Here's a recipe expressed in United States customary units of measurement. I think it's
very possible for that to be a good recipe, and yet become a bad recipe when it's expressed
in metric units. And vice versa — a total banger recipe written in grams and mils can
become rubbish when it's written in pounds and cups. And by "banger" I mean good, not
sausage.
Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here's a recipe by Chef Peroxide McCraggyface for
a Shepherd's Pie. Love a Shepherd's Pie. What's he call for here?
500 grams of minced lamb. The Brits call it minced even though it's actually been ground.
Luckily I know that. What I don't know is how much 500 grams is in ounces and pounds
— you know, the system of weights that we here in the United States inherited from the
Brits like some kind of hand-me-down sweater with a hole in it, before they went off and
got a fancy new Continental sweater.
Let's figure this out. Google is a free website. 500 grams is 1.1 pounds. If I go to the meat
counter at my grocery store and ask the guy there for 1.1 pounds of ground lamb, I suspect
I might get one pound of ground lamb and a tenth of a pound of loogie.
Ground meat is generally sold in round numbers. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna buy one pound
of ground lamb and my pie is gonna be 1/11th less meaty than Gordon's. Maybe that's not
big deal, but let's keep reading. What else we need? 300 milliliters of chicken stock.
That's a great quantity for Gordon, because that's how big the stock container is at the
Tesco near Gordon's house in London.
He just pours the whole lot in, and then tosses the container in the trash. I'm sorry, I mean
the bin.
Chicken stock in my grocery store is pretty much only sold in 2-pound cartons; that's
946 mils. So what am I gonna do, especially if I'm the kind of relatively inexperienced
cook who would be following a Gordon Ramsay recipe to the letter anyway? I'm gonna buy
the bigger container, pour in exactly how much Gordon tells me to pour in, then I'm
gonna stick the rest of this into the refrigerator so that I can throw it away in three to five
weeks.
When we write recipes, we tend to build them around those ingredients that come in relatively
fixed quantities. Some ingredients come in relatively fluid quantities, like, say, water.
I'd say that counts as fluid. I can write a recipe that calls for this much water or
this much water, it's all the same to you — because you can pour off however much
you need.
But if I'm gonna write, say, a dried pasta recipe, there's a relatively fixed quantity
involved, i.e. the box. Sure, I could call for this much pasta or this much pasta, but
nobody wants a box of pasta hanging around the pantry with not enough noodles to do anything
with, but at the same time too many to just throw away without feeling guilty about it.
A recipe that leaves you with this at the end of the night is a bad recipe — I don't
care how good it tastes. It is inconsiderate of the realities of being a home cook.
So, I'm not gonna write a recipe like that. I'm gonna treat the box as a relatively fixed
quantity — and then let all of the other more fluid quantities flow proportionally
from there. Like, here's my macaroni and cheese recipe. Oh, sorry Brits — "macaroni cheese."
It starts with 1 pound of dried pasta shells. Yes I know that technically makes it shells
and cheese but I can't fight that battle right now. Plus, Brits, what do you want me to call
it? "Shells cheese"? Anyway dried pasta comes in 1-pound boxes in the United States, so
all the other quantities in my recipe flow from that starting point.
Now, if I want to translate that recipe into metric, as so many of my viewers have earnestly
requested that I do, I'm gonna have a problem — because 1 pound is 453 grams. The Tesco
near Gordon's house doesn't sell a 453 gram box. It sells a 500 gram box. That's not a
trivial difference. That's like 10 percent more pasta.
So do I give the metric quantity as 500 grams, or 453 grams? If I round it up to 500, do
I just hope that all of the other quantities in the recipe will also kind of turn out to
be a little bit bigger when converted to metric? Let's see if that works.
I call for three cups milk. Three cups is 709 mils. I'm tempted to round that down to
700, but now I've got slightly more pasta and slightly less milk and GAHHH, see? This
not gonna work!
My point here is that a system of weights and measures is like a language. It arguably
is a language. And sure, you can translate something from one language to another, but
a poem written in English is never gonna be as good once it's translated into, say, French.
