Category Archives: Metric Reform

Metric Cooking Without Imperial Leftovers

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By The Metric Maven

Update: 2013-01-17

On 2013-01-10 the 25,000 signature threshold for a whitehouse.gov petition urging the US change over to the metric system was met. This was the threshold required for an issue to merit attention from the Obama administration.   Five days later, the rules have now changed: White House Raises Petition Signature Threshold to 100K.

Before I start the current blog, I would like to make an appeal to my US readers. I tend to  be of the opinion that online petitions are feckless. I would like to make a singular exception this month and encourage my readers to sign the petition at whitehouse.gov called Make The Metric System the Standard in the United States, Instead of the Imperial System. I have tried to sign up twice, once with my home email and once as The Metric Maven. I never received my confirmation emails with a password either time. Yes, I checked my spam filter. I then tried to login and clicked forget password? It indicated I would go to a page where I could change my password. It did not, but it did take me back to the petition, which I then signed. Sven also needed to use the same procedure to sign the petition. Others apparently have been able to breach this vestigial firewall and as of this writing (2013-01-09), there are 20,376 signatures. This is very close to the 25,000 needed to require the White House to pay attention to this issue. The petition will end on January 31, so voting before this deadline is crucial.  Based on my experience with the whitehouse.gov website, I believe more people have tried to vote, and have been unable to, than are shown on the tally. Should we make the 25,000 signature limit, we can then find out if this was a feckless endeavor or not. It will give us something concrete to which we can point when contacting legislators and requesting that legislation be enacted. Thank you.  Now the blog.

When the 2008 Olympics were held in China, there was one group of people the hosts were not certain how to feed. It was the Americans. Recipes sent from all other countries of the world made sense, but not those from the US. In order to make the recipes for Americans, measures with cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and all the other measurement units unfamiliar to the rest of the world had to be obtained. The necessary glassware and measures were sent from the US, the cooks adapted for the Olympics; the Americans were fed. After the Olympics were finished, they saw no value to these odd cooking utensils with imperial measures, and threw them all away. This story is somewhat apocryphal, but illustrates the metric culinary island to which we’ve banished ourselves in the US.

I’ve read a few cooking blogs that lament our use of imperial measures for cooking in the US. Imperial units isolate new US recipes from the rest of the world, and prevent the world from sharing with us.. These cooks wonder when, or if, we will ever figure out a way to change American cooking to metric—as the other 192 metric countries of the world have done—years ago.

A couple of solar orbits back,  I decided to look into the details of cooking using the metric system. Pat Naughtin often stressed that when changing to metric one should take the opportunity to reform practices within industries and make them better. What I realized during my work, was how different metric cooking is from the way I learned it using imperial. In an earlier blog, I lampooned the way some American computer programs mindlessly convert recipes to metric. Unfortunately this is generally the way people have converted from imperial to metric recipes in the past. When I’ve read through old accounts from the 1970s, metric cooking is treated like imperial cooking, just with different units. This leads to unpleasant imperial leftovers, that need correcting.

Cooking Scale with small bowl zeroed for measuring

A fundamental difference between cooking the way metric countries generally do, and ourselves, is the use of a scale to measure mass (weight). A volumetric quantity of flour in a measuring cup will change depending on how settled it is, but it’s mass (weight) doesn’t. Brown sugar can be measured loose, or  packed, so a cup of brown sugar can be of different weight, but occupy the same volume in a measuring cup. This can cause inconsistent results in cooking, but when mass is used, the quantity is assured to be consistent. Most all of us have seen the side of a breakfast cereal box that has a warning like: “Contents may have settled in shipment. Contents are sold by weight not by volume.”  I’m sure many people had called in complaining their cereal boxes were not filled to the top when they opened them. So how much flour is in a cup of flour?—depends, but we can always be certain how much 225 grams of flour is. The mass remains constant. The density does not.

