Pounds to Grams Converter

How do you convert pounds to grams?

Multiply the pounds by 453.592. A pound is sixteen ounces, and since the ounce is defined as 28.349523125 grams, the pound comes out at exactly 453.59237 grams by definition. For kitchen work, 453.59 — or even 454, the figure printed on butter packaging — is exact enough.

Metric recipes usually stop quoting grams somewhere around 500 and switch to kilograms, so the converter gives both. Half a pound is 226.8 grams — the 227 grams printed on a two-stick butter pack — and a quarter pound is 113.4 grams, one stick. Once you notice that US packaging is built on the pound, a lot of recipe amounts stop looking arbitrary.

Pounds in older and British recipes

The modern pound is the same in the US and the UK (the avoirdupois pound), so a pound in a British cookbook is 453.59 grams too. Very old recipes occasionally mean a troy pound of about 373 grams, but that unit belonged to precious metals and apothecaries, not kitchens — if a recipe is old enough to worry about, it probably measures in handfuls anyway.

How do you convert a recipe that mixes pounds and cups?

Convert the two kinds of amount differently. Pounds are weight, so they translate directly: multiply by 453.59 and weigh that many grams, whatever the ingredient is. Cups are volume, so they have no fixed gram weight — a cup of flour is 120 grams while a cup of butter is 227 grams — and each cupful must be converted with its own ingredient's weight. A typical US recipe might say "1 pound of flour (about 3¾ cups) and 1 cup of butter": the flour becomes 454 grams by the pound rule, and the butter becomes 227 grams by its cup weight.

The cleanest workflow is to convert the whole list to grams before you start, writing the gram figure beside each line. The cups to grams converter covers the cup amounts for 128 ingredients, the grams to cups converter works in the other direction, and this page handles the pounds. Once a favourite recipe exists in grams, it never needs converting again — and it scales exactly, which mixed-unit recipes never quite do.

Why do old recipes treat 'a pound of flour' almost like a volume?

Because for centuries the pound was how flour was bought, not how it was measured. Cooks ordered a pound from the shop, tipped it into the bin, and then worked in handfuls, cupfuls and "butter the size of an egg" — the pound in an old recipe often just records the shopping, while the method assumes the cook's own vessels. When nineteenth-century American cookbooks standardised the measuring cup, "a pound of flour" survived as a phrase and was quietly redefined as whatever filled the author's cups.

That history is why old pound figures for flour disagree with each other: a pound is 453.59 grams, which is about 3¾ cups of flour spooned and levelled the way this site measures it — how to measure flour explains why the scooping method moves that figure so much. If an old recipe says a pound, weigh 454 grams and you are closer to the author's intent than any cup count can get; the grams in a cup of all-purpose flour page shows the full table behind that number.

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