Normally, this would go on my other blog, but if you've read this blog any length of time, you have probably figured out my feelings on metric measurements by now and can therefore see the relevance.
This link, which I found posted by a commenter on Sadly, No!, leads back to one of the more ridiculous commentaries I've seen on CNN, claiming that with a filibuster-proof majority, the Democrats can do scary things like oh, impose the metric system. Yeah, uh... I wish.
I have to say right off the top that I don't personally cook metric, which I guess makes me a bit of a hypocrite on the issue. But I have written on the subject before, and I'm a very strong supporter of metrication, to the point where I really try to write my recipes with both metric and US units because, let's be honest, on the Internet, not everyone who might see a recipe is going to have access to equipment to measure in US measurements. It's a matter of basic politeness to me, and something that a lot of recipe writers just don't pay any damn attention to at all.
No, the metric system isn't perfect; the story of how the original meter was based on a faulty calculation of the Earth's circumference (the history is in the book The Measure of All Things by Ken Adler (2002, Free Press, ISBN 978-0743216760)). But I have a very, very hard time buying any of the arguments against -- issues of factors, division, and whatnot are rather overrated and tend to assume a certain innumeracy on the parts of the measurers (perhaps not entirely ridiculous in the US, but let us not snark), and vague arguments about "human factors" come almost entirely down to laziness and unwillingness to use a different set of units. (I saw one person arguing that 237mL -- the metric value of one US cup/8 fl oz -- is hard to multiply or divide. The argument was so mindnumbingly stupid that I'm pretty convinced the response was a troll, especially given that I know I've seen the commenter's name somewhere else.) The fun part is that, except for temperatures on non-digital ovens, you don't have to convert for the most part -- use the metric scale on your measuring cups, and weigh out ingredients that you'd normally scoop. And write your recipes down in metric as well as US or Imperial measurements -- not only will that save your readers difficulty with ambiguities (like, say, the infamous Australian 20mL tablespoon), you'll reach a much wider audience if you're posting on the net.
So will the Democratic congress go metric? Probably not; there's virtually zero chance of anyone putting their neck on the line for something that's so seemingly obvious. But wouldn't it be nice if they did?
Thursday, July 2, 2009
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3 comments:
When I work with aging UK recipes, there is a straightforward conversion I use to get the old things into metric. Sadly, the state of non-metric measurement means that the same doesn't work for US recipes (the US pint is about 470 ml, while the UK pint was more like 560 ml and in the UK we've always weighed dry ingredients) However, the main issue is to keep the wet and dry ingredients in the same proportions. Given that a "pound" contains 16 "ounces" and, in the UK at least, a "pint" contained 20 "fluid ounces" each of which weighed one "ounce", there is a simple rule of thumb. Where it asks for a "pound" use 400 g. Where it asks for a "pint" use 500 ml. You'll then keep wet and dry in correct proportion, keep to nice round numbers and get about 12% less, so you'll loose a bit of weight and perhaps reduce your waist circumference (which you can measure in kg and cm respectively). I wonder if such a simple conversion can be worked out for USA units.
David:
It's not especially hard, for the most part; a cup is 240mL, for example, and a kilo is 2.2 lbs, and 350F is ~180C; you can tweak the smaller ingredients as necessary. I think, btw, the answer to your question is 400mL for a US pint; there's an old, long-obsolete expression that says "a pint's a pound the world 'round", so assuming a largely water-based liquid, the weight:volume proportion is roughly even.
The pint issue is especially interesting -- there's a passage in 1984 where Winston is in a pub and the prole barfly he's talking to is complaining about how a half-liter isn't enough and a liter is too much, and it was years till I found out a British pint is 4 oz more.
A few years ago, my wife compiled a cook book for her mother's nursing home as a fund raiser. As she worked we soon realised that if she retained the recipes in their old pre-metric format, then the grandchildren of all the old cooks would probably not use the old recipes passed down to them from their grand mothers, great grand mothers, (and in one case) from their great, great, great, great grandmother.
All of these wonderful old traditional recipes could easily be lost.
The grandchildren imply could not cook recipes that contained words like gill (a French coffee cup politely filled), pounds, pints (USA), quarts (USA), pints (UK), quarts (UK), ounces (UK), fluid ounces (uk), ounces (USA), fluid ounces (USA), and several thousand more.
As a result my wife and I wrote 'Metric cooking with confidence' that you can find at http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricCookingWithConfidence.pdf
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
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