Unusable Butter
2008 March 18
I can cook. I can follow a recipe, and I am comfortable in the kitchen. But I don’t have my Imperial unit conversion values memorized, so I don’t know off the top of my head, for example, that 16 tablespoons equals 1 cup.
When cooking with butter, I usually rely on the stick itself to provide me with the guidance I need. In this case, the recipe called for 3/4 of a cup. Super, no problem. Okay, let’s see what the wrapper can do to help us. It says:
1/4 LB = 8 TBSP
1/4 LB = 1/2 CUP
ONE LB = 2 CUPS
THIS UNIT NOT LABELED FOR RETAIL SALE.
How is any of this useful information? I don’t know about you, but I never measure my ingredients in pounds. But somewhere out there, a butter label designer thinks that’s exactly what I want to know. And maybe if I worked in a mess hall kitchen, he’d be right, but I don’t.
The problem here is that I have to convert my 3/4 cup value into butter-pounds, a very unfamiliar unit. At long last, I see that:
3/4 cups = 3/8 lbs = 12 Tbsp
Finally! Now I count out the Tbsp markers on the label, see that there are 8 Tbsp in each stick. So I need 12/8 or 1 1/2 sticks.
A+ in arithmetic.
Household hint: “A pint equals a pound the world round.” You say you know that there are 16 Tbs in a cup. So if you can remember that 2 cups equal a pint, the butter-pound thing should make sense.
There are places in the world (usually metric ones) where cooking measurements are done in weight, not volume. FYI
Comment by Karen — 2008 March 18 @ 7:20 pm
For the curious, that stick of butter compels one to get out a notebook and revisit dimensional analysis. But it would have been much easier to simply put just two equivalencies on the wrapper rather than three:
1 Tbs = 1/16 cup 1 lb = 32 Tbs
You only need two equivalencies to figure out the tablespoons/cups/pounds relationship. But the wrapper gives you three, trying to print what they believe to be the most commonly referenced recipe quantities.
Regarding Karen’s comment about weight vs. volume measurements, it’s true that butter could be measured in either, but sticky or gooey substances are better off measured volumetrically. Think of the tablespoon lines on the stick of butter: Much easier to simply cut cold butter on the markers with a knife than to cut little bits of butter repeatedly onto a scale until you get the right mass.
And, as long as we’re being really picky about things, the countries that don’t measure volumetrically use mass, not weight as Karen suggests, as the unit of measure.
Comment by michael — 2008 March 23 @ 5:16 am