I purchased a scale which would automatically awaken in grams and has a nice large digital display. Scales have a tare function on them. What this means is that if you set a small bowl on the scale, you can press the tare button and it will re-zero the scale so you measure only the contents you then place into the bowl. At first cooking this way seemed awkward, but soon I realized that the use of a measuring cup was minimized to mostly liquids, and a scale was way faster. What one does not realize is how often one has to place contents in a measuring cup, bring it up level with your eyes, or worse bend down and look at it when it’s on a counter top. Many modern measuring cups have graduations which may be viewed from above, this is a great improvement. Measuring cups are often graduated with imperial units facing a right handed person, so to read milliliters, one must turn the cup around, or possibly hold it in your left hand. This is a subtle anti-metric bias. Graduations which may be read from above a measuring cup eliminate this anti-metric bias—for right handed people anyway.

At this point it may be best to introduce a recipe to use for illustration. The Chocolate Chip Cookie originated in the US, and is an obvious choice. I went to allrecipes.com and found their Best Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe. The site has an option to convert to metric. When I did this the recipe below was offered:

The conversion is much better than others I’ve seen, but has a few problems. First, the butter, white sugar, brown sugar, flour, chocolate chips, and chopped walnuts are all  weighed in grams, that’s good. The unintentional, algorithmic humor is that the recipe originally called for 1 cup of packed brown sugar. When weighing brown sugar, as is called out in the metric version, packing it beforehand is a superfluous waste of time. It reveals the mindless metric conversion the software performed. Two eggs are obviously two eggs. Ten milliliters of vanilla extract may be measured using two 5 mL (tea)-spoons.

In the case of ingredients like spices, they are often in such small quantities, that measuring them becomes inaccurate. Remember a gram is about the weight of a plain m&m. If you are trying to measure 1 to 5 grams, your scale will not easily distinguish a gram from two grams. (there are culinary scales that are accurate to 0.1 gram, but they are around $500.00 which breaks my budget) This converted recipe indicates you should use 5 grams of baking soda. This is a bad practice, and will cause frustration. It has been converted from 1 teaspoon of baking soda. One should directly use the equivalent volume which is 5 mL. The recipe calls for 3 grams of salt. I tried measuring three grams of salt, don’t do it, you will only encounter frustration. The imperial version of the recipe calls for 1/2 teaspoon of salt, use the 2.5 mL (1/2 tea)-spoon. The two teaspoons of hot water were taken directly to milliliters and are fine. For spices and such, use volume measure.

I have a viewpoint on how imperial recipes should be converted for Americans in during metrication. Americans are not used to using a digital scale (believe me–it’s easier than what we do), so volumes should be placed next to the weights in parenthesis. This allows a person to implement the recipe if they don’t have a scale. With luck, the parenthetical volumes would be dropped for weight, as Americans realize the ease of using a scale in grams. Here is how I would convert the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe for Americans to use (FYI This recipe has been much improved since I wrote this essay. See my metric cookbook):

Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

225 g butter, softened (240 mL)             5 mL of baking soda
200 g white sugar (250 mL)                  10 mL of hot water
220 g brown sugar (350 mL)                 2.5 mL of salt
2 eggs                                                    335 g Semisweet Chocolate Chips (475 mL)
10 mL vanilla extract                              115 g Chopped Walnuts (240 mL)
375 g all purpose flour (600 mL)

1) Preheat oven to 175 C (1750 milligrade)

2) Cream together the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth.
Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add to batter along with salt. Stir in flour, chocolate chips, and nuts.
Drop by large spoonfuls onto ungreased pans.

3) Bake for about 10 minutes in the preheated oven, or until edges are nicely browned.

With a scale, the ingredients may be measured very quickly. I took the mixing bowl from my mixer and placed it on the scale, used the tare button to zero out the bowl, and then added 225 grams of butter. If you are brave, you can continue adding the other ingredients using the tare function, but I don’t recommend it. Next obtain a small bowl, place it on the scale, hit tare to zero it, and measure the white sugar. Put it in with the butter in the mixing bowl. Use the same bowl to then measure the brown sugar, and place it in the mixing bowl with the butter and white sugar. You can then set your mixer to about medium speed and creme the mixture for about 8-10 minutes.

While the mixer is creaming, you can use the a bowl to measure out 375 grams of flour. You may wish to also measure out the chocolate chips and walnuts. I often use a small paper bowl or plate and set the measured ingredients aside to be added later. Once you have the hang of using a scale, it is much faster and more accurate than using a measuring cup for dry ingredients. If you are within a gram or two, that’s fine, a gram is a very small unit of mass, it will still  be closer than the old way of cooking.

