You may be saying this, but it's fine until it's not.

A good example of where it's not is baking. Cup works for the wet stuff but will ruin your baking if you use it with flour. Because of flour's ability to compact, 1 cup is a wildly different amount. That really impacts how dry or mushy your bread turns out.

That's not the fault of the poor cup, it simply means flour should be measured by weight instead

Show me a recipe that uses cups for volumetric measurements and also has any mass measurements. They're rare.

Cups makes it either very old or very American, and from what I've seen American recipes tend not to measure anything by mass. (Even butter is measured by the 'sticks' that it's sold in there. They're obviously some standard weight, but if you're not American (and so did not buy your butter in a stick) you'll have to try to look that up.) And in a vicious circle, as I understand it most American home kitchens don't have scales?

Personally I think cups (or call it anything, doesn't matter) are nice when absolutely everything is going to be described in a volumetric ratio. That works nicely, it's easy to scale, and it doesn't matter at all what a 'cup' is, everything's just relative to everything else. But even then, especially with wet & dry ingredients, you probably want multiple 'cups' of the same size, it's not completely convenient.

Tell that to all the people who write recipes without weight measurements

I agree this is a problem.

I found a table with the density of various flours and many other things: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...

Yeah - I started getting food boxes with picked ingredients that I cook every week a few years ago ... to add to the "cup" situation there's also the tablespoons/teaspoons situation they like to go nuts on their smaller ones.

My favourite was seeing "half" a tablespoon of something.. not having a full derivative of measurement devices for this unit, thankfully with 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon that was merely 1.5 teaspoon.

And then they have eg "sprinkle", "dash" and "pinch". As in "add a dash of water". Grr, those are _not_ beginner friendly units. I've destroyed a dish by adding a "big pinch" of salt (my fingers probably much bigger than theirs).

I find measuring with grams and millilitres much easier.

Salt is the worst because a pinch of kosher salt is wildly different from a pinch of granulated salt.

That said, one key part of cooking is knowing when the measurements matter. Most herbs and spices will flavor a dish exactly the same if you add a teaspoon or a tablespoon.

Those measurements matter the most when there's a chemical reaction that's strongly influenced by the ratios. For example, having enough emulsifier in a cheese sauce.

Yep - it was indeed a teaching moment for me. :-) Dealing with a bit of high blood pressure as well, I'm learning to err on the side of caution when it comes to salt.

Suggestion for that, look into using MSG instead of salt.

Obviously doesn't work everywhere, but it does work in many places.

It's the fault of many recipes which use volumetric measurements for everything because "it's good enough"

The imperial cup is 20% larger than the US Customary cup. That is not a rocket science tolerance!