This was because cooking was done on ranges (at best) and over fires (at most basic). Very early recipes tended to list oven heat in descriptive words rather than as temperatures, such as ‘low’, ‘hot’, ‘cool’ and ‘medium’. The real question I found myself asking, is does it actually matter about the temperature differences? This post has taken about two months of my spare time to research and write up!

I wondered one day whether I could really rely on the conversion tables and even the accuracy of historical recipes and decided to investigate further. I do frequently cook (converting) from old recipe books which only list ingredients in pounds and ounces though. We adopted metric with its smaller increments and simpler decimal readings (0 degrees is freezing, 100 degrees boiling water ).įor myself, I was taught in metric at school and I measure in metric. Of course, many (mainly older) home cooks still use Fahrenheit and have ovens still with Fahrenheit scales, but they are rapidly thinning out as time goes on and the march of metric continues. Although Imperial was originally a UK-developed scale (set out in the early 1800s from the previous ‘English scale’ which gave rise to both the British Imperial and the US systems) it seems metric is in the majority use here. Metric temperatures in recipes have been the norm for the last ten to fifteen years or so within the UK. Should this be something that you ought to be even bothered about? Not a potential vast difference but not exact either. If you have a metric oven and are converting from an old Fahrenheit recipe or have an oven in Fahrenheit and a ‘modern’ cookbook with Celsius values (and a Fahrenheit conversion table) you could be setting your oven to a different temperature than the original recipe. However, there is a potential problem here: can you trust the values in those old books and does this impact on your modern oven temperature? If you’re like me and have an array of cookbooks, some of which have been handed down or been a complete ‘find’ in an antiquarian bookshop or second hand store you’ll find yourself needing to convert weights, measures and, crucially, temperatures quite often.

Oven temperature conversion f to c