To help people move from English units to metric in cooking, "Sunday Night Suppers: Fast, Fun Surprising Meals for Family Traditions" by Barbara C Jones - Cookbook Resources LLC, Highland Village TX was published in October 2006. It's a paperback book of 284 pages.
The book uses conventional recipes as the base and then in a column to the right it shows the metric equivalent. It's very readable and has explanations of how to mix and bake/cook with each recipe. For example under "Dad's Best Meal" for "Corned Beef Hash-N-Eggs:" 1 (15 ounce) can corned beef hash 425 g 1 (11 ounce) can mexicorn, drained 312 g 4 eggs 3/4 cup chili sauce 180 ml The "Buttered Rolls" recipe follows: 2 cups of biscuit mix 480 ml 1 (8 ounce) carton sour cream 227 g 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted 120 ml In other recipes it equates 0.5 kg for 1 pound of a bunch of broccoli and ground beef. Note the approximations used in American cooking. I guess this is close enough. I'm not a cook to judge. However, I understand that others use mass units for cups of flour and sticks of butter etc. to provide more precision since it provides more consistency. Producers of flour and other dry products use mass in packaging. Mass is more accurate since products such as flour change volume as they settle but they retain the same mass. Therefore, product labeling and recipe decision-makers must decide which label to use for various types of products which are most convenient and useable to consumers. We see more packages on shelves which are rationalized in metric rather than in English units. So, metric only labeling on packages shouldn't be a problem as long as unit-pricing is used for every product. This cookbook is another example that American enterprises are preparing for hard conversion to International System of Units (SI), the modern metric system. US federal and state governments need to get with it. Regards, Stan Doore
