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Sixty years Ago my grandmother owned a small cafe. Her "homemade" cornbread was a special favorite, and one day, one of her customers asked if she would share the recipe with him. She told him that she didn't really make it using a recipe, that she just added ingredients until it looked right, but that she would try to figure out a recipe for him. About twelve batches of somewhat questionable cornbread later, she gave up, and when he came back into the cafe, she confessed that she hadn't been able to figure it out, but that she would bake him a loaf whenever he wanted.

Back then, cooking the European way, by weight, wasn't common here in the US, and my grandmother's recipe books, when she looked at them at all, specified amounts in cups. So, when Grannie tried to recreate her cornbread recipe, she put the ingredient into a measuring cup, put some into the mixing bowl, wrote down how much that was, decided if it looked right yet, maybe added a bit more, wrote that down, and so on. It wasn't very accurate, and didn't give her a repeatable recipe. If she had been using a kitchen scale to weigh her ingredients, she wouldn't have had any problem recreating the recipe.

If my grandmother had used a kitchen scale, she would have used either a mechanical scale, or a balance. A mechanical scale is just a platform mounted on a spring that compresses proportionally to the force applied to it. The problem with mechanical scales is that if the a scale is designed to measure up to 5 lbs. then then measuring one ounce of something will be more difficult than one pound. This is because the small amount of movement in the spring caused by one ounce will be difficult to detect because the scale is designed to move evenly throughout the whole five pounds. As a kitchen scale, this leaves a lot to be desired.