Help understanding American recipe?

[luzula]

I would like to make this cake recipe. What does it mean when it says "1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour, divided" in the ingredient list? First I read it as "one to one half a cup", but that doesn't make sense. Is this in fact an American way of writing "one and a half"? And why does it say "divided"? Also it's a mystery to me why it says in the instructions that you should use "1-1/4 cups flour" instead of "1-1/2 cups flour". I can't see anywhere else in the recipe that uses flour. It does say "test kitchen approved", so I assume it's tested and proofread...

Comments

[badly_knitted]

Having had a quick look, seems like you beat in the last quarter cup of flour in step 2.

[luzula]

Oops, I missed that. *facepalm* But does it in fact mean one and a half cup, that is, 1.5 cups?

[badly_knitted]

Altogether, yes. 1.25 cups in step one, then the final .25 of a cup in step two. I have no idea what size cup though... I'm not a baker.

[sanguinity]

While I'm sure "1 cup" began its life as "grab a teacup from the cupboard and use that to measure", nowadays "1 cup" is a standardized measurement of 237ml, and they sell standardized measuring cups that are just exactly that size. Most of which are very bad for drinking beverages from. ;-)

[badly_knitted]

Ah, I am enlightened! Thank you!

[luzula]

Oops, I've been using 2.5 dl for an American cup, so I see I've been getting a little too much! Will adjust.

[sanguinity]

The difference is, what, 5%? It’s difficult to imagine there isn’t already that kind of wiggle room built in, to make everything come out in nice round measurements, “1/2 cup”, etc. The idea that 237ml of whatever is the precisely ideal amount of an ingredient seems unlikely to me.

[luzula]

Good point! I usually improvise and change recipes when cooking, but never cake recipes, because they are usually dependent on getting the proportions right. But you're right, there must be some wiggle room since they're usually in fairly even measurements.

[ride_4ever]

What badly_knitted said.

Also...this being a zucchini-forward recipe I'm guessing that you have a lot of zucchini. Summertime by me the gardens are so full of zucchini that there's a joke "don't leave your car unlocked in the summer or someone will fill it full of zucchini".

[luzula]

Yeah, I missed some text in step 2, but I've still never seen the "1-1/2" notation before. Thanks!

Yep, lots of zucchini around here. : )

[sanguinity]

It means: "One and one-half cups of flour total, which will be divided into portions not yet specified and added at different times."

The first portion is one and one-quarter cups in step one.

The second portion is "the remaining flour" in step two: to wit, one-quarter cup.

[luzula]

I did miss the bit about "the remaining flour". *facepalm* But I've never seen the "1-1/2" notation to mean "1.5" before! To me that means either "one to one half" (that is, it expresses a range, which is not reasonable here because it should go from the smaller number to the larger, and anyway a cake recipe shouldn't have a range like that), or it means "one minus one half" which is obviously also not reasonable in a recipe.

[sanguinity]

Yeah, I can see that. When my little brother was learning to bake, he misread a chocolate chip cookie recipe that said "2 1/2 cups flour" (or possibly "2-1/2", this was many decades ago now) as two one-halves, to wit, one cup.

His poor cookies melted. Little clusters of chocolate chips in a thin film of goo...

Which is to say: yeah, this notation and its variants doesn't make it particularly clear what the relationship between the fractional and non-fractional parts are.

[luzula]

Around here, 1 1/2 is a standard way of writing 1.5, but I've never seen it with the dash. Perhaps being a mathematician made me overthink it, because in the context of a recipe, there really is no other reasonable way to interpret it than 1.5.

[desireearmfeldt]

I wouldn't write 1-1/2 that way, but they do seem to mean 1.5. Possibly they thought it would be easier to read on a screen or something?

[luzula]

I have no idea! 1.5 would have been less possible to misinterpret, I think.

[desireearmfeldt]

American recipes do traditionally use fractions rather than decimals.

[seascribble]

I see you have gotten many good and reliable explanations. I've seen half measures written that way a few times; I wonder if it might be to reduce the chance of mixing up the numbers and someone doing 11 cups? Which if we could just use grams or, if we must use cups, decimals, all would be easier. At least they were kind enough not to assume "sticks" was a viable measure for butter.

