is precise.

Measurements like "a pinch" (a pinch of salt) are the epitome, but even the ingredients themselves aren't precise and uniform.

Cooking becomes a lot easier and the food better when you throw out any and all notion of precision. The proper way to cook is grab some pot or pan, grab ingredients, throw them in, and cook.

Trying to make cooking precise is a fool's errand.

I do commend you for your views, but I'd say the nuance is (I guess like in programming or carpentry or other tasks as well), to know when precision matters, and when it doesn't matter.

It really does matter when making bread that you get the yeast, water, flour, salt concentration exactly right, and you get the temperatures exactly within range.

It really matters when boiling sugar. You're not going to make toffee correctly without a working thermometer.

On the other hand, other doughs, cakes, etc are much more forgiving, and for the majority of home cooking that anyone is doing, you're quite right that it really calls for a reactive chef who is making things _to taste_, actively keeping track of their cooking, rather than someone hoping that if they follow instructions _precisely_, they'll achieve the outcome they're hoping for.

But if you're writing a recipe book for others, not just for yourself... readers would still like to know how _you_ make it, and that calls for at least a bit of precision in the measurements and times. Perhaps we should write recipes with margins of error?

even more concrete instructions like "a teaspoon" or "4g of X" are often best guesses by the creators or recipe testers.

sugar & salt is especially tricky because different vendors ship different concentrations in the crystals. morton's may have a different level of salty compared to whatever the store brand is, and that'll come through the food.

age of ingredients and quality also is yuge. the Bon Appetit crowd is using good stuff they bought fairly recently, not garlic powder that's old enough to graduate 5th grade. obvious concept, but it makes a serious difference.

source: ex did recipe development & food science for a major fast-packaged goods company.

> The biggest lesson I've ever had in cooking is that literally nothing is precise

Ah, I remember coming home from school one day when I was 16, and finding the kitchen filled with smoke. On the stove was a pan with a breaded piece of meat, burned to blackness. When I called out, my dad emerged from his office. Seeing me turning off the stove, he erupted: "Don't turn off the stove, the package said place frozen in pan and let it fry for 13 minutes!!!".

He had read the instructions, put the meat into the pan, turned to stove to full heat, set a timer to 13 minutes, and then returned to his office.

Except baking. Baking is more chemistry than cooking.

I'd even say that baking is science

I'd say it's at best engineering, not science, otherwise everybody would be making the exact same bread. Which is demonstrably not the case.

Yeah, I think the best advice one can give to a new cook is : "don't measure anything". You have to learn what makes sense; the hard way, but that's the best way. You can't measure taste and that's the only thing that really counts. So you learn what tastes good and then you don't need cups and scales.

Well mostly. I weigh stuff when I make bread or emulsions (roux or mayonnaise e.g.). But even there, the variability between ingredients makes it all a hazy approximation.

Also:

* Some ingredients have different names in different countries

* We should probably specify the animal, rather than just writing 'milk' and 'eggs'

it makes the Liberian Burman American fusion cuisine chefs happy and thats all that matters

The part that blows my mind all the time is that there are all sorts of cups - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)

Mile unit is another one of the same sort - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile with the exception that only two kinds have survived if I'm not mistaken - US mile and nautial mile

I guess it can be very simple in US, especially if mug/cup volumes are defined in terms of a "cup" multiples, but in europe I get totally lost when I see the cup unit in the recipe since I din't know what volume it refers to

I always do cup = 245ml. If you then undershoot or overshoot by 5ml, you’re always okay.

That Wikipedia page is also missing the Dutch “kopje” (little cup) measurement, which is 150ml.

The US “statue mile” is also used in the UK (but not Canada, surprisingly to me, as I’d assumed the reverse before I’d visited).

As for cooking, US volume measurements are strictly defined, despite the history of where some of the unit names came from. So it should always be possible to convert to metric volume if you know it’s a US recipe.

The USA had two different miles until a year ago: the international standard mile (based on Carl Edvard Johansson’s inch), and the US Survey mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#US_survey

Yes! It includes the Japanese cup (go), familiar to any American who owns a rice cooker.