Contemporary measuring spoons are marked in 2.5 mL, 5 mL and 15 mL, so the vanilla, baking soda, hot water and salt are all straightforward to measure.

As I’ve said, metric conversion is the perfect time to examine your current practices and consider changes. If you have never used cooking parchment paper, I recommend you give it a shot. Rather than greasing a pan, which after cooking can create a petroleum sludge which requires scrubbing to remove, cut a piece of cooking parchment paper to the same size as the baking sheet, and place the cookie dough on it as you would normally. Bake as usual, and when you take the cookies out of the oven you can easily remove them with a pancake turner—after they cool 4-5 minutes.. I have a second baking sheet lined with parchment, and blobs of cookie dough, ready to go into the oven when the first pan is done. I cut a third piece of parchment paper and put it on my counter. I place the warm cookies on the parchment protected counter. This frees up the cookie sheet for more dough as the second set of cookies is baking. You do not need to cut a new piece of parchment for each bake, just use it again with the same cookie sheet from which you just removed the cookies. You will be surprised how much easier baking cookies this way is. Best of all it’s a bachelor’s dream, no cookie sheets to be cleaned. Just throw away the parchment when finished.

Cookie dough ready for baking on parchment paper
Baked cookies using metric recipe
Alton Brown taking the measure of a Donut. Are they metric calipers?

The results were very Good Eats. Alton Brown is one of the best known Chefs on television. His program Good Eats was very popular with the public and myself. Alton does his best to explain the scientific basis for why he cooks his recipes the way he does. Cooking is presented in an entertaining manner, in a way one cannot imagine Julia Child embracing. I bring up Julia as she did all her recipes using the metric system. She had obtained her culinary education in France, and realized how much easier using metric measurement was, and continued its use when she returned to the US. The recipes were then converted to imperial for her US audiences and in her cookbooks. I’ve watched a lot of Good Eats episodes and in one Alton seems to have indicated he prefers the use of metric measures. Alton, I implore you, consider creating a show called Metric Eats.  You would be doing your country and the world a favor. As for my readers, while you are waiting for Alton, you can download my humble offering of a cookbook here. It is fairly abbreviated, but should give you a decent starting point for exploring cooking with metric. I have made two compromises with it. I have Fahrenheit temperatures in parenthesis next to Celsius, this is of course not consistent with Naughtin’s Laws and is bad practice, but in the US difficult to avoid. Another compromise is that I have placed volume measurements in parenthesis next to the mass values for each recipe. This is to facilitate metric cooking even if one does not own a scale.

Another online option is The Metric Kitchen, my only complaint with this site is its  tolerance of centimeters, but it does discourage them and prefers millimeters. And considering the trespasses in my metric cook book, I have only a marginal leg to stand upon complaining, or criticizing at all.

I have noted that one negative aspect of imperial cooking, which has not been eschewed from metric cooking, and should be. It is a stealth imperial leftover, which has seemingly gone unnoticed, or possibly ignored, but that is the topic of the next blog.

If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.


The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.


The third book is not of direct importance to metric education. It is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.

The Magic Infrastructure

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The Sewer Urchin — The Apotheosis of Cool

By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

I still recall when I was too young to reach the kitchen faucet. I would have to ask my mother to draw a glass of water for me to drink, and wait to grow. I grew up with access to water on demand. I could flip a switch and summon light. The house was warm in winter and cool in summer. The seemingly most important of all the things which provided comfort, was the ability to turn on a television. I took it all for granted as much as there would be oxygen in the room for my next breath. Indeed as far as I knew, it was all based on magic—without cost to anyone.

One Winter the twin lead cable from our television to the antenna on the roof snapped in an ice storm. The image on the television screen disappeared and was replaced with “snow.” The name seemed very ironic. It would be a couple of weeks before the ice on the roof melted sufficiently and allowed my father to reconnect the antenna. Life without television had become unthinkable, and its absence almost unbearable. It was my first experience with the loss of “infrastructure.” The failure began to make me curious about the origin of water and electricity. When I truly realized that somewhere coal was burned to create steam, which in turn rotated an electric generator, and provided electricity it surprised me that it was available 24 hours a day. But like many Americans, I began to take it all for granted and gave it little thought.

