Here’s some hundred-year-old advice about the weight equivalents of various common ingredients. It’s interesting how a given volume of some foods weighs less than other foods. For example, 2 cups of granulated sugar equals a pound, but a pint (2 cups) of brown sugar equals 13 ounces.
I found this list in a cookbook compiled by an organization. It made me smile to see how the one item on the list that spilled over to a second line was out of alignment with the other items in the list. I’d probably do something like that – though maybe that’s how it’s supposed formatted. Not sure.
That is really interesting and may be helpful. It makes me want to weigh food.
This is really a handy chart! I’m tempted to get out my scale and double check it, although I’m sure it’s pretty accurate!
The one word that looks out of alignment is simply the last of the longest sentence here, and all the others in the list were indented, so this would not be. It’s called an ‘orphan’ in typesetting (my old newspaper background) and it always looks peculiar.
I found this list very interesting, Sheryl. I guess we don’t use the measurement of “gills” anymore, I have never heard of that. And I found it curious to identify butter as the size of an egg, because it’s always marked on the paper, but maybe they didn’t have marked butter paper so much then. Churning, I think, would’ve been longer ago than 1923. Wonderful post.
Interesting that a “gill” was evidently commonly used to mean a half cup. Completely fallen out of usage.
I have a cookbook that has recipes from the Civil War years and they have these odd measurements – a pint of butter or 2 oz of eggs. Sadly there’s no conversion chart!!! I’m going to print this and stick it in the front of the cookbook!!
Today, a standard American tablespoon is 3 standard American teaspoons.
I don’t know why it says a heaping quart of flour is a pound, but, in the next line, that 4 cups equals a quart equals a pound of flour.