KITCHEN SCALES

Your first kitchen scales purchase is a rite of passage, marking the transition from slapit-all-in-and-see-how-it turns-out cooking to actually following a recipe. You can get away with guessing if you’re a Michelin-starred chef but not if you’re rustling up your first Yorkshire pudding.

This is especially true when it comes to baking. Many a sponge has collapsed due to slapdash measuring. The moment you realise that the process of adding carefully weighed ingredients into a bowl is not a chore but an essential and satisfying part of transforming flour, sugar and butter into a toothsome, beautifully risen delight, is a culinary coming of age.

Man has always strived to measure things: the first mass-market instrument to do this was the balance scale. Consisting of a pivoted horizontal lever with arms of equal length with a weighing pan suspended from each, these are the scales associated with justice. They make an excellent symbol for fair play but are not so good when it comes to quantifying self-raising flour.

Better is the mechanical scale. This has a spring which moves the hands of a dial to reveal the weight of the ingredients in the dish above. Requiring no batteries and being easy to read, they have endured for decades and are pleasingly retro in style. Accuracy can be forfeited, however, especially when measuring smaller quantities.

Which brings us to digital scales, probably the most useful of all. Able to switch swiftly between grams and ounces, weigh both dry and wet ingredients, no matter how small, and with easy-to-read LCD displays, they are the chosen device of chefs and anyone else with a grown-up approach to cooking.