Americans are lazy cooks

[Dogonthebed]

I’m an avid Pinterest collector of recipes. I see something I like the look of then pin to that’s week meal plan only to find out it is an American recipe Recipe stretching it as they seem to have shortcuts for everything we can’t get in the UK. Can they actually cook? It is the equivalent of us making a cottage pie from a Coleman mix. Anyone else find it bizarre how much help they get for basic recipes then having the cheek to set up a blog as recipes??? They could just read the back of the instructions fgs!

You never wash melted butter or oil out of any of your weighing or measuring tools? How do you manage with buttermilk, oil, melted butter, treacle, golden syrup, etc?

I have several sets of measuring cups and spoons. When I bake, I keep a bowl of hot, soapy water to hand with a little squirt of white vinegar thrown in. I place any spoons or spatulas or measuring cups I use into the hot water. By the time the confection is in the oven all I have to do is take all of that out, brush remaining residue off it, and bung it all in the dishwasher.

You haven't lived until you've made yourself a dozen muffins from a devil's food cake mix packet and supplemented the mix with a good dollop of Hellman's.

You're wrong about the cup measurements, obv, and if you had read the thread (or had ever seen an American recipe published for an American audience) you'd understand why. There is a time honored way to scoop flour, and recipes always ask for certain ingredients to be packed (usually brown sugar) or 'heaped'. You do not pack flour.

My excellent American-published cookbooks, including books specifically devoted to baking, all use cups.

Examples -
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vols I and II, by Julia Child
Beard on Bread, by James Beard
How to Bake, by Nick Malgieri
Perfect Cakes, by Nick Malgieri
Le Chocolat, by Martyne Jolly
Great Chocolate Desserts, by Maida Heatter
Patisserie of Italy, by Jenni Wright
Patisserie of Vienna, by Josephine Bacon
The Settlement Cookbook
The New York Times Cookbook, by Craig Claiborn
Around my French Table, by Dorie Greesspan
All my Nigella Lawson books use cups and spoons too, as does my copy of The Joy of Baking.

Many of the authors of these books are leaders in their field and seem to have given their imprimatur to volume measurements.

The reason why is that they work. Or do you really believe that American bakers turn out flop after flop using their cups and spoons and never turn to some other way to do it?

Your comment on 'the more sophisticated American bakers' is Anglocentric snobbery.

Here's one of my favorite American baking cookbooks. Her bake shop is so famous they get tourists from all over. It's all volume measurements.

https://www.amazon.com/Tates-Bake-Shop-Cookbook-Southamptons-ebook/dp/B007VOTGCQ?ref_=ast_author_dp

I love Tate's cookies. Having a couple of the lemon ones as I type.

All of her cookies are fabulous. I love her quick breads and muffins, too. I have her other two books as well.

Ooh I used to love buying a tub of the lime ones

@ErrolTheDragon
We all agree! As for "US mini-pints" that sounds horrific. I don't like any of those words put together like that. Mini should never be used with beer!

Absolutely

Life doesn’t have to be all or nothing either. Lots of people neither have the time nor the inclination to bake often. They don’t want to take up loads of cupboard space with baking ingredients or buy full bags of flour or sugar for something they make once a year. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to have a fresh cake for a birthday, decorate it themselves or have the children helping with mixing and licking the bowl. A packet cake mix still gives a lot of the pleasure of a “home made” cake without wasted ingredients. It’s less hassle and it probably gives a better result if you don’t bake much. What’s wrong with that?

It’s astounding what people will use to make other people feel a bit shit.

This thread is an excuse to bash Americans.
I lived in America for years, and it's a vast country. What people are doing in Brooklyn won't be the same as what they are doing in Little Rock so it's a bit daft to generalise.
I personally like the cup system as I find measuring and weighing a massive faff. Actually I find baking a faff and find it much easier ( and no more expensive) to buy a cake from a local cafe..
Yes, the American food manufacturers are very powerful, and they campaign for the population to use packaged crap, just like the drug manufacturers campaign for people to take endless pills. However, there is also a massive ethnic mix in most states, and people cook amazing Columbian, Cantonese, Vietnamese food etc in their homes.
Brits are better at cooking than they used to be but let's face it, a lot of people here still have no idea about food. For one thing, we are an island surrounded by fish, and yet we export most of it because Brits in general are turned off by any fish that isn't white, boneless and bland..there's still a long way to go before we can compare ourselves favourably as a country of cooks!

Actually it isn't.

https://opentextbc.ca/basickitchenandfoodservicemanagement/chapter/imperial-and-u-s-systems-of-measurement/#:~:text=The%20only%20difference%20between%20the,the%20table%20in%20Table%207.&text=1%20(fluid)%20oz.

