How Many Cups in a Gallon? Try This Trick To Remember

Emma Christensen
Emma Christensen
Emma is a former editor for The Kitchn and a graduate of the Cambridge School for Culinary Arts. She is the author of True Brews and Brew Better Beer. Check out her website for more cooking stories
updated Dec 6, 2022
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Now that the sting has worn off a bit, we can divulge the full story of how we bought the wrong amount of strawberries for our review of the

Gluten-Free Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

cooking conversions and how many cups were in a quart!

Telling this story to a friend later, she laughed and said, “Don’t you know about the gallon-eating-the-quarts trick?” At our blank look, she grabbed a pen and drew a diagram like the one above…

So there’s:

2 Cups in a Pint
2 Pints in a Quart
4 Quarts in a Gallon

And so two “C’s” fit inside a “P,” two “P’s” fit inside a “Q,” and four “Q’s” fit inside a big, enormous “G.”

It’s like “the woman who swallowed a fly” for cups and quarts!

It still takes a few minutes of mental visualization, but with this diagram in mind, you can easily figure out that there are four cups in a quart, 16 cups in a gallon, and so on.

Fingers crossed–with luck we’ll never find ourselves in this particular conundrum again at the grocery store!

Any other good memory tricks you use when cooking?

Related: Measuring: Dip and Sweep

(Originally posted June 10, 2008)

(Image by Emma Christensen for the Kitchn)

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Tips & Techniques