The volume of 240mL of water. Fill a standard 500mL water bottle to the bottom of the cone: half of that.

     =  500mL
    /_\ 2 cups
    |_| 1 cup 
    |_| zilch

* Not to scale.

The Swedish Mile (= 10km) is still in use and once tripped me up when searching for a used car.

They were all wonderfully cheap until I realized that 50,000 on the website actually meant 500,000km driven.

There is no doubt in my mind that measuring weight in well defined units is superior to measuring volume in some not so well defined units. In baking - precision is critical. There are many other instances when measuring weight just makes sense - when I make a pudding, it is pointless to add “10 tablespoons of chia”, I just pour chia seeds in the container on the scale until it reaches 120g for example. Same for blended foods. Pretty much only advantage of volumes is that they are much easier visualized and can be approximately measured without any gear at all or with a very cheap and accessible container (cup, spoon etc), and quickly.

Older British cookbooks - some of which were passed down to me in the family - also use cups. Sometimes volume measurements are easier and cups are fairly handy. Quite a lot of standard issue mugs in the UK are cup-sized, or roughly.

However, in contradiction to least one remark about the universality of cups, they are not. British cups are, like US cups, half a pint, but British pints are larger. A British cup is 10 fluid ounces while a US cup is 8 (or thereabouts, I am not sure how standardised it is).

So I have to remember to adjust by a factor of 20% when working from a US recipe in the UK, or just convert to weight.

Where I live now a "cup" is typically 200ml unless I am measuring rice into a rice cooker.

It's even more confusing when you look at how many cup sizes there are around the world.

There is the US Customary Cup at about 236mL, the US Legal Cup at 240mL, the Metric and Canadian Cups at 250mL, the Imperial Cup at about 284mL, the Latin American Cup (which seems to be any of the other previously mentioned cup sizes, depending on where you are), and the Japanese Cup at 200mL.

While ounces are the same, fluid ounces are different!

> An imperial fluid ounce is 1⁄20 of an imperial pint, 1⁄160 of an imperial gallon or exactly 28.4130625 mL. A US customary fluid ounce is 1⁄16 of a US liquid pint and 1⁄128 of a US liquid gallon or exactly 29.5735295625 mL, making it about 4.08% larger than the imperial fluid ounce.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_ounce

Indeed.

Worse, the ounce, as a unit of mass, has two different meanings in English law, one of which is so obscure and differs so very little from the internationally agreed quantity, that it is hard to believe that it could ever matter, but strictly if you are thinking about the law of food labelling - and I do sometimes - then you always have a slight twinge at the thought.

The US customary fluid ounce is based on the Queen Anne wine gallon of 231 cu in. The Imperial weights and measures reform in the 1820s defined a new gallon equal to the volume of 10 lb avoirdupois of water at s.t.p., which was about the same as the old ale gallon. The Imperial pint was changed to be 20 fl. oz. instead of 16 fl. oz. so that the metric-style correspondence between mass and volume also worked for ounces.

As someone with a non-uniform set of cups... it's bad :P

The best approach is that you do it like my grandma. She taught me to make pastry. You put the right amount of flour etc in the bowl and then make it. She taught me this when I was too small to understand what I was doing intellectually and so just know what the right amount looks like. Not something you can put in a recipe book though.

The reason Americans use cups and spoons (instead of e.g. grams) to measure ingredients is a matter of history. Tradition says Fannie Farmer wrote the "Boston Cooking-School Cook Book" in 1896, and for the first time in a cookbook used precise measurements (instead of "a jigger of this" or "a pinch of that") to specify how much of each ingredient to use. Nobody at that time would have a weight scale in their kitchen, so Ms. Farmer measured her proportions using tools which were readily available in any kitchen -- cups and spoons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Farmer

Her cookbook achieved immediate success and she became a household name in America. Even I had heard of her, long before I became a feeble student of history. Her measurement system is totally entrenched in American cooking culture, so I expect it won't ever be displaced by metric measurements except perhaps amongst high-end commercial kitchens and with people who want to make the effort to convert to grams and liters when cooking.

