A medium-sized cake: a rant.

 Nearly all the world uses the S.I. system of measurement, and the big exception is the USA, which uses various interesting systems. A rectangular cake tin, for example is measured in pounds (a pound weighs 454 grams). But a pound of what? It's not that the tin itself weighs a pound, or that any one of the ingredients you might put in it weighs a pound. No: it's (probably) that if you make a loaf of bread in the thing, the loaf that comes out will probably weigh about a pound.

Yes, madness, I know.

Still, if we want people to use our recipes we have to make them comprehensible, and nowadays even American recipes usually give S.I. system measurements as alternatives.

But then the other day I found this recipe. It's Italian, and calls for a cake tin 0.78 feet wide. I'm completely charmed, but completely puzzled. 0.78 of a foot is 9.35 inches - not, obviously, a standard tin size even in America - or 23.75 centimetres, also non-standard.

I can only imagine that Italians have their own way of measuring cake tins, and the recipe conversion was done from that. Is there some unit of measurement based on the length of Caesar's foot? Or on some tiny fraction of the distance from the toe to the heel of Italy?

I'd love to know.

In the meantime, I used a different recipe.

Word To Use Today: foot. The standardised foot measurement may have been the brainchild of Henry I of England, whose reign began in 1100. This would give him very big feet, though, so he was probably measured with some pointy boots on.