In article >,
Rowbotth > wrote:
= The differences won't matter if you stick one unit and stay with it. If
= you use Metric for the first measurement, use it all the way through the
= recipe and you will be OK. You will only get into trouble if you use
= both units in the same recipe.

I'm not sure I see what you mean by this.

As long as you use the *right* unit, it shouldn't matter whether
they're all one, all the other, of a mix of both.

Are you simply suggesting that you can use the same numbers and
call them either cups or litres, pounds or kilograms, etc?

If so, I'm not convinced that you're right. The proportion
between, e.g., cups and litres is different to that between pounds
and kilograms, etc.

One cup is half a pint which is *approximately* one quarter litre
(250 millilitres). One pound, on the other hand is somewhat less
than half a kilogram.

Consider a recipe (for nothing you'd want to make as an example:

Original:

1 litre water
1 kilogram flour

Replacing litre with cup and kilogram with pound yields:

1 cup water
1 pound flour

The real (approximate) translation would be

1 quart water (i.e. 4 cups)
2.2 pound flour

So, reducing the properly translated recipe to the equivalent
one-cup version, would yield (approximately):

1 cup water
0.55 pound flour

showing that simply substituting US units for metric ones while
using the same numbers yields a version in this example where one
has, relatively, twice as much flour (approximately) as one should
have.

Will there be specific cases where one can get away with that?
Probably. Can one depend on it in every case? Absolutely not.

So I must be misinterpreting what you're saying above.

Can you clarify?


--
Charlie Sorsby

Edgewood, NM 87015
USA