Actually it is. If you read my link, which I'll paste again below, because it's really fascinating,

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Imperial-unit

"Early origins - The British Imperial System evolved from the thousands of Roman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and customary local units employed in the Middle Ages. Traditional names such as pound, foot, and gallon were widely used, but the values so designated varied with time, place, trade, product specifications, and dozens of other requirements. Early royal standards established to enforce uniformity took the name Winchester, after the ancient capital of Britain, where the 10th-century Saxon king Edgar the Peaceable kept a royal bushel measure and quite possibly others. Fourteenth-century statutes recorded a yard (perhaps based originally on a rod or stick) of 3 feet, each foot containing 12 inches, each inch equaling the length of three barleycorns (employed merely as a learning device since the actual standard was the space between two marks on a yard bar). "

And then of course the English settlers brought this ancient system to America. Otherwise they'd be calling it "cuillère à soupe" or something else, right?

Here's the post about the history again. It's really interesting.
Feel free to ignore if I have nerded too far into history.
https://imgur.com/gallery/S9nYOfZ

Hope you're on majority American websites defending British cuisine. You know they're saying exactly the same sort of shit about our food?

Colombia.

Interesting how you can appreciate the vastness and differences in one country but not this one? Assume you've eaten at every table and every restaurant to make sweeping generalisations?

Or...are you just doing the same in reverse?

She actually has knowledge of both cultures, unlike the OP and many PPs.

Well she has direct knowledge of the area she lived in.

The Joy of Cooking is one of my favourite cookbooks, for reading as well as using the recipes - pages on boiling water (partly because of the altitude thing) and that diagram of how to skin a squirrel!

I use dry measures all the time - grew up with one of those inverted cone Tala cook's dry measure thingies, supplemented by a pyrex graduated beaker showing the measurements for liquids. Happy to report that butter packs in Ireland are still marked out in 25g lengths, but am very glad to see what an American stick of butter looks like - very sensible system imo.

I popped to the supermarket tonight and saw a whole shelf of paxo stuffing boxes. Presumably they have a lot because they sell a lot.

Not something I would use personally, but not sure brits should be critiquing packet cake mixes when shoving freeze dried shit up a turkeys bottom is considered traditional.

I'd say you'd get the same variations. Plenty in the south who are used to african and caribbean influences, or those in the southwest, tex mex might not be familiar with or think about British cuisine. However, lots of British style restaurants and pubs in the larger and mid-sized cities. I've been to several smaller cities that have British themed bars and they are very popular. Lots in New England (where I lived for a spell) and along the eastern coast very much intrigued and interested in a good fish and chips dish, and any of the British desserts. And Cadbury. Lots of Americans I met obsessed with Cadbury.

I had the worst fish and chips ever in the US,we had them in Santa Barbara and Monterey. But the best ive had were in New Zealand

@Citrusandginger gosh not a whole shelf of Paxo?!

Some of this thread (including the premise) does seem a little far-fetched. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that British cooks are eccentric because Jack Monroe has a recipe which calls for washing off canned ravioli-Os and adding salt and pepper. Nor that British cooks are confused about culinary terminology because that same chef's best-selling Vegan(ish) contains recipes for salmon and chicken. (With canned peas, fancy!)

That said, I wonder if some of this isn't "separated by a common language" stuff? In American English, I think it's very common to say (for example) "I'll call you back; I'm in the middle of cooking dinner" or "my wife and I each do half the cooking" even if what's really going on is a lot of packaged Mac 'n' Cheese and Betty Crocker mix cakes. No one thinks "cooking" means they're Julia Child - not even Anne Romney! 😀Similarly, if my teenager wanted to make boxed Mac 'n' Cheese and didn't know how, I'd say "follow the recipe on the box" - whereas I suspect in British English it might be more usual to say "follow the instructions..." or "... directions"? I'd never thought anyone would find those usages of "cooking" or "recipe" exaggerated or misleading until I read this thread!

Also, volume measurements are fairly standard internationally, with some variations - you can buy a cucharada in any Latin American country (or Spain) and it's the same size as a US tablespoon: 15 ml or 15 cm³. Ditto a cuillère à table in Québec and in various Francophone countries.

@capitanaamerica I think you make a good point about use of language. I actually found myself looking up the etymology of "recipe" and "cook" thinking to myself that these words must have a more restrictive meaning in British English.

There was a thread on here a little while ago asking if cooking a chicken breast and potatoes from raw was in fact cooking, and a lot of people said no.