Commercial recipes in the US are pretty commonly by weight. You wouldn't want for example to vary your recipe for pasta sauce by half a pound of onions from batch to batch because of the varying sizes of onions.

Am not a professional cook (far from it), but borrowed a couple of cookbooks from someone who was to learn a little about how professional cooks work and approach their trade.

Cups are only practical for small amounts anyway, such as 2 cups or 1/2 cup.

A commercial sized recipe calling for 10lb or flour or 2lb of chopped onions would be highly inconvenient to measure by cups, even if you did have the necessary set of cups in big sizes (10 cups, 50 cups, etc). Much easier to measure large amounts by weight.

The "cup" size for measuring ingredients is massively confusing as there is the US Customary Cup at about 236mL, the US Legal Cup at 240mL, the Metric and Canadian Cups at 250mL, the Imperial Cup at about 284mL, the Latin American Cup (which has multiple sizes), and the Japanese Cup at 200mL.

As if that wasn't confusing enough, I seem to have measuring cups that want to make things even more confusing. Firstly, the 1 cup is labeled as being 250mL and the 1/2 cup is labeled at 125mL, which conforms to the Metric Cup size; however, the 1/3 cup is labeled at 80mL and the 1/4 cup shows 60mL, both of which would give a 240mL cup size, which is the US Legal Cup. As if that wasn't bad enough, if I fill the cup and pour it into either of my two measuring jugs, it actually only holds 200mL, which is the Japanese Cup size.

I’m sure it matters for baking (which I’ve never tried). But for normal cooking, don’t people just throw in random amounts of everything that are vaguely close to the quantity stated in the recipe? That’s what I do at least and it’s never caused me to ruin a meal. The tolerances really are not that tight. Also, most recipes I see include stuff like “one large onion” that is even less precise than a volumetric measurement.

It’s hard for me to imagine getting out a scale just to be sure I really put in 100g instead of 120g of something. Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this?

No. But there are some cases where 20% could affect consistency of product. One thing that comes to mind is hollandaise sauce and similar sauces. Where ratio of fat to other stuff could change consistency. But then we don't exactly measure eggs so it is bit moot...

>It’s hard for me to imagine getting out a scale just to be sure I really put in 100g instead of 120g of something. Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this?

If i'm making a new recipe everything gets weighed. If it's something where i know how it's supposed to look/taste it is mostly by feel. I would love a site that lists recipes that include only weight measurements. I don't know how big a onion is, there's easily a 5x range there. A cup of broccoli really depends on how you cut your broccoli doesn't it? 150 grams of broccoli is clear and i know what that looks like.

> Do Europeans (outside of baking) really do this?

Do you take out a scale when you need to add an ounce of something? Same for 100g, when you're accustomed to it. For me it depends on which ingredient I'm working with.

> Do you take out a scale when you need to add an ounce of something?

I have never needed to add an ounce of something. American recipes never really tell you to do this. The only thing they use weight for is large amounts of bulk items (e.g. a pound of chicken thighs).

It really depends on a lot of variables; experience, location, ingredients, season, taste.

Starting out it's good to learn measurements then you can advance to cooking with proportions and tasting your ingredients to see what works.

As you mentioned this is more important in baking, confectionary, things that require specific temperatures etc. Try tempering chocolate w/out a thermometer or baking a croissant 'on instinct' and it'll be a bad time :)

Here in Canada it's so much worse. You can literally find recipes that use both for the same type of ingredient. In my kitchen, you must have both cup measuring and a kitchen scale.

Canada uses both metric and standard.

We drive at km/h

But we are 6'1" 222 lbs. Our drivers license is in cm, but nobody knows their height in cm.

Buying a house, it'll be meters of road frontage, but sq ft inside.

In the summer we use Fahrenheit and during the winter it's Celsius.

> In the summer we use Fahrenheit and during the winter it's Celsius.

News to me, as a Canadian. I agree with everything else though!

The switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius is wild.

Generally, I’m a huge fan of the metric system for everything except temperature. I dislike temperatures having a decal point that you can “feel”.