My Grandfather had a small cabin in the backwoods of Montana where he often spent weekends. The cabin was made of logs and only had a wood stove, and cabinets for food storage. The nearest electricity was 27 kilometers away. An outhouse was conveniently located about 10 meters from the cabin. We obtained water from a nearby creek. It was quite an adventure with wildlife all around, the smell of lodge pole pine in the air, and the multitude of stars one would see in a night sky without light pollution was sublime. A single gas mantle lantern illuminated the interior where we both read books into the night.

It was all very pleasant, but after a couple of days without a shower, or running water, or indoor plumbing, or electricity, or a telephone, it was nice to know I could quickly return to a home with modern infrastructure. The weekends offered solitude and relief from the modern pace of life, but also provided considerable respect for why our ancestors created infrastructure in the first place.

As a boy, I survived an F5 tornado passing over my grade school building. When I was evacuated, not long after the tornado had passed, the phone lines, power lines, trees and all the infrastructure of the small town in which I resided was devastated. There was no electricity for 1-2 weeks as I recall. The water wasn’t safe to drink. I stayed at a relatives house while the infrastructure of my little town was re-built. For months afterward the sounds of chainsaws and the movement of utility trucks was a constant.

Path of F5 Tornado

My interest in American infrastructure was greatly rekindled when I listened to a lecture by Scott Huler,  and later read his book On The Grid. What intrigued me was how oblivious I was to it all. When most people I know talk about infrastructure, it’s  usually to complain in some way. My Uncle used to quip: “There are two seasons in Minnesota, Winter and Construction.”

Since my youth, I had seen multicolored spray paint on road surfaces, but gave it little thought. Huler provided a “decoder ring” for the colored lines, which are standard throughout the country. Reviewers of Huler’s book have noted with annoyance that it is a book without any illustrations. I can agree with their sentiment, but he provided a useful Infrastructure Rosetta Stone with this graphic:

Each color of spray painted line, defines the path of Gas Lines (Yellow), Water Lines (Blue), Sewer Pipes (Green), Electrical (Red), Communications (Orange). When the path enters a lawn, small plastic flags with the same color mark the path across a lawn. White lines indicate the excavation limits. When you see these colored lines appear, you can be confident that construction will follow.

The colors indicate the area has been surveyed. As discussed in a previous blog, surveying is still done in chains, even though the most important advance has been the use of GPS, which is meter based. The GPS metric units are all converted to chains and feet by the surveyors. When an area is leveled with bulldozers, GPS is again used. Huler’s book illustrates the undisciplined way we use measurement:

Survey of Australian Subdivision in Metric

“We have an alarm that will flash on the screen if you are getting out of tolerance. I think we have it set at 2/10 of a foot”—that is less than 3 inches. If that’s not enough, there’s a system called Millimeter GPS made by a company called Topcon. “We can measure to the nearest millimeter today.” (page 18)

How about we just use millimeters? The alarm is set to 60 mm, and it’s possible to measure to the nearest millimeter today.

The way we channel storm water has decreased the amount of fresh water that returns to the water table. It instead shoots down storm drains into rivers and ends up in the sea in a short period of time. To mitigate this problem, Civil Engineers have been adding back meanders and have slowed down the flow so that more fresh water is retained. Scott Huler spends a considerable amount of time tracking down the path water takes in Raleigh, North Carolina. Here is how he describes the water flow with imperial units:

A USGS stream meter at the park later allowed me to retrieve only the value of the flow I was wading through: It was about 4/100th of a cubic foot (about a third of a gallon) per second, which is about 20 percent below it’s mean value over the last 12 years.(page 49)

Let’s convert this over to metric and see how it reads:

A USGS stream meter at the park later allowed me to retrieve only the value of the flow I was wading through: It was about one liter per second, which is about 20 percent below it’s mean value over the last 12 years.

The actual value is about 1.13 liters, so he could have also said that or 1130 mL. but the value seems too precise with the caveat of about attached twice in the original, so I just rounded it to a liter. I’m sure Scott Huler reported with values the USGS provides, and until we can change to metric, we will be collectively stuck with multiple inarticulate measurement units. Another example is:

Raleigh gulps as much as 50 million gallons of water per day, which require the intake to suck out 80 cubic feet per second. (page 54)

Which could be written in metric as:

Raleigh gulps as much as 200 million liters of water per day, which require the intake to suck out 2000 liters per second.

