A cup of cheese

[TyneTeas]

I am making bacon cheese bread and need to add a cup of grated cheese.

How is that a measure??

Do I densely pack the cup to the extent I may as well just have carved a cylinder from the block or arrange a few meagre strands like an acrobatic formation team within the cup?

The recipe may as well have just said add an indeterminate amount

AIBU to expect a system of measurement to be more precise?

If in doubt use the entire block. You can never have too much cheese. Actual fact!

Well there you have it - some people think a cup is 125g and others that it's 8oz. In UK imperial 8oz is equivalent to around 250g.

US volume measures are different from UK imperial ones, hence they talk about pints, quarts and gallons but they much smaller than our pints, quarts & gallons.

Also Australian/NZ cup sizes are different from US ones, so god help us all.

I'm rubbish at baking bread. Might see if the idea works as cheese and bacon scones...?

Cups are about volume not weight so you can't directly translate. You need to make the whole recipe in either volume measures or weight measures. I live in Canada and have a mixture of UK and North American cook books. The ones with metric measures are definitely more accurate (I have digital scales)

Tempus it's not like proper bread making, it really is just mix it up in a bowl, leave it and it doesn't take much kneading, I just shoved it up and down the board for a couple of minutes.

Hadn't thought about different countries having different size cups!

Although the proportions would still be right I suppose.

I heard that the "cup" system was introduced in the early years of the US, when many people would not have had scales or even measuring jugs, the idea being that a recipe calling for 4 cups of X, 1 cup of Y and two cups of Z would have the right proportions, even if your cup was a different size to your neighbour's.

I can see the logic in that PigletJohn but you'd never know what size tin to use or how long to bake stuff for