Fulton, L., E. Matthews, and C. Davis. Average weight of a measured cup of various foods. This is the preamble of the bulletin of foods of weights and measures The average weight and standard deviation of a measured cup of various prepared foods are tabulated here to assist in the development, standardization, and testing of food preparation formulas for homes and institutions. The information will be useful to food technologists, food service managers, teachers, students, home economists, and dietitians in test kitchen research and education programs and to those who advise consumers on the purchase and use of food. Conversion of food preparation formulas to metric measurements will be facilitated by the availability of these data.
Some cookbooks have lists of approximate measurements for given weights of commonly used foods.
In general, this type of information is not readily available nor very precise. Unpublished data collected by the Consumer and Food Economics Institute and others were used by the American Home Economics Association in compiling a list of weights for 1 cup of a limited number of foods. These data were also used to derive the nutritive value of foods in common household measures. The data reported here for the actual weight of 1 cup of various foods in different forms were obtained in the laboratories of the Consumer and Food Economics Institute. The data reflect the normal variation in measuring the volume of foods.