Then Huler leads into part of what the thesis of this blog is about:

There are O-rings for hydrants (they all have the same thread; there’s a plan to eventually adopt a nationwide thread so that all the hydrants will have the same connections)……….(page 68)

The National Bureau of Standards was created because of The Great Baltimore Fire which occurred on February 8th, 1904 (1904-02-08). Fire Departments from nearby cities were called, but when they arrived, none of their hose fittings were compatible with those of Baltimore’s fire hydrants, and so the fire kept burning as if they had never shown up. We have had 108 years to solve this problem, but like metric, nothing has happened. Perhaps because it’s all voluntary?

“Together we stand, with shovel in hand, to keep things rolling along” — Ed Norton

The physical infrastructure of the United States is crumbling. This seems to be acknowledged by our citizens, but its implications are not truly understood. Our lives are rich beyond our historical understanding. We have clean water with which we can drink and bathe. We have sewers to remove our waste and waste water. We have an electrical grid which powers all our electrical equipment and natural gas lines which act as an alternative to electricity for cooking and heating. Our communications lines have interconnected the planet. We also have roads, and bridges that allow for transportation, but as Huler points out, a most important part of our infrastructure is in complete disrepair—our railroads.

The era of inexpensive oil is over, and climate change is already accelerating the deterioration of our infrastructure. Most of the world understands this. The obvious response is to build high speed rail in the US so that people may be transported in a more cost effective manner. Transportation is the life blood of a modern economy. If it is not preserved, then an economy will slow and wither. It is important that we construct high speed rail in the US in metric, this will decrease costs for us, and employ Americans to build them, but moreover it would also make our trains ready for sale to international customers. With 95% of the worlds population using metric, it would be foolish to construct trains that required imperial tools for maintenance.

The difference between a nation and a free-for-all is universal access to a common shared infrastructure. The United States has a choice, to rebuild our infrastructure and remain a great nation, or to accept a regression into feudalism with the limit being The World Without Us. The Roman aqueducts and infrastructure did not crumble in a day, and nor has ours. It, like Rome will not be rebuilt in a day either. According to Huler: “China Spends 9 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure, Europe spends 5 percent.” The US had decreased from 3 percent to an anemic 2.4 percent. In Huler’s words: “People persist in believing that these systems will somehow maintain themselves, expand themselves, improve themselves without anybody having to put anything in.” There seems to be a considerable number of Americans that believe our infrastructure runs on magic, but it doesn’t, it runs on eternal public vigilance and funding.

The cost will be very large. In 2008 The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated we would need to invest at least $2.2 trillion over five years to bring our infrastructure back from the dead. How would taxpayers feel if I told them I could give them a 10-15% discount on whatever amount we spend on infrastructure?—forever. I suspect they would be for it. It is proverbially known that changing the US over to the metric system as part of a plan to rebuilt our infrastructure, would save at least that much in construction costs. Ten to fifteen percent on $2 trillion dollars is a serious savings.

An overhaul of our infrastructure would be a great opportunity to reform our domestic industries. We could implement metric threads and dimensions for the new pipes, standardize sheet metal thicknesses to metric, reduce the number of fasteners we would need by using all metric, and implement other useful reforms. A metric infrastructure overhaul, would create a workforce well acquainted with building in metric. This in turn will allow our international building contractors, who continue to cling to ACSOWM (i.e. inches, feet etc), to directly bid metric construction projects in foreign countries.

A coordinated metric conversion across all American industry during the repair and upgrading of our infrastructure could bring a sense of national unity. We could tap an American esprit de corps with the rebuilding of our infrastructure and society, and reverse the increasing ennui among the public. I can only hope We The People can find within ourselves, the will and drive to engage in this essential undertaking. For as Benjamin Franklin said: “One never knows the worth of water until the well runs dry.” Let’s not wait for that moment to act.

Related Essay:

The Invisible Infrastructure

If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.


The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.


The third book is not of direct importance to metric education. It is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.