I assure you it is a matter of habit. I have no problems associating ranges of Celsius temperature with the comfort levels.

>The switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius is wild.

In the summer, a too hot day is 100f. Makes sense. I immediately know the difference between 70, 80, 90f. How to dress changes between 70f and 90f.

But if you were to operate in celcius. We're talking 21c, 26c, 32c. I have no way to understand such a small range.

But then in winter. When it's FREEZING aka 0c. I can easily judge then based on the relationship to 0c. Whereas if you operate in f, it's like 31f. I dont get that range.

Good luck feeling 0.1⁰C

I saw a funny collision of imperial & metric measurements a while back. My BIL went through an Irish soda bread phase and wanted to learn to bake it himself. I suggested he find a recipe that used weight instead of volume, at least for ingredients like flour.

He went off and found a YouTube video by some Irish lady, tried her recipe, and was very disappointed with the result. I watched the video to help him debug and when this lady measured small quantities like salt and soda with a teaspoon she used an actual tea spoon, as in a spoon you’d use to make tea, not a “teaspoon” like a specifically-sized baking measuring implement.

So no wonder the recipe didn’t turn out for him, who knows what her “teaspoon” worked out to actually be. But it was very funny to me to run into this weird disconnect of a modern European “x grams of flour” combined with the very traditional “this spoon I happened to have in the drawer” (which of course is how measures like cups and teaspoons got started but I didn’t expect to see anyone use that approach in a published recipe this century).

I don't think such precision is necessary for typical 'cooking' but baking is different -- it's just straight up chemistry and the ratios are not just useful guides but vital to getting recipe right.

But chemistry requiring fairly strict ratios need not imply you can use the same amounts of ingredients every time.

For example, recipes using fruit often require water that partly comes from the fruit. Use older, drier, fruit, and you’ll need to adjust amounts to keep the effective ratio the same. Maybe add a sip of water or milk, use less starch to bind stuff or heat things a while shorter.

Temperature and humidity of the air also can affect what the ideal ratios are.

I don't agree. You're baking for humans, right? Well, humans can't tell the difference between e.g. bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration. It's just bread to them. You have to introduce a very big variance to get over human biases ("mmm that sourdough bread is delicious" - and it turns out it's sourfaux, so now what?). Cooking ingredients are mostly not standardised and you can't exactly measure taste anyway (or touch, or smell) which is the effect you're going for, so exact measurements are not going to have the same importance as, dunno, mixing exact proportions of ingredients for nitroglycerine.

You can easily tell the difference between bread with 80% hydration and 85% hydration if they've been cooked for the exact same length of time. Only if you cook the 85% slightly longer will it be hard to tell.

Volume is too imprecise. It can vary. E.g. flower. 1 cup can mean a lot based on how rough the ride is from the factory to the store.

Salt & sugar have same issue. Based on grain size volume can differ while weight (and thus cooking properties) are maintained. (Yes, you use big chunks of sugar for Liège waffles, but that's an exception).

There's no law in the U.S. that you must use imperial units, and I'm not aware of any serious professional that does.

It's also such a silly argument coming from the brits who swap their units almost randomly: https://ibb.co/0cB4tgd

Every carpenter I’ve met uses sixteenths of an inch, and every metal worker uses thousandths.

Neither of those jobs require serious tolerances

Sounds to me like what you meant to say is that your criteria for determining whether someone's profession is "serious" is whether they use metric or not.

Sounds to me like you're not commenting in good faith. Begone, nerd.

This was one of my first use cases for ChatGPT - converting recipes into grams. Major quality of life improvement.

I'm now using "recipe for X, for N people, metric units" all of the time.

"recipe for X" is usually just as ill-defined.

Yeah, maybe I do prefer slightly larger than average portions but most recipes I find on the internet for 4, are actually for 3. Unless they aren't and it's more like 6.

But I mean if you keep making it you can just adjust that, same as the units.

(Not even taking into account that people like to add side salads, or have some bread with their main, or an appetizer, or a dessert.. maybe my "bigger" portions just assume not a single addition)

Isn't a cup a measure of volume while a gram a measure of weight, though?

