Weights and Measures

A weighing balance is not used by housewives for day to day cooking in India. Experienced persons can do all right without a balance, but beginners fail to reproduce every time the same quality in a particular dish unless they weigh the ingredients. And in order to impress upon students the importance of weighing the ingredients, the author has made it a rule to weigh every ingredient in their presence during her cookery demonstrations. Both the metric system and the imperial system of weights (avoirdupois) and capacity have been used in describing the recipes in this book, and a table of the approximate equivalences of these and of Indian weights and measures is given below. In the recipes, following the practice of French and Italian cookery books, numbers of grammes are usually rounded off to the nearest 5, e.g. 3½ ozs is shown as 100 g instead of the 99 given in the table, 1 lb as 455 g instead of 453.6 and so on, as this is easier both to memorise and to measure. An exception is the ¼ oz which has been left as 7 g. The spoons mentioned in the recipes are B.S.I. measuring spoons as spoons might vary in size from place to place. All spoon measures are level unless expressly stated otherwise.