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!

Yes. Tablespoon / teaspoon measurements are real. You buy a set. Cups are the same 1 cup, half etc.

I think a lot of Facebook videos by Americans wanting to show off their ‘recipes’ are just people with long nails opening packets, but that’s the same for a lot of SM.

And recipes that use cups (not all Americans either, Nigella is fond of a cup) have adjusted for how much of the ingredient you will get in the recipe by volume so they work fine. Not sure what’s hard to understand about it?

I love watching chefreactions, he calls out a lot of this terrible lazy cooking in foil trays

dont you make gravy from granules in the uk?

Well, I personally run towards recipes like that. It is so much easier to measure in spoons and cups in my opinion. And I don't live in America. What is so superior about using grams?

Yeah. We also use cake mixes, etc.

We just don't call it a recipe. A recipe will call for a roux (usually with instructions) or thickening the juices with flour or cornflour.

Yes, they are real measurements. You don't just grab any old cup or spoon from your cupboard/drawer.

@BabaBarrio This entire thread is more about bashing each other than it is about American cooking vs British cooking, right down to the insults.

And show me, please, where I said American women had a monopoly on anything.

I was married for many, many years — in that entire time, my husband cooked exactly zero meals. He was also a pilot and was absent a good portion of the time.

OP, I totally disagree with you - you are watching a weird subset of TikTok videos and extrapolating to a whole country.

HOWEVER, wtf is up with boxes of “dry pancake mix” that you then have to add oil, milk and eggs to? Just a box of flour then, basically? And yet everyone buys them.

The Americans I know are great cooks. They can definitely cook a steak as well, if not better, than us. If your experience of American cooking is reading recipes that are more 'let me tell you my life story and show you pictures of my wholesome life' with a quick recipe slipped in, or folk on TikTok showing you a million ways to get creative with cheese whiz then it's no wonder you think they're lazy. Go there and try the food instead - it's great!

Not American and I use cups and tablespoons/ teaspoons etc for almost everything. Not sure what the problem is. They are super easy.

Social media isn't how people feed themselves and their families. Wildly different.

Cups are just measurements. Jeez.

American supermarkets are not like British supermarkets - and British supermarkets are FAR from perfect. But it is very hard to feed a family when (to our eyes) perfectly normal foods are interfered with. For eg, coleslaw which has high sugar corn fructose (or whatever it's name is) added. Meat not nearly as interfered with as British meat. This is not something to be snide about, this is something to be concerned about. Not everyone can afford Whole Foods (which my American bestie calls Whole PayCheck).

There are plenty of good and serious American cooks. That said, yes, there are a lot of terrible recipes out there on the web. British people cook plenty of awful rubbish too, but probably would be ashamed to share the “recipe.”

A lot of American cultural content tends to assume US universality or perhaps lacks interest in stuff outside the US, so there’s a tendency to recommend iconic American branded products that aren’t widely found outside the States, and use odd terms like “stick of butter” which assumes that you’re buying your butter in the same sizes as the writer. The imperial measurements and stupid “cups” are awful too; a “cup” of sugar can actually end up meaning very different amouts depending on how finely it is ground, moisture level and how firmly you pack the sugar down in the cup, so even if you purchased American measuring cups it’s just not a great way to do things and looks very amateurish and childish, to my mind. I have noticed that good American cooks, like Joy of Baking (a good blogger) use grams and proper ingredients, so it’s definitely not everyone.

I made the mistake of joining an American group for Thanksgiving a few years ago. Lovely people, lovely company and I know it’s unkind to say anything ungrateful, but oh dear God, that food!?!? Weird concoctions of jelly and marshmallows mixed into savory dishes. Cranberry “sauce” that was just a can-shaped wedge of purple sugary stuff (I’d imagined some sort of beautiful tangy fruity coulee, so that one really was disappointing). The turkey was the size of a small child and had no flavor.

Was going to say I think this might be a regional thing. I used to follow quite a few Christian/Mormon home schooling families in/around the Bible belt and their "so healthy, home made meals" were something else. This was a casserole recipe 🤢

1 bag frozen onions
1 stick butter
1 bag frozen tater tots (hash browns?)
1 tin turkey mince
2 tins mushroom soup

They would have pantries the size of bedrooms with wall to wall shelves with tins of veg, mince and boxes of mac n cheese and cake mix. They also seemed to use a lot of disposable plates/cutlery.

OK mass or volume then

A US recipe might call for a cup of water or a cup of flour, which you might translate here into ml or g, ie liquid and dry measurements are different

The point being that running away from US recipes because they use cups is silly, it's a specific measurement you can convert in 2 seconds, you just need to specify the ingredient

I recall one show where the mum made spaghetti sauce by mixing ketchup with melted butter!

Blimey.

Tell me you know nothing about America or Americans without telling me you know nothing about America or Americans, why don't you...

Was going to say I think this might be a regional thing.

Nope, try again. Not everyone in that region in America cooks like that...just like not everyone there has 20 children, homeschools and believes in creationism. Shocking I know.

There are loads of Americans who cook amazing food. You seriously don’t think all the celebs in LA are chowing down processed junk? Lots of fresh ingredients using all types of fruit and veg…Mid west BBQs, sea food in Seattle, awesome delis in New York, Mexican food down South…

I don’t know what recipes you are reading OP but you can find any old rubbish on the internet. They do have processed foods just like we do, everything seems to be laced in corn syrup. But it’s very easy to avoid eating that rubbish just like it is in the Uk.

No it's not. It's parading someone's ignorant and ill-informed idea of American cooking as Truth.

This is a form of stereotyping, based on what 'someone's friend' said about cooking or what someone saw on one site online. All stereotyping is objectionable.

Maybe look up some of the many, many excellent American cooking websites before you cast aspersions on an entire country of over 300 million people...

I quite like cups for measuring some things... my own banana muffin recipe uses a nice international mix of cups (flour etc), ounces (bananas) and mls (oil).

I was curious how cup measures came about, I haven't yet found out as I was distracted by this rather lovely wiki page on the cup (unit) (it helpfully points out Cup a measurement used in bra sizing, and is unrelated.)

Again with the cups vs grams measurements - I’ve made the same cakes from Nigella recipes from both the UK and US versions of her books and the end result has been the same.

What was different which took some getting used to was how much temp and humidity affect some baking - especially bread - it took a while to get some bread recipes that I’d made dozens of time in the UK but which failed badly until I accounted for the difference across different seasons on the East Coast of the US.

Also the New York Times Cooking section and Epicurious have fabulous examples of good US cooking.

And for cute funny videos try Jennifer Garner on Instagram where she does what she calls a ‘fake cooking show’.

@Ruthietuthie
Where do you find these books. I spent ages in Barnes and Noble in San Diego going through the baking books and couldnt find a cook from scratch one. I have spent hours and wasted money on American Cook books and cant find any good ones.