I mean, I can easily translate the ideas, but the meter, the rhyme, assonance, alteration
— all that stuff is going be lost, and lord help me if I've used an idiomatic expression
in my poem.
I mean, imagine I wrote a poem about the rain in which the there's a cat and there's a dog,
because I'm doing a play on the English idiom "it's raining cats and dogs." That joke is
not gonna land in France, because in France when it's raining a lot, they don't say that
it's raining cats and dogs — they literally say that it's raining ropes.
That's actually like a classic example of this problem I'm talking about — I didn't
make that up. I'm not that cool. But anyway, yes, of course, you can do excellent translations
of poetry, but there's a reason that excellent translations of poetry are normally written
by other poets — because in order to make a poem work in another language, you basically
have to re-author it in that language. You can't just run it through Google Translate.
So if was gonna translate one of my recipes into metric, ideally I wouldn't want to just
do a Google job on it and translate 1 pound into 453 grams. I would want to to reimagine
the entire recipe to make it natively metric — to make it work with the things that you
have in your grocery store and the things that are easy to measure on your scales and
in your measuring vessels.
This discussion raises a pretty interesting question: Owing purely to the differences
in measurement systems, could it be the case that food is appreciably different in the
metric world compared to here in the non-metric world? And by non-metric world, of course,
I mean, the wide world of the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar. Yes, we three are the only non-metric
countries left. Might there be ways in which food is noticeably different here in the United
States compared to everywhere else in the world, purely because the measurement systems
that we use nudge us towards making certain decisions in the kitchen?
It's the whole tail-wagging-the-dog phenomenon, right? In linguistics and cognitive science
they have this concept called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. It's also known as linguistic
relativity — the idea that our languages actually shape our thinking.
Classic example of that is the Russian word for blue: there is no Russian word for blue.
There's a Russian word for light blue and a Russian word for dark blue, but there's
no Russian word the existence of which implicitly asserts that both colors are shades of the
same color. As a result, Russian-speakers and English-speakers think about these colors
in very different ways. That is, at least, the theory. Linguistic relativity has a lot
of critics. Not all the scientists believe that, but that's the idea.
Let's look over in the fields of business and economics where they have this concept
called "round-number bias." People are more likely to buy or sell an asset once it hits
a nice round number, even if that might not be the most rational time to buy or sell.
You gotta wonder if there's some phenomenon in cooking that's kinda like linguistic relativity
and round number bias.
Let's go back to Gordon's shepherd's pie. He tells you to bake it at 180 Celsius — that's
a relatively round number, very common in metric recipes. If I were to translate that
to Fahrenheit for my oven, that is 356 Fahrenheit. My oven can't do that. My oven can do 350
— probably the most common temperature in Fahrenheit cookbooks. It's so common that
350 is literally the default temperature on this oven, and it is 6 degrees cooler than
the corresponding temperature in the metric world.
Is American food different from, say, European food because we're baking a lot of our stuff
at a slightly lower temperature? I did a lot of research to see if someone has proposed
this phenomenon before, and I couldn't find anything. If something is out there, please
let me know about it. If no one has proposed this before, then there's a free thesis or
dissertation idea for somebody studying food science. Take it. Just promise me that you'll
call it the Ragusea phenomenon.
For my part, I'm going to make you this promise now that I'm going to start doing metric conversions
on all my recipes. I'm not gonna reimagine them in metric; I'm just gonna do a Google
job on them. And I have no idea how I'm gonna handle things like "tablespoons." Did you
know that a tablespoon in Canada and the U.K. is 15 mils but in the U.S. it 14.79 and in
Australia it's 20?
But, it shouldn't matter that much, because the better way to use someone else's recipe
is always as a starting point. Take the concept, the idea of the dish — and make it work
with whatever they have down at your grocery store that day that's looking really nice
or is on sale. And in the same way, you make it work with whatever quantities and temperatures
your system of measurement is subconsciously prodding you to use, because our minds are
not our own – the system is in control. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.
Ooo, that reminds me — I want Sheppard's pie.