You inherit your great-grandmother Helga's köttbullar recipe and it asks for 1 kaffekopp of bread crumbs, 2 dl of milk, and 1 krm of white pepper. Your kitchen scale and US measuring cups have no idea what to do with any of that. Scandinavian cooking units run on their own tidy ladder, and once you know the rungs, the recipe falls into place.
Scandinavian cooking units: the measuring ladder
Most Scandinavian kitchens keep a nested set of spoons and cups marked in millilitres, not fractions of a cup. Sweden (where the units are mått), Norway (mål), and Denmark (mål) share the volumes but not the spellings. A Swedish msk is a Norwegian ss and a Danish spsk, so a recipe for kanelbullar from Stockholm and one for gravlaks from Bergen can use the same 15 ml spoon.
Norwegian recipes also use a 10 ml barneskje (bs) between the teaspoon and the tablespoon. Danish recipes have no krm and ask for a knivspids (a knife-tip pinch) instead. The krm is the one for a taste of cardamom or chilli, and the dl is the everyday baking cup.
| Unit | Sweden | Norway | Denmark | Millilitres | Closest US measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spice measure | kryddmått (krm) | kryddermål (krm) | none | 1 ml | 1/5 teaspoon |
| Teaspoon | tesked (tsk) | teskje (ts) | teske (tsk) | 5 ml | 1 teaspoon |
| Tablespoon | matsked (msk) | spiseskje (ss) | spiseske (spsk) | 15 ml | 1 tablespoon |
| Decilitre | deciliter (dl) | desiliter (dl) | deciliter (dl) | 100 ml | About 0.42 US cup |
The teaspoon and tablespoon line up neatly with American spoons, so swapping them is almost trivial (the tablespoon and teaspoon sizes guide covers where spoons differ). The dl is the one that catches US bakers out: it is smaller than any standard US cup, so a recipe asking for 5 dl of flour means 500 ml, a little over 2 US cups.
Older cup names you may meet in vintage recipes
If your recipe came from a 1950s family cookbook, you may still see two older household cup measures alongside the decilitre:
- Kaffekopp (kkp) is a coffee cup, usually 150 ml. Norwegian recipes also use a bigger kopp (kp) of 250 ml, so check which cup the recipe means.
- Glas is a glass, 200 ml, found in Swedish measure tables.
Modern Swedish recipes have all but dropped both in favour of the decilitre, but the older words may turn up in handwritten family recipes and church-fundraiser cookbooks. One kaffekopp is 1.5 dl, and one glas is 2 dl, so the conversion stays clean.
| Old unit | Millilitres | Decilitres | Metric cup (250 ml) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 kaffekopp | 150 ml | 1.5 dl | 0.6 cup |
| 1 glas | 200 ml | 2 dl | 0.8 cup |
At home, the kaffekopp was often whichever coffee cup was to hand.
In our home, we just used any coffee cup in recipes that had equal parts of something - a classical example of an old traditional recipe is a sponge cake. So you would measure with coffee cups equal measures of eggs, sugar and flour.
Cecilia from Scandicuisine
Her published recipe makes the same point with three identical glasses: eggs in the first, the same amount of sugar in the second, and the third filled 70% with wheat flour and topped up with potato starch. The ratio holds whatever the glass holds, as long as all three match.
If your recipe goes even further back, you may meet Swedish units that lost legal standing in 1889: the jungfru (about 82 ml), the kanna (about 2.6 litres), and the weight unit ort (about 4.25 g). Norwegian and Danish books used their own sizes. Treat all of them as approximations.
From dl to grams for common ingredients
Volume in dl, weight on your scale. The conversion depends on the ingredient: 1 dl of flour and 1 dl of sugar do not weigh the same. The maths is easier in metric cups (1 metric cup = 250 ml = 2.5 dl), so 1 dl is two-fifths of a metric cup and 1 kaffekopp is three-fifths. The cup measurement guide compares the 250 ml metric cup with the smaller US cup.
| Ingredient | 1 dl | 1 kaffekopp (1.5 dl) |
|---|---|---|
| Plain flour | 56 g | 84 g |
| Granulated sugar | 80 g | 120 g |
| Bread crumbs | 43 g | 65 g |
| Butter | 91 g | 136 g |
| Fine table salt | 120 g | 180 g |
The grams come from this site's weights per metric cup (plain flour 140 g, sugar 200 g, bread crumbs 108 g, butter 227 g, fine salt 300 g). To check a row, divide the dl by 2.5 for metric cups and read the grams off the plain flour converter or the butter converter.
Norway's standard kitchen table puts 1 dl of flour at 70 g, more than the 56 g here, which is spooned in and levelled. For bread doughs, weigh the flour.
Converting a Scandinavian recipe step by step
Back to great-grandmother Helga's köttbullar. The ingredient list reads 1 kaffekopp bread crumbs, 2 dl milk, 1 krm white pepper, 1 tsk salt, and 400 g minced beef. Here is how it lands in a US-equipped kitchen:
- 1 kaffekopp bread crumbs is 150 ml, around 65 g. Drop 65 g into the bread crumbs converter for the equivalent in US cups.
- 2 dl milk is 200 ml, around 0.8 of a metric cup or 0.83 of a US cup. A standard measuring jug with ml markings reads it off directly.
- 1 krm white pepper is 1 ml, about three thumb-and-finger pinches, or a little under a 1/4 teaspoon.
- 1 tsk salt is 5 ml, the same as a US teaspoon. No conversion needed.
- 400 g minced beef is already in metric. Weigh it on the scale.
When an ingredient is not in the tables above, pick it on the baking measurements converter and convert from krm, kaffekopp, or glas to grams, US cups, or ounces. A glas of honey from an old Swedish book comes out at 280 g, where a glas of sugar weighs 160 g.
Pin a copy of the ladder to the fridge, and the next Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish recipe you open will read like one of your own. To swap any of these units in one step, the volume converter turns krm, dl, kaffekopp, and glas into millilitres or cups.