On 2008/01/30, at 2:06 AM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
On the other hand, "T" is often used here as a unit of volume. I
have often
wondered what happens when you add a tesla of salt to a coulomb of
boiling
water. ;)
Pierre
Dear Pierre and All,
In the article, 'Metric cooking with confidence', Wendy and I use the
conventions that ts is an abbreviation for teaspoon and that TS is an
abbreviation for tablespoon. They are defined using the Australian
values as:
1 teaspoon = 1 ts = 5 millilitres = 5 mL
1 tablespoon = 1 TS = 20 millilitres = 20 mL
We also use a running footer in our cookbooks so that people don't
forget, and so that readers in the UK and in the USA will remember
that the Australian tablespoon = 20 mL not 15 mL.
As for c for cup, the issue here is even more complex. We wrote:
Cups
Even something as simple sounding as a cup of flour is fraught with
difficulty. Do you use an English teacup, a breakfast cup, a morning
coffee cup, or an after dinner coffee cup? If you receive a recipe
from the USA does a cup mean that you should use a teacup, a
breakfast cup, or your old coffee mug with the broken handle that has
'I luv N.Y.' printed on the side? And we haven't even considered
whether an after dinner coffee cup is the same as a demitasse!
Compare all of these with the simplicity of the Australian metric cup
that always contains 250 millilitres. This means that there are four
cups to one litre. The complete set of information an Australian cook
needs to know about cups is:
1 cup = 250 millilitres (this is added to the running footer as
mentioned above.
4 cups = 1000 millilitres = 1 litre
See: http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/
MetricCookingWithConfidence.pdf to put this information into context.
After studying many cookbooks from the UK and in the USA it seems
that their editors mostly use 15 mL for a tablespoon and 5 mL for a
teaspoon with a wide range of choices, including T and t, as
abbreviations for tablespoon and teaspoon respectively. In making
their choices we think that these editors have simply taken the
tablespoon as an approximation for half an old fluid ounce (UK fl.
oz. in the UK and USA fl. oz. in the USA) and given them some ill-
fitting metric clothing.
The USDA defines a cup as 8 fluid ounces or 48 teaspoons or 16
tablespoons. The UK does it differently because they had different
ounces (20 fl. oz. = 1 pint in the UK while 16 fl. oz. = 1 pint in
the USA).
In Australia, we have to be aware that recipes from the UK and the
USA have all of these these differences.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
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Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST,
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