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!

Bit like marmite or Worcestershire sauce here then

I love those bags of frozen soffritto. Snip it open chuck it in the pan and I feel like I'm off to a good start without even having had to peel an onion. Sometimes the idea of peeling an onion can be a big 'nope' for me.

It's called 'wash your sister' sauce now. Or sometimes 'roy's sister cherie' sauce.

Saw one recently which was supposed to be a soup recipe and it had an entire packet of shop-bought fresh tortellini as one of the 'ingredients', I was so confused

I've been involved in food projects to help people with low incomes and no cooking experience learn.

The projects use cups not weight.

Not everyone on a low income has a set of scales, but everyone has a cup or mug in the cupboard. The exact volume doesn't matter, you just need to use the same cup throughout the recipe and it will work.

It's also an approach that is helpful for the one in 4 people in the UK who struggle with numeracy and the one in 5 who have low literacy.

@Scruffington me too- just makes bolognese taste much nicer without the chopping faff and I hate peeling onions

That’s down to awful mat leave policies, no requirement to consider PT requests, and shit childcare provision. The US government does not have the family-friendly policies we take for granted.

US 1950s fluoro jello salads are a hilarious and baffling rabbit hole (which plenty of Americans also find hilarious and baffling, I first became aware of it via Metafilter and AskaManager).

But we had our fair share of weird 1970s cooking in the UK - DM has an old 1970s Marguerite Patten recipe book she was given when she got married in 1974, and while it is all made from scratch, the photography in particular is something else. So many lurid colours. We just don’t have Mommy bloggers recreating it on TikTok.

I believe (and I'm only going on what others have told me) that fresh produce is also extremely expensive in the US as opposed to cheaper processed alternatives.

DBro was in New York last year and said a fresh red pepper (1) cost around five dollars. Of course that could just be because he was in a city......

Great for teaching kids how to cook as well - I have a great choc chip and oatmeal cookie recipe (off the back of a President’s Choice oatmeal packet 🤣) which DS has been making with minimal supervision since he was two.

Weighing stuff out precisely is hard, putting one scoop of flour and smaller scoops of oatmeal and butter in a bowl is not.

Yes, grocery shopping is way more expensive in the US. Obviously NYC will be a special case but even Ordinaryville, Ohio will be far more expensive than your average UK supermarket.

Love the sweeping generalisations here. Some Americans, like some British people, do actually cook from scratch. There are also very health conscious Americans who are disgusted by the amount of processed food available in US shops. I managed to cook from scratch really easily while living there. And there are many good blogs from US cooks that don't use any processed food.

Also, since I've been living back in the UK, I've been shocked by the number of kids I see who are visibly overweight - more than I used to see where we were living in the US. British people have no reason to feel superior around food and nutrition at all!

American boxed cake mixes are delicious. In fact, I'd recommend bringing some back if you're ever in the US.

I normally bake from scratch and have a sheaf of reliable recipes for cakes of all kinds, and DD4 bakes something nice at least once a fortnight. But sometimes you feel like a cake in a hurry on a Wednesday evening, and it's nice to whip one up using just one mixing bowl, with no sieving or time-consuming measuring involved.

I agree with you that cake mixes are not the same as a home-made cake, but that wasn't the point I was making. The person I was responding to had posted about obesity, and that was what I was referring to in my post. It doesn't matter how you cook a cake, it is still a cake at the end of the day, and stuffed with calories.

You must be in an overweight child hotspot then as I don't really see any obese kids where I live, mist arw the opposite. The fact is in world rankings the US does have more of obesity problem, those are the facts.

British food when out, well depending on where you live is of very high quality now. At home maybe a different matter but surely that comes down to money like most things in life.

LOL

We have refrigeration, you know, and planes and trucks to transport produce all over the country to supermarkets.

California is a leading producer of fruit and veg, and Americans get the benefit of proximity to Central and South American producers, too. Arizona and Nevada are not among the more populous states.

Now that winter is upon us, I'm looking forward to seeing Texas pink grapefruit in the shops. American-grown Clementimes have already appeared. We've just had apple season, with lovely apples from two nearby states in all the shops, and before that we had melons, blueberries, raspberries, and cherries. They're all still available, but produced in California, Peru and Mexico at this point. There are lots of fresh root veg and green leafy veg too.

