This is great - a print-out is going on my fridge.

And a pint is pound world renown!

so, 16 oz. or one pint = 1 lb.

and a half pint or 8 oz. = 1/2 lb.

Oh that is awesome...and a font-lover's dream!

wait, that's kinda brilliant! turn that badboy into a graphic for dishtowels and ovenmitts and you'll be a gazillionaire. :)

How about putting that graphic onto reusable shopping bags? Then it would be with us when we need it :)

Art -- that's really only for water. You could get yourself in trouble if you use that mnemonic (I always heard Alton Brown saying, "A pint's a pound the world <I>around</I>") for corn syrup, for example.

When making rice
Water's twice
(Makes thrice)

i learned that diagram in elementary school and have never forgotten it! hooray for childhood cooking memories (or at least memory aids)!

A quart means a quarter of a gallon. Or was that so obvious that it's not worth pointing out? Also, 4 cups in a quart, easy to remember since quart means four. (On a smaller scale, same theme, four ounces in a quarter cup.)

I use the pint/pound thing often. Most (wet) food is mostly water or oil anyway so it's close enough for me.

Erica-

All my years in school and it never occurred to me that a quart referred to quarter of a gallon....duh

Erica-

Wouldn't it be four ounces in a half cup?

...all this means that it's time to pass to the wonders of the metric system :)

Erica you just destroyed my brownies!

maybe 4 oz in a 1/4 pint

LOVE THE GRAPHIC!

I learned the quart/gallon thing the hard way, at eight years old.......dad sent me to the store to buy "two quarts" of milk. So I bought two 32oz quart cartons. Which apparently cost a small fortune. After his heart attack, dad sat me down for a long torturous lesson about pints, quarts, gallons, ounces, etc, etc.

Similarly, I had an epiphany when I learned/figured out that 1/4 cup is 4 TBS, thus 1 cup is 16 TBS.

This info is useful when scaling down a recipe and you end up with amounts like 3/8 cup, which is more difficult to measure than say, its equivalent, 1/4 c 2 TBS.

pich, actually the imperial system works better for cooking, the metric system is for distances. Recipes work better with well rounded imperial measurements, especially baking. Usually you start with a cup of flour as opposed to 1/5th liter, 1 tsp of an ingredient is 4.93 milliters. Thats why both systems stick around. and to make it more confusing a UK and a US Tablespoon are different, as are pints, cups, gallons, etc.

Ok, I know this is an old post, but if anyone else checks it out, 2 things...

Ohjodi, I'm confused - 32oz is a quart, right? 8oz per cup, 4 cups per quart, 8x4=32. 2 quarts = 2 32oz cartons. Or did I miss something?

Also, the tablespoon gets even more confusing - in NZ, it's 3 (5ml) teaspoons to a tablespoon (15ml), whereas in Oz, it's 20ml (4 teaspoons). I have sets of both and recipe books from both countries (as well as the US and UK), so I do a lot of double-checking!

Wow. Just wow!

I do NO baking and I can count on one hand the number of times I have to measure during cooking in a year.
I cook dinner, breakfast and brunch for myself and my guests.

But as a kid I was taught.....

8 = cup - the size of a drinking glass before we became fat asses
16 = pint
32 = quart(er)
128 = gallon

To not know this smacks of lack of attention to what you are buying all these years.

In our modern society you mean to tell me you never noticed the size of a half gallon of ice cream, a quart of milk, the size of a single serving of yogurt before the shrinkray got to it, what a quarter or half pound at the deli weighted or even the size of your pay by the pound fruits, vegetables, meat, fish or bulk oatmeal were.

This is a function of unit pricing so you are telling us you never compared the price of items in your entire adult life.

To need to look this up is just WOW!!!!!!

I made a comment in 2008, got an answer in 2009, I read it now in 2010 and answer: you never misure 1/2 a liter of flour when cooking using the metric system: you weight 1/2 kilo of flour :) volume measures are used just for liquid like water and milk etc. Moreover, remember that 1 liter of water weight a kilogram, so you can weight it if you want to be more precise.