Yes, as the article points out in paragraph 2:

> There is a chasm between Europe and America’s kitchen cultures. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume, not weight, to make measurements in their kitchens. Cooking with cups is volume-based and relies heavily on visual cues – everyone knows what a cup of granulated sugar looks like; less so 200g or 7.1oz – while the metric system is weight-based.

Yes, I have seen it, it's just a confusing title.

My granny do not need anything to cook

Cup is a universal measure of volume. It works for flour, sugar, liquids. Whereas grams is different volume for each material and requires a scale. I suppose one could use a metric quantity, but 'liter' is too big and 'deciliter' is too small.

I am a non-USian, but still think that 'cup' is the best measure of volume for cooking/baking.

And there is a compromise! Most of the measuring jugs I buy have cups on one side, and common materials in grams on the other. So there is no real problem.

Liquids can be accurately measured by weight. The converse is not true -- powders cannot be accurately measured by volume. 2 tsp of kosher salt contains the same amount of salt as 1 tsp of fine salt. And every brand is slightly different. The only way to accurately know if you're using the same amount of salt as the recipe developer is if the measurement is by weight.

Then there's the people who write recipes telling you to chop 1 cup of a vegetable, or "X medium-sized Ys". I never understood the aversion some people have to weighing things.

They are eyeballing everything, then have to make a recipe out of it. The recipe didn't include all of the "fixing" of the spice/salt balance they do during cooking.

Weight also opens up question. Is that pre or post preparing? Like removing parts or skins and so on?

That’s interesting. I’ve never once thought of weighing (or measuring by volume) something before chopping it up. Maybe I’m just not thinking of the right ingredient?

For me, weight solves one of the biggest issues which is “large potato” or “large onion”, WTF is “large”?

> 2 tsp of kosher salt contains the same amount of salt as 1 tsp of fine salt.

The article makes a similar point about unrefined brown sugar and caster sugar, but something doesn't sit right with me for that. Shouldn't the packing densities of sugar/salt crystals, and therefore the mass densities, be the same at different scales? So unless the volume you're measuring is within an order of magnitude of the size of the objects being measured, where edge effects become significant, shouldn't they contain about the same amount?

(Even the grains of coarse salt shouldn't be significantly more than 1/10 of the width of a teaspoon, no?)

No, because they have a different internal crystal structure with more space. The kosher salt is, to use a vague term, more fluffy. There's a photograph in this Cooks illustrated article, if you go to the end of it and click read more: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/taste_tests/2109-kosher-...

The article also points out that the salt structure differs not just between table salt and kosher salt, but between kosher salt manufacturers depending on the process they used to make it. Weight wins.

I see what you mean but that only works in the assumption of crystals being the same shape and point size probability distribution. Which is a reasonable assumption for crystals but real materials are derived by grinding, so you can easily have a wider distribution of shapes (rounder) and sizes (small particles filling the gaps between larger ones).

Good point but this only holds if the sugar/salt particles always have identical geometry and are just varying in scale; I think that assumption is fundamentally flawed.

> Cup is a universal measure of volume. It works for flour, sugar, liquids.

Until a recipe asks for 1-cup of butter. Tf am I meant to be, melt it down? Or 1-cup of broccoli, how does that even work?!

Grams works for everything. All the time, no exceptions.

"cups of butter" is the wildest measurement I come across regularly in US recipes.

Just... how?

Edit: A friend of mine has just related running across a US scone recipe asking for "5 tablespoons of cold butter". I don't even want to think about packing cold butter onto a tablespoon to get that measurement right!

In case you are wondering how this works in practice, American butter typically comes in "sticks". Each stick weighs 1/4 pound, and is individually wrapped in foil or paper. These wrappers are typically marked in Tablespoon increments with 8 Tablespoons (1/2 cup) per stick. Measuring Tablespoons of butter just involves looking at the markings on the stick (or visually estimating the number of 8ths) and cutting off the chunk that one needs. Measuring major fractions of cups is just counting sticks.

Also, that will greatly simplify the conversion process for me in the future.

