Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (20 page)

America’s attachment to cups really is odd (and indeed there are finally small hints of rebellion against it, such as a
New York Times
article from 2011 making a “plea on behalf of the kitchen scale”). In countless ways, America feels like a more rational place than Europe. Most American city streets are laid out in orderly numbered grids, not piled up higgledy-piggledy as in London or Rome. Then there is the dollar, in use since 1792, an eminently reasonable system of currency. When it came to money, America established a usable system much sooner than Europe (with the exception of France). In the mid-twentieth century, the process of buying a cup of coffee in Rome using Italian lira was an exercise in advanced mathematics; it was not much better buying a pot of tea in London, as the British clung to the messy system of pounds, shillings, and pence. Meanwhile, Americans strolled to the grocery store and easily counted out their decimal cents, dimes, and dollars. Likewise, American phone numbers are neatly standardized in a ten-digit formula. An American friend describes the method or lack of it governing British phone numbers as “a baffling hodgepodge.” So why, then, when it comes to cooking, do Americans throw reason out of the window and insist on measuring cups?

American cup measures can only be understood in the context of the history of weights and measures. Viewed historically, an absence of clear standards in measures has been the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, cup measures belonged to a wider system of measurement, within which they made considerably more sense than they do today. Our present confusion has its roots in medieval England.

 

A
pint’s a pound the world around” goes the old saying; and so it was at one time. In the Anglo-Saxon period, the ”Winchester measure” was established in England, Winchester being the capital city then. This system created an equivalence between the weight of
food and its volume, which would have been an obvious way to create units of volume where none had existed before.

Think about how tricky it would be to establish the exact capacity of a vessel if you didn’t have a measuring vessel. How could you say how much water a given glass held? You could pour it out into another glass and compare the level between the two. But then how would you know how much the second glass held? The exercise quickly becomes nightmarish. It was much easier to establish given capacities by using the volume of certain known, weighed substances. A “Winchester bushel” was defined as the volume of 64 pounds of wheat (which was relatively constant, wheat grains being less variable in density than flour). A bushel was made up of 4 pecks. A peck was 2 gallons. A gallon was 4 quarts. And a quart was 4 pints. The upshot of all this was a pleasing fact: the Winchester bushel came in at 64 pounds (of wheat) and also 64 pints (of water). A pint really was a pound. Neat.

If only these Winchester measures had been the sole standard for volume, all would have been well. But in medieval England, numerous competing gallons came into use for different substances. As well as the Winchester gallon (also known as the corn gallon), there was the wine gallon and the ale gallon, all representing different amounts. The ale gallon was bigger than the wine gallon (around 4.62 liters as opposed to 3.79 liters), as if reflecting the fact that ale is usually drunk in bigger quantities than wine. It’s all too easy to succumb to this kind of unhinged logic when thinking about how to measure things. It’s like Nigel, the rock star in the film
This Is Spinal Tap
, who believes that to make music louder you need to create an amp that goes up to eleven instead of ten.

The lack of standardized weights and measures was a problem for customers wanting to receive their due (a pint of ale varied hugely from county to county) but also for the state, because it affected the duty charged on goods. The Magna Carta of 1215 attempted to address the lack of uniformity: “Let there be one measure of wine throughout our whole realm; and one measure of
ale; and one measure of corn.” This didn’t work; competing measures continued to proliferate. Between 1066 and the end of the seventeenth century, there were more than twelve different gallons, some assigned to solids and some to liquids.

By the late eighteenth century, there were various moves to escape the anarchy of the medieval measuring system. In the 1790s, after the French Revolution, the metric system began to be established in France. The meter was based on the findings of an expedition of scientists to measure the length of the earth’s meridian, an imagined line from the North Pole to the South Pole: a meter was supposed to be one ten-millionth of the meridian, though due to a tiny miscalculation it is actually a little smaller. But the principle was now set that the French would measure in tens. In 1795, the new measures were decreed in a law of 18th Germinal: liters, grams, meters. Sweeping away the old jumble of archaic standards was meant to demonstrate how modern France had become; how rational; how scientific; and how commercial. Everything, from street systems to pats of butter, was subdivided into perfect tens. The revolutionaries even experimented with a ten-day week—the “
décade
.” Thanks to this new measuring system, life was now logical. You breakfasted on bread measured in grams; you drank your coffee in milliliters; you paid for it in decimal francs and sous.

The Americans and the British conducted their own reforms, but neither country wished to go as far as the revolutionary French. In 1790, President George Washington gave his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, the job of devising a plan to reform weights and measures. The United States already had decimal coinage, having thrown off pounds, shillings, and pence along with the British crown. But in the event, Congress couldn’t agree on either of Jefferson’s proposals for reform and spent several more decades failing to decide anything on the matter.

Meanwhile, in 1824, the British acted. There was no question at this time of following the French—national enemies against whom the country had only recently ceased to be at war—down a
route of total metrification; the aim was simply freedom from the dark ages of multiple standards. In 1824, parliament voted to use a single imperial gallon for both dry goods and liquids. The new British imperial gallon was defined as “the volume occupied by 10 pounds of water at specified temperature and pressure.” This worked out as 277.42 cubic inches, which was close to the old “ale gallon.” Once the new gallon had been established, it was easy to readjust the pint, quart, and bushel measures to fit. The adage now went like this:

For Britain, read the British Empire. These new imperial measures were confidently promulgated wherever the British ruled. A pint of maple syrup in Colonial Canada was the same volume as a pint of whiskey in Colonial India.