[luzula]

I'm used to deciliters for volumes in baking, but I'm fine with cups so long as it's clear how many there are...1.5 would have been clearer, I think. Yeah, the "sticks" one is annoying, I always have to look it up.

[antisoppist]

Yeah in my job working from Scandinavian languages I do a lot of converting dl into ml in recipes and the flour and sugar are a total pain because we do those in grammes. I do have a decilitre measure from when I lived in Finland so I weigh it myself.

[luzula]

At least dl into ml is easy. I don't think one dl of flour always weighs the same though, it depends on the moisture content of the flour.

[genarti]

I see you've gotten explanations, so I'll just say that I've occasionally run into people who feel that "1-1/2" is clearer than "1 1/2" and personally I fully disagree; I advocate for no hyphen across the board! I guess the idea is to avoid poor kerning making it look as if it's "11/2," but surely that's easy enough to avoid.

[luzula]

Hyphens are used for so many purposes in general that 1-1/2 is very open to interpretation! I wonder why they didn't use 1.5 instead, which surely can't be misunderstood.

[genarti]

I usually see fractions rather than decimals for recipe measurements, now that you mention it! I'm not sure why.  Partly it might be because 1/3 cup is also a standard measurement, and that one's not quite as graceful to decimalize, I guess? 1.33 just looks a bit silly to me, but I guess there's no reason it inherently is. But I honestly think it's probably just historical. The standard cup sizes are 1 cup, 1/2 cup, 1/3 cup, and 1/4 cup, usually sold as a set, and pretty much every American kitchen has at least one set of those, so it's fraction math we're all used to doing in our heads.  (Same for teaspoons, except those sometimes have 1/8 too; tablespoons are usually just whole and half, because there are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon so there's not a lot of point in having a special separate spoon for anything smaller than a 1/2 tbsp. But we juggle those fractions a lot in the kitchen, in any case.)

[sanguinity]

Yes, this. American recipes are all expressed in fractions because the American kitchen measurement tools are all fractional. (And because the measurement tools are all fractional, the recipes are, too.) The directions for the tool use matches the tools.

I won't pretend that learning fraction addition isn't a challenge for some American cooks and bakers, but asking everyone to do decimal <-> fractional conversions on top of the rest... does not simplify things.

I assume the reason that decimal quantities are the default in European recipes is because the cooks are all using scales with decimal readouts for the bulk of their measuring, yeah?

[luzula]

I assume the reason that decimal quantities are the default in European recipes is because the cooks are all using scales with decimal readouts for the bulk of their measuring, yeah?
Not in Sweden--we use volume measurements for flour, sugar, oil, and the like. But grams for butter. We have measuring sets with 1 dl, 1 tbsp, 1 tsp, one "kryddmått" (literally "spice measure"), which is 1 ml.

[sanguinity]

Oh, interesting! So no fractional measures in your measuring sets at all, then!

I suppose I should have said UK above, since that's the only country I have specific knowledge about (and even that is hearsay).

[luzula]

Hmm, well, 1/2 dl measures are available, but I don't always use it even if I have one. It's easy enough to judge when a measure is half full...

[genarti]

Oops, I was testing out replying by email but I never remember how markdown works, so it ate all the paragraph breaks I put in. At least it wasn't too long a comment to have folded up into a text wall!

[luzula]

No worries, I never even noticed!

[regshoe]

1) So much confusion could be avoided if it was only easier to type ½. Or just use decimals, as you say...

2) Why would the recipe writer specify that the flour needs to be 'divided' and then not tell you what amounts to divide it into until you get to the instructions? That's so confusing.

3) All this sorted out, I hope the cake is nice :D

[luzula]

1-½ would not be clearer to me, though! It's the hyphen that messes it up...but perhaps, if they could write 1 ½, they wouldn't have used the hyphen.

I haven't made the cake yet, but I will soon!

[regshoe]

Oh yes, 1½ or 1 ½ would be the 'obvious' way of writing it for me! The hyphen is confusing.

[brigantine]

So: How did the cake come out? I hope it was a success!

[luzula]

I haven't made it yet, but I will soon! : ) One of my housemates asked me to wait, since sugar always messes her up when she has her period.