Cups, Spoons and No Scaleવાટકી, કપ અને ત્રાજવા વગરની રસોઈ

The other way round from the conversion table. You already know what the recipe wants — 250 g of besan, a vatki of dal — and what you have is a measuring cup. This says what to fill it to.

The cup in your drawer may not be the cup in the recipe

A US measuring cup holds 240 ml. A metric cup — the kind sold in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — holds 250 ml, about four per cent more. Over one cup of flour that is five grams and nobody would notice. Over the four cups you measure out for a batch of thepla dough it is twenty grams, and you will feel it in the dough.

The tablespoon is the worse trap, because the gap is bigger and nobody expects it. A US or UK tablespoon is 15 ml, which is three teaspoons. An Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, which is four. A recipe asking for two tablespoons of oil gets a third more oil in Melbourne than in New Jersey, and the same spoon used for chilli powder is the difference between a dish and an inedible one.

Teaspoons are 5 ml more or less everywhere. So when something matters and you are not sure what your spoons are, count it in teaspoons: three teaspoons where the recipe said a tablespoon.

Every figure on this page is for the 240 ml cup, the 15 ml tablespoon and the 5 ml teaspoon. If your cup is the 250 ml one, the measures below give you about four per cent more than the recipe asked for, which matters for batter and does not matter for dough.

What your vatki holds, settled once

A vatki is not a measure. There is no standard one. The steel vatki in one family's kitchen holds a different amount from the next family's, and when a recipe is dictated down the phone in vatki it means the one in that kitchen, which you do not have.

You can settle it in two minutes, and then never think about it again. Fill your vatki with water to where you would fill it with dal. Pour that into your measuring cup and read the millilitres. Write the number inside a cupboard door. From then on every quantity anybody gives you in vatki is a number you can actually measure.

Once you know the millilitres, this is the conversion:

That works for anything that pours — dal, rice, flour, water, oil. It does not work for a vatki of grated coconut or of chopped shaak, which packs differently every time it is filled, and no table can rescue that. For those, a vatki is an instruction to use your judgement, not a measurement.

What are you measuring?

Flours, grains and poha

Dals and pulses

Sugar, fat and dairy

Everything else

Where a cup goes wrong, and it is almost always the flour

A cup measures space, not weight. For anything made of whole pieces — dal, rice, sugar, peanuts — the pieces pack the same way each time you fill the cup, and the weight comes out within a few grams of the figure above. For flour it does not, because flour is a powder and how much air sits between the particles depends entirely on how the cup was filled.

The numbers say how far wrong. Atta is 120 g a cup scooped from the tin and about 110 g sifted and spooned in: a spread of eight per cent. Besan is 100 g loose and about 115 g packed down: fifteen per cent. Fifteen per cent of the besan in a khaman batter is not a rounding error.

Where it does not matter: rotli and thepla dough, where you add water until the dough feels right and the feel is the real measurement. Where it does: anything you cannot correct after mixing — khaman and dhokla batter, a muthiya mixture, anything baked.

So for flour, fill the cup the same way every time. Spoon it in, level it off with the back of a knife, and do not tap the cup on the counter: tapping settles the flour and adds ten grams you did not ask for.

Grams and millilitres part company for oil and ghee

For water, milk and curd a millilitre weighs about a gram, so the two words are interchangeable and a recipe in millilitres can be read off the gram rows above without thinking about it.

Oil and ghee are different. A cup holds 240 ml of anything, but a cup of oil weighs 220 g and a cup of ghee 215 g. So if a recipe asks for 100 ml of oil and you measure out 100 g instead, you have added about nine per cent more oil than it wanted. In a shaak nobody will complain. In a batter for something fried, more oil is a softer, flatter result.

Which direction to trust: if the recipe gives millilitres, measure millilitres. The cup is a volume measure, so for oil it is the easier one to get right anyway.

What this page cannot do

It cannot fix a cup of the wrong size. Every figure here assumes a proper 240 ml measuring cup; if you are measuring with a mug or a teacup, these numbers are no better than a guess, because household cups run anywhere from 150 to 250 ml.

It cannot tell you which cup an Indian recipe writer meant. They do not all mean the same one and most do not say. When a recipe gives both grams and cups, trust the grams — a weight means the same thing in every kitchen in the world, which is the whole reason this page is built around grams going in rather than coming out.

And it cannot replace a scale. If you cook this food often, a kitchen scale ends every problem on this page at once. Until there is one in the drawer, the measures above are the next best thing, and for dough and shaak they are entirely good enough.