I live in a big Midwestern city where winters are long and cold. The local Farmer's Market operates from early May to the end of October, and takes food stamps as well as cash and card payments. I grow herbs, tomatoes and peppers - both sweet and hot - on my deck, and my downstairs neighbour grows zucchini in a little bed she created in the back yard. I bring the herbs indoors in winter and have rosemary, sage, basil, mint, thyme, and oregano whenever I want. My parish church has a 'gardening for our sisters and brothers in need' programme where parishioners donate garden crops to a city food bank. I don't grow enough to make much of a difference to the total, but every little bit counts.

I doubt there are pick your own farms near every British city and town. The SE tends to be very well served by businesses benefiting from the generally higher incomes in that region.

I live in NYC, we don't cook at all.

(I'm joking, but generally New Yorkers don't really cook. Loads of people I know use their ovens for storage)

So does the British obesity epidemic. The Nuffield Trust has stated that one in four British children was obese in the 2020-21school year, with a distinct correlation of obesity to income levels. If you factor in children who are overweight, you are looking at one in three children who are either obese or overweight.

It's more a case of lost empire syndrome. This is often accompanied by the "Americans don't have real cheese" urban myth. Anything that puts them in their proper place is popular on MN.

The money comes from licensed kitchenware and home textiles. The cooking bit is the shtick that sells the merch.

And your point about the volume measurements is...?

If you think the average Thai and Indian cook uses a scale and measures everything in grams when cooking at home for the family, you need to give your head a wobble.

Most home cooks all over the world either eyeball ingredients or use a trusty cup or other vessel to measure ingredients. Both of my grandmothers and my mother made bread this way every day of their lives, and pastry, and most savory dishes too. My mum can whip up a sponge just by eyeballing the ingredients.

With the cheese thing, isn't it the case that it is the prevalence of processes cheese? I was backpacking around Europe in 2000 and we washed our clothes on a laundrette in Venice and got chatting to an American girl backpacking she remarked on how dangerous British cheese is and how the U.S regulations ensure their safety on the cheese bu not having cheddar available. She also thought all the cows in England were still infected with mad cow disease though and how these things indicated how unsafe our policies on food standards were.

When I was very young so 7 in the mid 80s my Mum organised a tour of the U S over a period of two months and even then I was surprised at how big some people were in certain states. My Mum is not a particular amazing cook but she was desperate for vegetables when we returned as they were distinctly lacking. We definitely have a rising obesity problem but in a way we have imported lots of these approaches to fast food from the U S. Probably because burger and fries is tastier than soggy cabbage and faggots when you are a child.

So do Americans have there own cheddar equivalent then or when you say it is an urban myth are you just alluding to the European cheeses that are available in the U S this is a genuine question?

Oh dear.

If you need 9 tablespoons of butter then you use one full stick stick plus one tablespoon of a second stick. You use the handy little markings on the wrapper to gauge where to cut. Each stick is marked into eight tablespoons/half ounces. Astonishing, right?

Recipes almost always call for packed brown sugar, and they take into account the density and texture of other sugars, nuts chopped or whole, or other ingredients like raisins, chocolate chips, etc. that you might use. Your castor sugar and brown sugar measurements will all be fine. There's no need to fret, because recipes have the correct proportions, taking the different qualities of various ingredients into account.

The only issue you might have is with high altitude baking. Some books give amended ingredient measurements for high altitude baking (The Joy of Cooking, for example). If you use your usual recipe for a chocolate cake somewhere in the Rockies and it flops, you can always look online too, to see what might have gone wrong and how to fix it.

Everyone who bakes either sifts flour and then scoops and levels it, or just scoops and levels and fires ahead. It is a perfectly satisfactory method of baking, and millions of very good bakers use it all the time in the US because it works. Flour handling doesn't need to be spelled out in every recipe because it's a given, like releasing eggs from the shell before adding to the mixture. Do you honestly think Americans would go on using a method that turned out failure after failure?

I can't believe the nonsense that's being spouted on this thread, and the sheer lack of joined up thinking.

When we lived in Pennsylvania, we did find some Real Cheese. There was a deli out in the sticks, which to our delight had a whole Stilton. The first piece we bought was a bit immature but ok. I think we were the only people buying it, we got through a fair bit before we had to tell the shopkeeper that he'd better get rid of the rest before it walked out of the door.

That was ca 1990, don't know if the predominance of fake/poor cheese still applies. And maybe it's regional? Are there areas where you can get local goat or sheep's cheese like you can here?

Exactly that.

But also cultural.

Mist Italian cakes use oil. Thery find butter very heavy and conider it bad for you in the quatities we use.