Unit Conversion is Hard

I have already mentioned some of the issues associated with cooking in a country that uses different units of measure in my earlier post on everyday living, but that was written back when we lived with Fanny and Vic and all of their Swiss measuring implements. Fanny had one cup about the size of a pint glass with gram measurements for most of the common dry ingredients (flour, rice, sugar, etc) as well as  a line for 5 dl of any liquid. It may not have worked terribly well for any of our old recipes, but was darned useful for anything we've made from ingredients here.



Now that we are in our shiny new (temporary) place, we have found ourselves without this magical measuring device, and have been forced to improvise. Recipes that simply require ratios, such as rice, really haven't been a problem, but others have resulted in complications. Here are the basics of how we have been getting along.

As you can see, these tools are somewhat non-ideal. The nalgene has been more of a tease than a help, reminding us that it once had the increments of both liters and ounces written on the side. Once, but no longer. The spoons have proven unreliable, but the mug has been the greatest source of uncertainty. It became clear that we needed one of Fanny's magical measuring pint glasses. 

A multi-store search has yet to yield another pint glass, but we have found a cup made with similar intent. First let us marvel in the new measuring cup and its infinite superiority to the old mug and nalgene method. Behold...

It is see-through! It has numbers! Units! Lines! It is has once been calibrated for the accurate measurement of cooking ingredients! But, upon closer inspection, this measuring cup reveals something quite disturbing about the Swiss population: they cannot do unit conversion! Observe, the first pair of measurements highlighted in blue: 

I know that some recipes call for liters and some call for deciliters, but it seems that some valuable cup-space could have been saved by assuming that people can divide by ten. We Americans are often mocked for our admittedly ridiculous unit systems (cups, pints, quarts... really?), but I like to think that we can at least divide by ten. That being said, for the sake of this entry we may have to conveniently forget that many of our measuring cup sets do come with either a 3/4 or 2/3 cup measure. 

The next set of measurements are specifically for those of us from the States. 

Though the cup assumes that dividing 10 is too great of a task to expect of the general population, the presence of both liquid and dry measures on the same device assumes that those of us using it should be able to exercise basic logic in measuring dry ingredients before liquids. As one who has repeatedly ended up with grains of rice stuck to the lingering droplets of water in a measuring cup, I believe that this may be an optimistic assumption. 

Next come the measurements in grams for flour and sugar, which I am sure will prove to be quite useful. I suppose, since the measurements are in grams, it would probably be easier to use a scale than have lines indicating the volume equivalent for 100 grams for every possible dry ingredient. But as I do not yet want to go buy a scale, I will take what I can get. 

Finally, for those who are unable to both pour ingredients into a measuring cup and look from the side to see how much they have added, there are additional lines printed on the inside. As you may have guessed, this is also in liters and deciliters ... and milliliters. 

And now, as it is dinner time, I must stop posting sarcastically captioned pictures of my new measuring cup and use it to measure first rice and then water. Bon appetit!