5 Mar
2001
5 Mar
'01
7:39 a.m.
On Mar 5, 18:51, Tony Duell wrote:
Except that, traditionally, there are two teaspoons in a dessertspoon and
two dessertspoons in a tablespoon. It doesn't add up :-)
> If you think all that's bad, I still
haven't figured out the
measurements
> for cooking...like how many tablespoons in a cup,
and how many cups in
a
quart and all
that nonsense. Who came up with this crap anyway?
I knew the HP49G was useful for something :-). It has all those units in
the unit management system..
According to that machine :
1 cup = 16 tablespoons
1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces
1 quart = 4 cups
1 cup = 236.5882365 ml
And those are U.S. measures, I think. A cup is half a pint; an imperial
pint is 20 fluid ounces, not 16. An imperial quart = 2 imperial pints =
1.136523 litres (1136 ml); 4 U.S. cups = 946 ml.
A tablespoon is supposedly 15ml (mine aren't but that's another story :-))
So 16 tbsp (1 U.S. cup) would be 240ml. Close enough for cookery, I
suppose.
And of course that only applies to liquid measure. When you're measuring
dry materials, you're supposed to use a rounded (not heaped! that's
different) spoonful -- an allowance for the hypothetical meniscus, of
course.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York