像大多数美国人一样，萨明·诺萨特(Samin Nosrat)在厨房里也使用杯子作为量具。不过，她说，这些量具并不总是被使用。诺萨特是烹饪书《盐、脂肪、酸、热》(Salt Fat Acid Heat)的作者，也是同名Netflix节目的主持人，她以“感官引导烹饪”(sensory-guided cooking)为职业，通过帮助家庭厨师了解食材的特性来培养他们的烹饪直觉，因此承认自己“对量具有一种复杂的关系”。“如果我要写一些清晰且有效的食谱，”诺萨特说，“使用秤就很有道理。我有三套秤。” || 欧洲和美国的厨房文化之间存在鸿沟。根本区别在于，美国人在厨房中使用体积而非重量进行测量。用杯子烹饪是基于体积的，并且高度依赖视觉线索——每个人都知道一杯细砂糖的样子；而200克或7.1盎司则不是那么容易辨认。而公制系统则是基于重量的。“问题不在于美国人称重的方式不同，”为美国市场美国化英国食谱的作家萨拉·钱伯林说。“他们中的大多数人根本不称重。”尽管她自称“双语厨师”，钱伯林更喜欢使用公制系统称重，“因为数字的乘除更简单”。食品专业人士似乎普遍认为，与杯子相比，克和毫克更精确。|| 伦敦维奥莱特面包店的克雷尔·帕特克（Claire Ptak）曾为梅根和哈里制作婚礼蛋糕。她认为，大多数美国家庭都没有一套秤。帕特克已出版了五本食谱书，多年来一直敦促她的美国读者购买秤。她的母亲在女儿成为专业面包师20多年后才刚刚买了一套秤。|| “我突然意识到这是一种多么自恋的行为，”诺萨特说，“我们在美国坚持使用杯子系统，而世界上其他地方则以另一种方式烹饪。”正如钱伯林所说：“就像告诉某人他们最初被编程去做的事情是错误的。” 一套杯子量具有时会代代相传，许多人是从现已不在世的家人那里学会用这种方式烹饪的，现在你就可以理解为什么这个问题会引发强烈的情感共鸣了。

Like most Americans, Samin Nosrat grew up in a home with cup measures in the kitchen. That said, they didn’t always get used. Nosrat, the author of cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat and presenter of the Netflix show with the same name, has built a career on what she calls “sensory-guided cooking” – helping home cooks to build culinary instincts by understanding how ingredients behave – and so admits to having “a somewhat tortured relationship with measurements”. “If I’m going to write recipes which are clear and which work,” says Nosrat, “it just makes sense to use scales. I have three sets.”

There is a chasm between Europe and America’s kitchen cultures. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume, not weight, to make measurements in their kitchens. Cooking with cups is volume-based while the metric system is weight-based. “The issue isn’t that Americans weigh things differently,” says Sarah Chamberlain, a writer who Americanises British cookbooks for the US market. “It’s that most of them don’t weigh things at all.” Though she describes herself as “a bilingual cook”, Chamberlain prefers weighing things using the metric system, “because the numbers multiply and divide more easily”. Food professionals seem universally to prefer grams and milligrams to cups for their accuracy.

Most US households don’t have a set of scales, agrees Claire Ptak, of Violet Bakery in London, who made Meghan and Harry’s wedding cake. Ptak has written five cookbooks and for years has been banging a drum for her American readers to invest in scales; her own mother has only just bought a set more than 20 years into her daughter’s career as a professional baker.

“It’s dawned on me how narcissistic it is,” says Nosrat, “that we in the US insist on the cup system when the rest of the world cooks in another way.” As Chamberlain says: “It’s telling someone the thing they first got programmed to do was wrong.” Add to that the fact that sets of cup measures sometimes get handed down through generations, and that many people learned to cook this way from now-absent family members, and you can understand why the issue becomes emotionally charged.