Previously, when I've come across a US recipe requiring cups of butter, I've looked up the size of a US cup - which is given in fl.oz - converted that to ml, and then found a good estimate for the density of butter, and used that to convert to a weight in grams - which I can then measure easily.

If I'd known that "a cup of butter" was not really meant to be an actual "cup" measurement, and was actually shorthand (longhand?) for "0.5lb butter", that would have made conversion So. Much. Easier.

Seriously, wtf.

(I take it that other "cup" measurements are actually meant to be volume measurements, and I should measure cups of flour/sugar/etc... (and liquids, obviously) in volume-marked measuring containers?)

That does provide a method to the madness, thanks.

But... butter being measured in "cups" and "tablespoons", which are multiples/fractions of a 1/4lb block, is therefore fundamentally a unit of weight, not volume?!?

That's even more wild.

Butter in the USA is sold in 1-pound boxes, each containing four quarter-pound "squares" that are marked with tablespoon and fractional-cup gauges. Simply slice off five tablespoons. (There are "Eastern" and "Western" square sizes, depending on where you live.) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter#Packaging

Indeed, how would you slice cold butter by grams? Is there even a procedure?

Easy. Just slice of parts into your bowl until the scale shows the desired weight. I am a bit envious of American butter packaging, because it saves so much time, but if they ever change anything about it, you are all hosed, because nobody will know what 5 tablespoons was supposed to mean. ;-)

> how would you slice cold butter by grams?

It's more sensible than slicing off butter by spoons, where a spoon is not a square, except the slice of butter is a square!

Butter stick at least in America normally have tablespoon marks on the wrapper. That said, sometimes the wrapper is clearly shifted one direction or the other so that the first or last “tablespoon“ is not a full tablespoon.

Butter sticks in the US have marks down the side of the wrapper, like a ruler, that show you tablespoon increments. Google image search "tablespoons butter stick".

In the US, our butter comes in wrappers that divide each stick into 8 tablespoons, so it's actually very easy -- you can visually see where to cut.

When a recipe asks for a cup of butter, they're not actually asking for a cup of butter. American butter comes in one pound blocks so it's likely the recipe developer actually used a half pound of butter rather than a cup. If you actually measure a cup of butter into your recipe you've likely put slightly more butter in than the recipe developer did.

But at least you'll be close. Unlike 1 cup of broccoli.

How do you measure 1 cup of broccoli? Cos that sort of instruction comes up constantly. Unless American stores sell vegetables in 1 cup bushels (which just in case they do, is beyond insane) I don't see how you could reliably do that ever.

Yes, that's such an obvious point that I didn't think I needed to make it more clear that I agree with you.

Agreed I hate volume measurements for anything that can’t be packed down or that is expected to be used in a non-liquid form (like the butter example). At least with butter, I know it means two sticks but I still prefer weight whenever possible.

I have to push back a bit on using volume to measure compressible solids like flour. If the actual mass matters, as it can in baking, measure the mass not the volume.

I don't see how cups are in any way better than desilitres. You use a larger measuring tool when you need more than say three dl. I agree that grams are inconvenient to use for flours and liquids, so litre/desilitre/millilitre just seems the logical option.

I'm obviously very biased by growing up with SI units, and having no cup measures around. Every time a recipe says cups, I sigh and use a smartphone to convert it.

According to the article a "cup" of flour is anywhere between 120g and 150g. A 5% error in measurement is enough to screw up baking, let alone a 20% error.

I agree that grams are inconvenient to use for flours and liquids, so litre/desilitre/millilitre just seems the logical option.

It works for fluids but it is complete mess for any compressible solid (flour), and even non-compressible one that comes in different grain size(salt).

On side note it would be nice to have tabletops with builtin scale...

I've got some glass and transparent plastic cups with marks at deciliters up to 500 cc. They are commonly sold at stores here in Italy. I guess its the same all around the world. Or I just fill a glass with water and weight it, empty and full. 1 liter of water at usual temperatures and pressures is 1000 grams, a convenient choice. We don't need much more precision than that to cook. Even milk can be approximated with 1 l to 1000 g.

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