This guy just really, really wants to use his slide rule. A cheap gram-accurate scale and an electronic calculator are a more...scalable kitchen solution.

Also, not all ingredients in a recipe scale linearly--most notably spices, tinctures, and any fermentation components.

How can you measure basil leaves in cups?

Is that “put the leaves in the cup” or “put the leaves in the cup and press them down” or “roughly chop the basil leaves and put them into the cup” or “finely chop the basil leaves and put them into a cup”?

Using a slide rule is all very well, but you only really need it if you’re using daft measurements like cups and spoons. If you just use grams and millilitres you don’t need one.

I don't see how a slide rule would substantially improve anything in my kitchen, honestly.

> Bakers understand the importance of proportions in cooking; they even write their recipes normalised to the weight of flour, meaning all other ingredients are given in proportion to the amount of flour.

I do more baking than cooking. Baker's math is an incredibly useful concept. But that math is trivial to do in my head, and that's much more convenient than a slide rule or other calculating device.

As a hobbyist cook, this article starts with a false (or at least misleading) premise:

maybe the recipe calls for 80 g of butter but you only have 57 g

The amount of fat is rarely critical, pie crusts and puff pastry the exceptions. Unless the situation is puff pastry, make the full recipe. There are also recipes, like Better Homes and Gardens cookbook "baked rice pudding", that you can fudge ingredients to an extent, but can't double. The heat transfer of a double sized batch of custard prevents the whole thing from cooking.

The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.

PS

I own 2 slide rules. I don't use either one in the kitchen.

People should just be into slide-rules period. Particularly in the West. We are always so amazed when people in Asia beat people with calculators using their abacuses, but the West had its mechanical computing device too, and like the abacus it can beat a calculator if used well.

The Slide Rule Museum tickles hard some 2000's web nostalgia:

https://sliderulemuseum.com/

Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single slide to find all the sides of a triangle is surprisingly satisfying. It got me to realize that, sliderules with the right scales can solve the roots of any 3-variable equation. I guess this is why there was a proliferation of industry-specific sliderules back in the day.

More generally, aren't simple, well-engineered analog tools so satisfying?

Very cool, I've never used a slide ruler but I can see how in logarithmic space, that 3.3/2 scaling factor simply becomes a distance you add.

Makes me want to get one now, because I like the concept of memorizing ratios rather than recipes (thanks to the popular eponymous book), and this seems more convenient (and satisfying) for non-trivial computations than getting my screen dirty or dictating it to an assistant.

And metric containers and recipes.

In metric countries, a small kitchen scale is very common. The US seems to run on volume, rather than weight.

i'm just not a serious enough cook, my kitchen's temperature varies humidity too the water coming out of the tap is random too so I just gave up at the end. Nowadays I read couple of recipes to get the gist of it, define the theme in my head and just go to town... I almost never have all the ingredients, so I substitute at will. I guess one instrument that I still use regularly is my Thermapen, food safety calls for one; and family feels more reassured when they see chicken breast that is ever so slightly pink but the temp reading suggests it's safe lol

I think such scaling as the author suggests, can be done in the head. 57g is roughy 3/4 of 80g. It's trivial to take 3/4 of almost anything. 250g -> ~180..185g, 40 -> 30, 50 -> 37g. Unless you do bakery, where proportions are very important, there's no need for 3 digit precision.

And yes, in general a slide ruler is a great tool. I should try it again.

This is great! I actually just bought a slide rule a few weeks ago (a Pickett N902-ES), and I've been working through the original booklet. One reason I bought it was to get a different perspective on calculation, since I never used a slide rule in school. Case in point: I do a lot of cooking, and this use case never occurred to me.

I picked up a couple Concise circular rules made in japan a while ago. They're wonderful. I'll toss one in the kitchen.

https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/list.php

Circular rules are superior to slide rules.

But then he ruins everything by using volumetric units (don't even get me started on these units, let's just focus on volume).

Indicating proportions with respect to weight is much simpler. Just put a scale under your mixing bowl and weight stuff as you add them. Less stuff to clean, less waste, easier to dose.

Yeah I remember my class was the last in our high school to learn the slide rule, the next year we transitioned to (expensive!) calculators.

People had to be taught not to go wild with the extra precision.

I have created a python program for exactly that purpose. Its nothing fancy. A yaml file of ingredients, another yamk fole of recipes and a yaml file for nutrient target and then some optimizers and some constaimt enforcers. I can now decide what I want to eat that day and the program tells me what quantity I should eat, what ingredients I need, what ingredient I need to buy, how much time it will take for cooking and how much meal prep boxes etc Extremely helpful for weight loss

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When I was in college, a friend gifted me with a old slide rule (German make), but it was missing the slider scale. I created that slider by cutting a stripe out of my plastic shoe box. Worked like a charm.

I think Slide rule is an amazing invention, for it's simplicity and vastness of calculations that can be done.

Please, if you want good pesto, worry less about the ratios, and use real Parmiggiano Reggiano instead of "parmesan".

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> Kitchen work is all about proportions

Only in Imperial/United States customary units. They start with a few unconvincing metric examples, then throw away the pretence and jump right into cups, tbsp, etc.

If you'd stop using Imperial, and started using metric + scales, the entire problem domain no longer exists.

What I would actually like in every kitchen is a scale and a lookup table for the weight of a cup of flour, cup of rice, mL of oil, etc. No more volume based measurements.

Professional chefs recipes are all in proportions to begin with. For example for a baker everything else in a recipe is in proportion to the weight of the flour.

> I just found myself in someone else’s kitchen and they didn’t have a slide rule.

What? No way that happened! In all seriousness though I almost never find myself in the need to multiply anything in the recipe by the amount different than some multiple of 0.5 and these are pretty easy to do in my head.

I improved everything by converting to metric first if the recipe happens to be otherwise, and using metric measuring tools

As another commenter noted, few things in cooking actually scale linearly, and, in general, if you are following recipes mechanically like this, you produce sub-par results. You always have to adjust quantities for ingredient freshness, humidity, ingredient variance, and other variables, so recipes are only ever guidelines at best. And seasoning is always to taste (your own, and whomever you are cooking for) anyway.

But, sure, I guess this helps you scale up those guidelines in some rare cases where that math isn't trivial to do in your head...

I've done quite a bit of math in my head in the kitchen....

i believe i threw a slide ruler in the trash recently. i stopped reading as soon as they said something about a c position. i’d rather have a digital scale- so many fewer measuring cups/spoons used, just do the addition in your head or tare as you add additional ingredients.