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 I can say from my recent California visit that good quality fresh food is not cheap (more than UK ) it's easily findable and abundant though if you have a really good supermarket like say whole foods - but many of the more downmarket supermarkets are stuffed full of poor quality convenience food.

I really liked Pavilions in West Hollywood and Trader joes wasn't bad either

Would be happy to shop at those plus Wholefoods -

I do think though that California isn't necessarily representative of the whole of the USA- it does tend to have a health and fitness focus in various places and it's very easy to steer away from Taco Belle, McDonald's, APPLEBEES ETC

Correct. It doesn't weigh the same as a cup of cream.

Nobody is claiming that American cup measures are measurements of weight. They are measurements of volume.

A cup of flour weighs just under five ounces, or approximately 127 grams. If a recipe calls for ten ounces or 300 grams of flour, you use two cups.

Basically, the recipe you use will come with all the right proportions of ingredients, which you measure by volume, not weight.

If you look on TikTok or the blogs of women with gel nails for your recipes of course you'll find all sorts of ungodly crap. If you look at sites like Food, Allrecipes, Bon Appetit, and a host of others, you'll find proper recipes for real food. Millions of great recipes, with huge numbers of reviews...

I don't see the recipes or blogs you refer to, because the algorithm brings me to sites that are not shite.

My tiktok was full of Erewhon videos for a while. I think (might be wrong) that it's s standalone supermarket in LA where the bold and the beautiful spend $25 on a ritzy bottle of water and a sandwich costs $40.

I must say the best birthday cake I ever made for DD, loads of compliments from parents of DD's friends was an American recipe, it had oil instead of butter.

Ah, so hair splitting...

all carrot cake recipes use oil so oil doesn't seem that foreign a cake ingredient to me.

I'm well north of NYC, and I can get local goat cheese. These are pictures of the cheese department at my local supermarket. I think these are all "Real Cheeses".

With this fairy style birthday cake, I typed into Google, "lightest sponge ever' and tbf it was!

Meh. Nothing wrong with making a cottage pie with a Coleman mix.

Sometimes I make things "properly" sometimes I CBA when there's a shortcut.

blogs of women with gel nails

Yeah, because you can't have gel nails and cook from scratch?

I've never seen a cake mix that called for a whole cup of oil. Are you sure your remark is based on experience?

Also, there are plenty of lovely cake recipes (from scratch) that call for oil. I make one for DS' birthday every year that involves buttermilk and oil. It is lush, imo. The recipe comes from a restaurant in Decatur, GA.

I appreciate you may well have a preference for cakes made with butter, but that's a matter of taste and therefore your opinion of cakes made with oil is a subjective opinion, not an objective one.

Yes, I knew that unpasteurised cheese is available but isn't it in certain states and also aren't the processes European, i.e they are European imports or British they aren't authentic American cheese as that is the processed type?

Hahaha. I'm European. This thread is comedy gold. A Brit criticizing someone's cuisine?? It's like Russia criticizing Israel for bombing another country.

Let me spell it out for you. Your food sucks. It's shit. It's horrible. An abomination. This is known all over Europe, ask anyone. Chip butties, fish and finger butties, crisp butties, mince and tatties, all the vomit inducing, inedible, beige-greige crap. Yea yea, I know, you have your 'roasts', and 'shepherd's pies', 'chops', 'stews' and the like. But there's nothing and I repeat - NO-THING - any other country haven't cooked first and haven't cooked far far better. Lasagna with garlic bread? You're analphabets of cooking, you don't know what good food is.

The only other country comparable is.. Yep, USA. But although they cannot cook, they're lovely friendly people, not snooty stick-in-their-ass fucks.

We're all European @Shadowonasun and shouldn't you be doing your homework?

That just isn't true of Britain anymore but this does depend on where you live and your upbringing. Just as it is not true that eating out wise not all Europe are great cooks, we visited the Netherlands last year and the food was hit and miss, Britianny this Spring and had some hideous pancakes and very rich heavy sauces at dinner time. Spain in the summer to an area that is 99.9 percent Spanish tourists and the food was excellent in two restaurants, rubbish and dry in another two! Some of us are good cooks especially if we have varies heritage, my DH is a really good cook, as are all of his friends strangely. I just think that is outdated BS frankly.

The story I like is that American cake mixes were developed with dried egg added. So you just had to add water, I think.

But housewives felt that was too unsatisfying so they took the egg out, so you get the experience of adding it yourself and feeling like a chef :)

Stating your European does not equate to 'good cook' just as it is ridiculous to say a huge country like the U S has no variance in style or quality of cooking.

The problem with this thread is that so many posters think the silly Insta 'chefs' are indeed representative, something to go by, a solid example to form the basis of an opinion of a country of 300 million people from all sorts of different heritages and income levels and interest in cooking.

To be fair, many of the posters who have commented here are familiar names from a great many other threads on America and Americans. Clearly there are several people here on MN who have a chip on their shoulders when it comes to all things American.

But why is the fallacy so easy for other Brits to believe?

Fair comment, @Shadowonasun, though we could quibble on a few points here and there. Most of our good food is ideas (and ingredients) imported from the mainland, with varying degrees of success.

I think it's also a fair guess that few Brits will take your post as a slur on the very nature of all British people and try to get the thread deleted!
Tempted as I am to speculate on the implications of that, I can't be arsed
😂

Cups are great for measuring, boxed mac and cheese is a delight and if you don't think Americans spend a huge amount of time ripping the piss out of English cookery then you're very naive.
I'm in a lot of American food groups, and they spend a good amount of time dissing English food and cooking as being the worst in the world, we have a reputation for it.
I don't think it's fair to judge any countries' food on the basis of what they cook for convenience

You know that that sort of recipe was popular about 70 years ago, right? ( Along with the jello salads a few of you claim to have been served.)

That sort of recipe is considered so godawful and redolent of a certain era and certain sort of person that is considered parody material - by Americans.

Cripes, who triggered you?

I think it used to be like that in the UK. But from the 80s things got so much better and I don't think what you say applies so much now. If it did the supermarkets wouldn't stock the wide range of ingredients that they do. But equally there is also a wide selection of processed rubbish.

How does your food group feel about cooking in the rest of the UK?😉

I mean that's just a negative stereotype that hasn't been true for about a decade now. I don't know many people that cook all these traditional British dinners, there is a huge variety of cultures in Britain that has influenced the general preferences of your everyday cook. I think though that for some of us, cooking wasn't a thing for our parents who grew up in swinging sixties Britain, my parents were bohemian, cared about music and politics more than eating, like loads of their contemporaries, often my Mum would 'cook' space food that was starting to appear on the shelves when she was in her 20s and they were very, very thin!

Americans are not a homogenous group.