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

[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!