Who in their right mind would put « 12.5cl » as an amount of milk, when it’s much clearer - and saves a character, albeit only a full stop - to write « 125ml »?
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Hmm… for some reason such things don’t confront me; my brain just ‘translates’ automatically.
I use mm all the time in my head but use a tape with centimetres marked on it.
However, whoever thinks that using cups as a sensible measurement needs a firm talking to.
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Is the rest of the recipe using cl?
No, it was grammes and coffee spoons, apparently.
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That sounds like someone I work with who uses numbers to 8 or 10 decimal places even though only the first one or two are significant. Makes it really hard to figure out what is happening in a complex spreadsheet.
After years of being frustrated with these silly French measurements, I’ve bought a tape measure in feet & inches, it’s a bugger of a job working and cutting using these French measurements! If I want to build a raised garden bed 6’ wide & 12’ long using these daft measurements, I’d have to measure 1,828.8mm wide & 3,657.6mm long, now where’s the sense in that? 
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We had an artisan in the uk who measured everything in Imperial, but then converted it to SI.
It worked for him.
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Talk of units like this, we often deal with stuff over a very wide range of concentrations. It can boggle some minds a little to have to become familiar with milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, but otherwise the zeros seem endless.
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12.5cl is a wine glassful. Clearly a chef would have wine glasses immediately to hand. The correlation is therefore obvious as after all ---- this is France.
Vive la République. 
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My brain has started using only centimes instead of euros for road fuel. So much easier to say to myself 209 centimes instead of 2.09 euros. Works for me, especially as I have already ditched the centimes and euros, leaving just the numbers. 
For a meal, our Salle des Fetes lays the tables with glasses in 2 sizes: 16cl and 19cl and it is up to whoever is pouring the wine and/or the “drinker” to decide when enough wine has been poured.
I’ve never seen a glass actually “full of wine” 
I’ve noticed that some diners will put water into the 19cl and leave the 16cl for wine and others will do things the other way around. 
Tumblers for water used to be offered but that habit seems to have died out (or perhaps those glasses got broken).
In restaurants, if one orders “a glass of wine” it is never, ever full and I’ve not noticed any “guiding marks” such as we used to have on some beer glasses back in the old days in UK. Perhaps the Resto uses a “measure” of some sort… no idea. Might ask 'em next time I come across such a thing.
I sympathise.
I’n architecture & engineering (excluding working in the US), everything is in millimetres, even though it’s difficult to build to the nearest mm!
So, you kind of get used to dealing and writing in stupidly big numbers. BUT
When I’m working with my hands, I revert to imperial and used feet and inches. Much easier to remember and make out on a tape.
I remember my first year at infant school learning imperial and then it switched to metric.
Cooking using cups is a bit mental until you figure out the logic and simplicity of it all. Just need to find the right size if cup I guess?
So if there is an actual definition of a cup then use that measurement.
Asking Claude AI it says….
….so there isn’t a standard size anyway 
Not everyone will know how big the cups in their cupboard are. OK, you can use a measuring jug to find that out, in which case you already have a suitable tool to measure out with, so your drinking vessels can remain untroubled in the cupboard.
You’d think the world would have learnt how important common measurements are when some years ago a Mars lander failed spectacularly due to different parts of the project using imperial & the other metric.
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Yup US cup measurements are very crude indeed and I guess if making a cake for say a camel, the cup would probably be a bucket. But how big is a bucket??
Teaspoons are also an interesting method of measuring fluid. I recall that a teaspoon of cough syrup came with a plastic ‘teaspoon’ measuring 5ml. So that stuck, but my wife does not or more likely refuses to understand the difference between a desert spoon and table spoon. (and a soup spoon is another matter …)
Um. What logic ? 1 cup = 236.64 ml. This is logical ?
For purchasing ingredients it’s a nightmare. So we want 4 cups of plain flour that is sold by weight. So how much does a cupful weigh ? Then of course that has to be calculated for each ingredient separately as a cup of parsley weighs somewhat less than a cup of sugar.
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US cup measures come from frontier days. Most folk had no means of weighing things so everything was done by volume.
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For the first time, that actually makes sense. Not so much in the 21st century mind
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The only sensible way to communicate measurements of fluids {and solids} is to use mass in grams. That way there is no ambiguity or variations caused by local traditions or changes in temperature and pressure.
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It’s logical in that it is volume and not weight based so great if you are out in the wilderness and trying to make some delicious fruit tart but forgot to pack the digital scales in the rucksack.
It’s like mixing mortar which is always volume based .
Btw…Im not sticking up for cups as a unit of measurement. I think it’s lazy.
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As I don’t heat my bedroom and always sit up in bed and read for a time before sleep, I treated myself to an old fashioned hot water bottle.
Estimated the first time the amount to put in the kettle then marked a red line on the view panel. Not good as always holding it up to see it the level would not stay still so I filled a half litre glass jug and tested it in the kettle. near enough so I now fill the kettle from the measuring jug. No more guessing. 
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