Also with the metric system - our cup and spoon measurements are all in metric. One cup is 250ml, a teaspoon is 5ml, a tablespoon is 20ml (unless you are outside Australia, then it is 15ml). Most recipes use metric cup measurements, and weights for things like butter. Newer recipes are giving both the weight and volume.

At least the metric system (as in metre, litre and kilograms sizes) doesn't change between countries.

I've been reading a lot lately that flour should be measured in volume when cooking, especially baking, because of sifting/un-sifting. That it's bettter to use a kitchen scale. At the risk of coming off ignorant big-time (and in this case I am), I'm going to guess that Cups aren't measurements of volume . . . yet most recipes call for flour measured in cups . . ?

And a pint is, of course, not a pound (even for water) on this side of the pond, so that 'world around' menmonic is somewhat nonsensical.

...anyway, to think I was feeling foolish because my on-the -fly conversion of cubic feet to litres was a little out...

How about Firkins, Barrels, Hogsheads, and Puncheons? Metric system might come in handy here.

But "A liter is kilogram the world around"... Or "A liter is a kilo in the world we know?"

"dad sent me to the store to buy "two quarts" of milk. So I bought two 32oz quart cartons."

....Okay, I'll fess up -- I've read ohjodi's comment thoroughly three times, and I still don't see what's wrong about "two quarts" = "two 32oz quart cartons".

@Anita83

I think you mean that flour should be measured by weight, not volume. Cups are measures of volume.

For homemade, the difference between the volume and weight in recipes in things like flour, aren't going to be huge. But on the commercial baking scale, the differences add up, and so in most bakeries you will see them weighing the flour instead of measuring by cups.

@empresscallipygos

I don't get it, either.

we learned this on the first day of culinary school, and when I started at my current job a former classmate of mine had written it out onto a piece of paper and taped it to the wall in case she ever got confused.

Maybe that he wanted him/her to get a less-expensive half gallon carton?

@ sunset and empresscallipygos

Maybe the point was that the father meant for him/her to get a less expensive half gallon carton?

@cravethemind

Thanks for clearing that up!

I wish ohjodi would check back and clue us in!

@ Anita83, most American recipes give only the cup measurements, which are volume, not weight*. Some recipes give both, as in 1 cup of flour (140g). I weigh when using British, New Zealand, or Australian recipes, and use cups when using American recipes. I've never noticed significantly better results using weight, but I'm not a professional!

*To be precise, volume is how much three-dimensional space a substance or shape occupies or contains (such as a cup), whereas weight is, well, how much it weighs (mass*gravity).

That's great... now I want a graphic or mnemonic for imperial/metric conversions.

I often make recipes using American (imperially measured) blogs and I'm a (metric) Australian.

I use my iphone for conversions and my laptop as my cook book... the only problem is that I get dough all over my iphone and flour all over my computer.

I also ignore the tablespoon measurement difference... and I haven't had any problems yet...

This just highlights my frustration with the imperial measurements. Why can't we all just go metric? This is a constant source of confusion in our kitchen as we are Americans living overseas, with a mixture of recipes, appliances and cookware variably requiring metric or US (or even British) measures. Ugh!

Still, my most useful rules-of-thumb are that 1 teaspoon = 5 mL and one ounce = 30 g. From there you can riff if you know, for example, that 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons (15 mL), etc.

Think about going metric. You're the only people left using imperial (except for Myanmar and Liberia, if Wikipedia is not mistaken). So going metric would simplify communication with the rest of the world immensely (especially considering that recipes are minor problems compared to the loss of a Mars probe).
And trust me, it's cool! No memorizing! Less calculating! Not complicated AT ALL. You can be metric and still use cups! As Jon Stewart put it: "Just imagine! Everything can be divided by 10!!!"

What a fun graphic. Where did you find it? I would love to hang it in my kitchen.