The Ships Cook Book

Recipes, Insight, Theory and Everyday Management for Students, Ships Cooks, and those with an interest in Marine Catering Operations. All Recipes have a fully adjustable servings feature, just change the number of servings and the ingredients recalculate automatically.

The Ships Cook Book
Equipment Index 

Cup and Spoon Measures

shipscookbook

These inexpensive Cup and Spoon measures are an inviable tool for any one that bakes or follows recipes when cooking, as so many recipes these days seem to specify cups and/or spoons for some of the ingredients, cups and spoons are a way of measuring ingredients by volume and they and quick and easy to use.

Anyone that works on a ship is well aware that ships move up and down and side to side as they move through the water, this creates forces cause all kitchen scales, mechanical and electronic, to go up and down making it impossible to measure.

Using cups and spoons to measure by volume is unaffected by ships motion and generally we only use cups and spoons for measuring dry foods and powders and also liquids.

Liquids measured this way by volume are always accurate, however is should be noted it is possible to get slight variations when measuring some dry ingredients depending on if the item is compacted, for instance sifted flour has a greater volume than compacted flour, according  Wikipedia the difference between one cup of compacted flour compared to one cup of sieved flour is as much as 40 grams, having said this in practice I have never found this to be a problem and tend to compact powders into the measures tap to ensure there are no air pockets and then slide a small pallet knife across the top to level.

All cups and spoons should be levelled when measuring.

I carry several small items of equipment in my luggage when joining new vessels, and Cup and Spoon measures are one such item.

A somewhat bazar fact about measuring cup sizes around the world, is different counties use different amounts or volumes, but brushing this  inconsistency  to one side most of the cups I have come across are 250ml, equals 1 cup,  this is the measure we use on the Ships Cook Book recipes.

   

We use the following sizes in our recipes;-

1 cup  =250ml

1/2 cup = 125ml

1/3 cup = 80ml

1/4 cup = 60ml

1/8 cup = 30ml

1      Tables Spoon

1/2  Table Spoon

1      Teaspoon

1/2  Teaspoon

1/4 Teaspoon

1/8 Teaspoon

And if you think measuring cups and spoons are not very interesting take a look at an slightly whimsical but interesting article I cam across when researching about cup and spoon measures, on the link below.

https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2017/10/27/perfect-measuring-cup-quest