Bound By Measurement: The Cup System
2/4/2022
One confounding element of being an American in Europe is being constantly emerged in a network of units of measurement that is different from what I am most comfortable in. Meters to Feet, Celsius to Fahrenheit, Liters to Ounces – all different forms of thinking about length, temperature, and volume. The trickiest one for me to adapt to is the day measurement 2/4/2022 vs. 4/2/2022. I wonder if there is more of a monthly emphasis on the American month due to its primacy? Immigrants like me have a double consciousness in measurement, needing to think in both ways at the same time. And of course, there is a lot of smugness when it comes to Europeans and their units of measurement – the metric system is rational, organized, and systematic, whereas the imperial system is simply chaos. Despite all this, however, there is one American Unit of measurement that, I feel, is superior to all, and that of course is the Cup System
Shockingly I cannot find any content about the cup system’s history. Don’t worry, I did not look too hard. In fact, I have never really questioned the centrality of the cup system in my own understanding of measurement until I baked alongside Europeans. So long have I taken for granted that little set of cups: a hard-plastic green, linked by a singular clip, numbered 1 Cup, ½ Cup, ¾ Cup, ¼ Cup, 1/3 Cup, etc. They always haunted the kitchen cabinets of my childhood home, and during my youthful baking passions, they became a part of my pattern – the ¾ cup used to measure the sugar of my chocolate chip cookies, the 1 Cup used to measure the peanut butter of my peanut butter cookies, etc. I had intimate knowledge of this measurement of ingredient and the product these measurements would eventually yield. So ingrained is the cup system in the American baking consciousness that it puts itself onto other forms of baking products. For example, I know on a fundamental level that 1 stick of butter is ½ a cup of butter. The measure of “cup” therefore defines the measure of “stick”. The way I think about food production is inextricably linked to and embedded in the cup system.
Living with Europeans, I can confirm that the metric system is not the most ideal way for measuring baked goods. Recipes call for 100 grams of flower, or 250 grams of Butter, 600 ml of water, etc., etc. – and these numbers just have no tangible meaning to me. While I do love the metric system in most cases, I simply believe that the cup system is far superior in the creation of food. Why? You may be thinking that this is a “metric system bad” essay. But it’s not. It’s a love letter to how measurements are based on lived experience. I love how the form of measurement is simply verbal, rather than mathematical. “Cup” is such a fun term as it is a volume that is bound to a single object. While there are mathematical truths to the cup (1 Cup = 128 Grams or 4.5 Ounces of an abstract something) the cup is simply a measure of itself, no more no less. A cup is a cup. A cup of something is whatever fits into it. The fractional cups are only a reduction of an ideal cup. The cup is the center of its own universe. And this is why the cup is superior – a cup of something is always the same amount of that something. It measures volume, and that is so key when baking because all ingredients revolve around the idea of cup-age. The issue with grams is that each ingredient has its own density, and that might just make a recipe confusing, but the lightest ingredient and the heaviest ingredient are equal under the cup system.
I found a recipe for peanut butter cookies online the other day that is just proof of this. Here are the measurements for the solids in the recipe:
112g Butter
100g Sugar
110g Brown Sugar
130g Peanut Butter
How is this measured then? A scale? Doesn’t that make things so hard, so difficult? Under the cup system, these four measurements are all reduced to one singular metric: ½ Cup. Seeing grams and liters in recipes always seems so intangible to me for some reason, perhaps because I am just so used to cups. I think it goes deeper though, knowing what a cup looks like, and how much that cup contains, makes reading the recipe so much easier to visualize. The measurement is not based on some universal metric out there but rather from a metric of muscle memory. Therefore, cups make cooking and baking so much easier, because the nature of the measurement is based on language, rather than math.
Additionally, The cup system is preferable to me simply because of the memories of the object. There is something about the “CUP” being a sacred object in the kitchen, a foundational artifact that defines how food is made in the American kitchen, a quintessential tool central to all my memories of cooking and baking and how I think about cooking and baking.
Reflecting on the cup system makes me think about how I consider measurement on a larger scale. Being exposed to so many different systems over my lifetime I realized that I base measurement on my memories and experiences, rather than just the mathematical corollary. Yes, the cup is a measurement from memory, so deeply engrained, and that is how I think about the act of food creation. But so is a mile is another measurement stemmed in memory – a mile to me is 4 laps around the track. And at the same time, I know 400 meters to be one lap around the track. “Track” is therefore the tool I use to convert meters and miles, how I understand distance, and that is inherently linked to my memories of an athlete in high school, the literal thousands of laps I ran to become faster. Liquid for me is not understood primarily through the math of ounces or gallons or liters, but through “Nalgene” water bottles, a material product that has been central to my hydration routine for over a decade. Similarly, a “pint” is understood through the beer I enjoy with friends, and, expanding on that, a bar evening’s degree of conversation intensity is measured by the number of pints. Height is not best understood objectively, but subjectively. 6’0’’ equals “me” and all other heights are then based on that relationality. “6”0’”’ also is a fascinating measurement because it almost serves as a socio-sexual category in dating app discourse rather than an empirical measurement, but maybe that’s for a later day.
This is all to say, measurement is better understood in language than through maths. And I think that because different things should be measured by different metrics. Back to the immediate example of human height: The imperial system is clearly superior. 5”4’, 6”0’, and 6”6’ are more easily understood as social categories rather than precise measurements; while the metric range of 1.626 – 1.829 is bland and does not vary enough to have real human meaning. Liters make more sense than Ounces, at least to me, because the measurement of Liter stays constant verbally when compared to the absolute mess of the ounce-quart-gallon situation. And, back to the point of all this, the cup system is simply king in the kitchen because it creates a constancy in all ingredients.
We live in a society where we cannot be bound to one set of measurements. The imperial system, the metric system, the cup system, all have measurements that make sense based on each unique circumstance. I propose something of a new all-inclusive measurement system, the millennial- system, a system that is based not on hard mathematical forms of a singular kind, but rather a system that is based on social pragmatism, on a linguistic reality, on memory.
Anyway…that Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe really got me riled up.
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