Re:Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages
by askvictor on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @06:22PM
(#14800519)
I'm Australian, a 'standard' tablespoon is 20ml, but recipes sometimes use 25. Not sure about the rest of the world. It probably doesn't actually matter too much for most recipes; the ones that need that level of accuracy tend to specify weights.
These are quite standardised unless you are using something like Australian tablespoons¹ (but then any American following that recipe would run into problems as well). The US customary cup and spoon measures were introduced exactly to solve the problem of measurement ambiguity in recipes! Nineteenth century cookbooks can be hard to follow because of the significant variation in the interpretation of smidgens, dashes, pinches, and (then) spoons and cups.
1: Are these really a thing? Any Australian care to chime in?