I've never actually encountered a table spoon that measures a "tablespoon."
3:1
seems to be the ratio of teaspoons to tablespoons, yet I've never used a
"teaspoon" three of which would fill a real tablespoon, though I guess the
measures work out that way.
The purpose of the recipe is to provide a place to start ... <sigh> ... that's
all one can hope for, I guess.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pete Turnbull" <pete(a)dunnington.u-net.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 2:39 PM
Subject: Re: New here :-)
  On Mar 5, 18:51, Tony Duell wrote:
  > 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 
 
 Except that, traditionally, there are two teaspoons in a dessertspoon and
 two dessertspoons in a tablespoon.  It doesn't add up :-)
  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