this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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There's nothing inherently more natural about cooking in the metric system, people just prefer base 10 these days. People balk at 4 quarts to an arbitrary gallon but love 1 liter being the arbitrary cubic volume of 10 ten-millionths of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole passing through Paris [but not quite].
Cooking by volume was natural before everyone had accurate kitchen scales. You didn't have a digital tare button in the 1800s but you did have a bunch of containers in common sizes.
Generally you have 4 sizes: 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. You just use a combination of 2 sizes (1+1/2) or multiples of your smallest size (3x1/4).
You usually don't need high precision for cooking, common ratios are good approximations (1:1, 1:2, 1:8, etc...). Baking is a different beast and I don't know how people did it before weight.
Also, fuck tablespoons and teaspoons. They should just be replaced with 1/16 cup and 1/32 cup.
To say you're not taking this seriously would be an understatement. A teaspoon is not half a tablespoon.
I know it's 1/48 cup but that's a stupid fraction and doesn't follow any logic, one of the main reasons it should be thrown out