Baking with Julia (1996)
Gourmet magazine
That's for starters. These are the core sources of my recipes. I looked them over after reading your message, and
I do stand by what I originally wrote. Cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons for volumes (dry & liquid) and pounds for
the mass of meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. Ounces are there parenthetically, when butter is called for by fractions of the stick.
Volumes larger than a few tablespoons become fractions of a cup, and small masses are just fractions of a pound.
In all likelihood, we're probably both correct--you're probably looking at sources completely different from mine. I know that I have seen
quite a bit of mass and volume ounces in British and older American cookbooks.
Now when it comes to fixing drinks, yes, volume ounces predominate. But I don't exactly call that cooking :)
As far as Alton Brown goes, he's shown himself to be a supporter of metric cooking, however, he has to be realistic--very few people
in the US would watch a cooking show in which all measurements all of a sudden are metric. But I have hopes, since Alton did a show
in which he demonstrated just how easy it is to cook using metric units.
These are the core sources of my recipes. I looked through them carefully after reading your message, thinking I
On 11/19/05, Jim Elwell <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At 19 November 2005, 08:29 AM, Remek Kocz wrote:
>I've been exposed to quite a few American cookbooks, and ounces are
>definitely hard to find in them. Pounds or fractions of a pound are
>prevalent for weights and cups and fractions of cups dominate the
>liquids. The occasional ounce references I've seen were to the size
>of a container of ingredients, like a can of beans or tomatoes.
I am not sure what cookbooks you are looking at, but I believe ounces
(both mass and volume) are fairly common in American cookbooks.
Liquids volumes above 1 tablespoon are frequently specified in ounces
(very common in alcoholic drink recipes). Mass ounces are very common
for things like ground beef and flour ( e.g., four onces of ground
beef for a burger).
I have heard the Food Network "Good Eats" host Alton Brown emphasize
the need for a digital scale in the kitchen for measuring amounts of
things like flour, sugar and spices. Unfortunately, he does almost
everything using traditional American units.
As to which ounce, at least in cooking the "volume" ounce (used for
liquids) is 1/8th of a cup, which is 1/4 of a quart. A "mass" ounce
is 1/16th of a pound. Both of these can be defined far more precisely
than would ever be needed in cooking.
Jim
