I had forgotten about the collective-bargaining contract. Even without it, a major gap in years of experience is one of the most basic justifications for disparate salaries that an employer can put forth in a pay discrimination case. (The law is not on the side of posts here suggesting experience does not matter.) But if there is a collective bargaining contract in place that sets salaries by formula, then it’s essentially game over. (Of course, one can’t opine meaningfully on this question without seeing the contract.)
All of that is separate from whether the disparate rate of pay is the right thing to do, is consistent with what she was promised (which would be a contract matter if anything), etc.
That’s what I was thinking. Addison has 18 years of experience, she has seven.
We know the general outlines of the contract from the summary I linked to. If she really wasn’t informed about which step she started on and the process for challenging it, I think the Guild is to blame.
Disappointing not only that a cooking columnist would write something so ignorant but that no editor would catch it.
"Weight is a direct measure of an ingredient itself. By contrast, the volume taken up in a measuring spoon or cup includes variable amounts of empty space.”—Harold McGee, Keys to Good Cooking
That’s why European recipes and professional bakers’ recipes always use weights, and why various publications’ futile attempts to define a standard weight for a cup of flour are so inconsistent.
“In the test kitchen, we favor the dip-and-sweep method—we dip a measuring cup into a container of flour and then level the flour with a straight edge—but some bakers prefer to spoon flour directly into the cup. Since these techniques—along with the heavy- or light-handedness of the baker—incorporate different amounts of air, we’ve found that there can be up to a 20 percent difference in the weight of a cup of flour …”
I’m not sure what you’re saying is wrong about the article. He explains the source and the magnitude of the variance starting in the third paragraph, and says pretty much what you’re saying (though he doesn’t go into great detail). And this is a follow-up to an article where the same issues were discussed at length to explain LATs new recipe format, where they now mostly lead with grams. They are going with dip-and-sweep conversions, so they agree with you and cook’s illustrated there too.
This story seems to be dealing with reader reaction to the the new format, and why the cup/gram ratios don’t match more commonly-seen conversions. Maybe Ben could have been more forceful here, and explained (again) why they think this standard is the best. But maybe he didn’t want the tone of the article to be “we are righter than the industry standard” so he went with more of a cultural relativism piece.
This is probably reading too much into this, but I can understand some conservatism among the LAT food writers right now. It’s been a traumatic year with a lot of collateral damage. Until permanent editors are put in place, there’s no one to back major decisions if something blows up. Until then, it’s just a writer’s word vs. an internet full of critics.
Why does no one agree on what the weight of 1 cup of flour should be? We should have a universally accepted measurement for flour, and all ingredients like it, but we do not.
We do not and can not for the simple reason that the weight a cup of flour can vary by 20% depending on who fills the cup.
Some recipe developers reach their weight measurement by spooning flour delicately into a cup, while others call for scooping the cup into a canister, which obviously makes the measurement a little heavier.
That’s confused nonsense. Professionals developing and testing recipes weigh the flour. American publishers arbitrarily convert those weights to volume.
I’m sorry, but I think you’re misreading this. He means “should” more like “ought” or “wouldn’t it be nice,” and this is made obvious by the rest of the article (including your quote). The whole article is literally premised upon the facts that you claim it is ignorant of.
Again, this quote literally restates your argument. He is explaining how different developers “reached their weight measurements” for writing cup/gram equivalencies. He bemoans the same arbitrary balkanization that you do.
A competent article about measuring flour will say right at the start that the only way to get consistent quantities is to buy a scale and use it (as professionals do), and that trying to use volume can throw the quantity off enough to ruin certain recipes (which is why professionals don’t).
Despite noting the reality that you could end up with overly dry cake or overly crumbly cookies or pie crust, Mims falsely states that “that discrepancy is not a huge deal if you’re using only 1 cup” and “everything will turn out OK” if you follow the recipe.
But that is what the author is saying. In the article you linked, he writes
A reader recently asked me, after reviewing the first recipe we published with our new metric weight measurements, why our weight for “1 cup all-purpose flour” — stated as 142 grams — was different from another publication that listed a cup as being 120 grams.
But the one thing that would solve all this, the one thing that professionals and bakers outside of the U.S. have known for decades? A digital scale.
And the author even talks about why he’s going to the trouble of writing all of this (again, in the article you linked)
… [A] novice cook will be confused and frustrated. And this group is, I believe, the biggest portion of cooks in this country, not the few highly devoted and discerning loyalists. New cooks just want a recipe, period, and they don’t really care if it’s tested well or from a trusted source. This is a truth that many of us who really care about a recipe’s provenance and merit find hard to accept.
and
As with most changes that would benefit everyone, the clear choice is yes, but capitalism and ego say otherwise.
So, as @selfish_shellfish is saying, the author is actually making the same point that you are, but across several articles.
No, that is absolutely not what Mims is saying. He wrote
In the end, recipes are fundamentally ratios, not absolutes, so as long as the whole recipe is consistent with itself, everything probably will turn out OK
So the idea is that, if the recipe is well tested and internally consistent with how it is converting weight to volume, then the recipe will likely turn out okay. That is very different than the meaning you are conveying, @robert.
But that’s wrong. Depending on how the person following the recipe fills the measuring cup, the amount of flour could be off by up to 20% from the tested recipe. In some recipes, that’s enough to throw things off. This isn’t conjecture: I’ve seen that happen many times. It used to happen to me until I learned my lesson.
And even more so after reading that piece. That’s nice if he recommended buying a scale in some other piece, but that doesn’t improve this one.
That’s very unlikely as so many variables which can’t be easily captured even when well tested and internally consistent can be very different - there is actually only one way to solve the problem for recipe developers- don’t use volumes
Genuine question, but what are the other variables?
What other variables aree there that significantly final outcome b/c of the variability of wt vs. volume, aside from flour? Even Cook’s Country and ATK don’t list their butter by wt (at least, not in any of the recipes I’ve seen); castor sugar and water can’t be “packed” and thus have less variability in volume; I think brown sugar is usually described as “packed” (decreasing variability in volume); and the LA Times has already specified the brand and type of salt.
Honestly, IMHO, an oven’s temp control being incorrectly calibrated would throw off a recipe more than any of the above.
Again, no one is doubting that all recipes should go by weight. And the author implies that he was prevented from engaging in best practices by his former bosses who had other concerns, so there are some very real forces preventing that.
I think measuring any non liquid ingredients by volume doesn’t make much sense. I have for example table- or teaspoons in the kitchen which have different volumes (and yes I am aware that these small volume rarely make a huge difference in many recipes but the general idea of measuring only liquids through volume and non-liquids through weight would eliminate any such potential mistakes - and is not difficult to implement in cookbooks and magazines). Same for recipes where they include fruits or vegetables just in numbers when they are available in vastly different sizes, e.g. tomatoes, eggplants
I think this is a valid observation: the upheaval has to have taken a major toll on everyone.
(I’m wondering how things will resolve for Patricia Escárcega, and with Genevieve Ko now at the NYT, are they down to one recipe developer/cooking columnist with Ben Mims?)
It’s a fun game i play when I see an interesting recipe from a good Chef that you know was originally by weight for his/her restaurant. To try and figure out the internal logic of the conversion to cups and teaspoons ect. Most of the time you figure it wasn’t tested and the go by an in house conversion chart