…4000 steps, Karl Baedeker would have had to climb to get the amount of peas together for a side dish…

It is recorded that Baedeker, the publisher of guide-books, was caught in the act climbing the Milan Cathedral and stopping at every twentieth step to put a dried pea from his waistcoat to his trouser pocket. Multiplied by 20, plus the remaining steps, results in the precise number of steps for his later guide-book. Friends called him from then on „Erbsenzähler“ (= nitpicker). Even Jacques Offenbach dedicated a songline to him in his operetta „La Vie Parisienne“: „Kings and governments may err, but never Mr. Baedeker“.

Using the scales might be a bit faster to get the standard amount of dried pulses for a serving today:
50 g for a side dish,
100 g for a main dish.
After cooking, they weigh more than double
(e.g. 100 g dry lentils weigh around 225 g when cooked).
So it’s quite easy to calculate even the quantity of canned pulses per serving by dividing by two.