Did this spell an end to confusion in measuring? Not at all. In 1836, the US Congress finally established American uniform standards and decided to take the opposite route to Britain. Instead of adopting the new single imperial gallon, the United States stuck with the two most common gallons from the old system, the Winchester (or corn) gallon for dry goods and the Queen Anne (or wine) gallon for liquids. It is not so surprising that America wanted different standards from Britain. The strange part is that the United States expressed its metrical freedom from Britain, not with its own modern measures but with quaint old British ones. When America sent a man to the moon, that man was still thinking in the pints and bushels of eighteenth-century London. Even now, in this age of Google searches, when the cook of the household is more likely to search for a recipe online than to scour the pages of
The Joy of Cooking
, the recipes flickering on the screen of American cooking websites are still overwhelmingly given in traditional cups.

The result has been nearly two hundred years of mutual non-comprehension in the kitchen between the two nations, made still worse since 1969 when Britain finally officially joined the metric nations (though many a British home cook still prefers imperial). The United States is today one of only three countries not to have officially adopted the French metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). To American ears, there is something cold, inhuman almost, about the European practice of quantifying ingredients in grams. To the rest of the world, however, American cups are plain confusing. How much is a cup, anyway? In Australia, the cup has been defined metrically, as 250 ml. But in the United Kingdom, it is sometimes translated as 284 ml, half a British pint. Canada weighs in with a 227 ml cup, corresponding to 8 imperial fluid ounces. As for the true American cup, it is none of these. The technical definition of a US cup is half a US pint, or 236.59 ml.

 

G
iven all this, why did Fannie Farmer in 1896, the “Mother of Level Measurement,” deem the cup system to be so superior and so exact? There was nothing inevitable about America’s preference for volume measurement over scales. If you look at earlier American cookbooks, the methods given are just as likely to be weighing with a scale as measuring with a cup. This is partly because many American cookbooks were in fact British—reprints of successful British recipe books such as Mrs. Rundell’s A
New System of Domestic Cookery
(1807). But even in authentic American books, most of the recipes imply the existence of scales in the kitchen. The first cookbook published by an American for Americans in America was
American Cookery
by Amelia Simmons in 1796. Simmons routinely deals in pounds and ounces. Her turkey stuffing calls for a wheat loaf, “one quarter of a pound butter, one quarter of a pound salt pork, finely chopped,” two eggs, and some herbs. She also gives the first American recipe for what would become a classic staple of the American kitchen: pound cake: “One pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound flour, one pound or ten eggs, rose water
one gill, spices to your taste; watch it well, it will bake in a slow oven in 15 minutes.”

Amelia Simmons’s pound cake is not a great recipe. The very short timing, of 15 minutes, must be a typo (pound cake in my experience takes around an hour), and Simmons doesn’t tell us how to mix the batter (do we add the eggs one at a time to avoid curdling? Or in one great swoop?). However flawed, it does show that in 1796 at least, Americans were not averse to putting butter and flour on a scale. Pound cake remained a favorite long after cups took over. Even Fannie Farmer includes a pound cake, not dissimilar to Simmons’s, except that she had replaced the rosewater and spices with some mace and brandy; and she plausibly says that it will take one and a quarter hours in a “deep pan.” And she has replaced the pounds with cups.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, cups were taking over from pounds altogether in America. At first, the cup would have been any breakfast cup or mug that was on hand. This is how traditional cooks still do much of their measuring in countries from India to Poland. You take a glassful of this and a cupful of that and it works just fine, because you’ve made the dish a hundred times before, using the same glass or cup. The problem comes only if you attempt to instruct others outside your family or narrow community in how to make a certain thing, when the recipe gets lost in translation. What was different about the cup measurements of nineteenth-century America was the shift from using cups to using
the
cup—a single standard with precise volume.

Why were Americans so attached to their cups? Some have seen it as a feature of pioneer life, when those traveling west would carry makeshift kitchen utensils on the wagon, but wouldn’t want to be encumbered with heavy scales. There must be some truth in this. In a far-flung frontier settlement, a local tinsmith could rustle you up a cup, whereas scales were an industrial product, made in factories
and sold in towns. Besides, frontier meals tended to be ad hoc, such as johnnycake, a stodgy mess of cornmeal and pork fat thrown together from cupfuls and handfuls of this and that.

Yet the frontier mentality cannot entirely account for America’s wholesale adoption of the measuring cup. The evidence from cookbooks is that measuring cups were being viewed not as an inferior substitute for scales, but as
better than them
. The cup was used in fancy well-equipped kitchens in the cities as well as in creaky wagons. Catherine Beecher, whose sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was the best-selling author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, wrote a cookbook—
Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book
, published in 1846. Beecher notes that “it saves much trouble to have your receipt book so arranged that you can
measure instead of weighing
.” She assumes that her readers will have scales as well as cups, but views cups as handier. She advises weighing each ingredient the first time it is used, and measuring the volume of the weighed ingredient in a “small measure cup.” Beecher’s idea was that next time the ingredient is required, the cook will be able to bypass the scales and use only the cup.