I'm all for respecting cultural differences, but...

[EscargotChic]

I love the internet as a source of recipes, but when they give ingredients US-style it drives me nuts. I think the one currently in the oven will be fine with approximate amounts which is good because it called for a pint of cherry tomatoes and a quarter of a cup chopped onion.
Not wanting to disrespect lovely US Mumsnetters, but seriously, kitchen scales are an amazing invention!

But how, I mean HOW in God's name do you measure butter in a tablespoon? Is it supposed to be level? In which case it needs to be really really soft? Or all piled up on the top? And if piled. up, how high?

It's a ridiculous system.

@ModerateOrGoodOccasionallyPoor On our sticks of butter, the tablespoons are measured out on the wrapper. Or, you can just divide it into 8ths. Or weigh it. A tablespoon of butter weighs about 14 grams.

I have cups and I convert things like sticks of butter to grams. I just google. It's easy. However I'm not a fan of US recipes. Far too likely to include tonnes of oil, or random upf pre made ingredients. Like a recipe genuinely telling you to use shop bought pancake mix or a tin of soup in a casserole.

@DdraigGoch indeed. But for me, it's just a rough idea and with savoury dishes, I don't think it's that crucial. Or I just put in as many onions as I would if using a certain amount of mince for example

I have scales in grams and ounces, a set of measuring cups, and a German measuring jug. I use the 50g markings on the butter packet to measure out butter.

DS‘ first recipe was a French children’s classic, a yoghurt cake that used the two pots the yoghurt had come in to measure out the other ingredients. He must have been 2.

I‘ve also been known to use a wine glass to measure out liquids - one has a handy 250ml mark on it.

I like the science behind cooking and baking though. Measuring cups are fun to understand the ratios of different ingredients. Scales make it easier to - well - scale a recipe. It’s interesting to see where the flour and sugar markings are in relation to each other on the measuring jug - and to the liquid markings. And I put onion/garlic/veg into my meals by intuition.

Dunno if it's been mentioned already but my cups have the weight written on them. So if a recipe calls for half a cup of butter, I look at my half cup which says 118ml, so then I weigh out 118g of butter. Seems to work OK.

I love cups. I actually seek out recipes with cup instead of grams.

Well I think a French recipe will use grammes.

I had a Hummingbird Bakery cookbook years ago and as it was all in US measurements and we didn’t really have smartphones for quick conversions, I bought some cups. I found it harder to fill cups than pour into a bowl sat on scales so that kind of put me off. It baffles me too because if you fill a cup with flour to the top, it might weigh 110g, but you can pack it down and get another 40g in there - so which is it? I found US baking recipes often use ingredients I don’t fancy, like cups of vegetable oil or corn syrup. Not that UK recipes are any healthier, but I guess I just prefer recipes in grams that use butters and sugars.

I will never understand why people select recipes with ingredients they don't like. I typically find recipes that use butter or sugar rather than oil or corn syrup or spread or margarine because I prefer them

I was a bit cross about cups being imprecise for things like cheese (how densely should the cup be packed!?) a few years ago...

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2800968-A-cup-of-cheese?page=1

Very very odd then! Please report back!!

I’m not sure that counts as a cultural difference. Culture is things like Spanish people eating more at lunchtime or not having their evening meal til late. Or perhaps differences in how people hold their cutlery.

As long as everything is in proportion, including the number of eggs, then yes. You’d get a pretty large cake though!

The recipe says x cups of flour and y eggs. If I can use 'any cup' x times but the recipe still says "y eggs" then the proportions are going to be wrong. Whereas proper weights and measures are universally defined. Or is there an egg to cup conversion chart, so that you know whether you should be using quail or ostrich eggs to match your particular set of cups.

And then when you come to put it in the tin, you'll have used the size of tin the recipe specified for the proportions of the recipe. If you have doubled the recipe then you must double the tin. But if (as far as you are concerned) you are still just putting in x cups of flour etc. - they just happen to be Sports Direct cups - the mixture is going to be much deeper in the tin which means that it won't bake properly.

Cups work surprisingly well for recipes like pancakes which only need one cupful of each ingredient - 1 cup of flour, 1.5 cups milk, an egg and a dash of oil. Far quicker than weighing, and the exact proportions don’t really matter (you just add more or less milk to the batter to get the thickness you want).

Obviously doesn’t work for precise baking etc, or something with more than 2-3 ingredients.

Forgot to say, my very British gran and home economics teacher both used to make cakes by eye - a cup is really just an extension of that (because it relies on you knowing what the cake batter is “meant” to look like).

I agree that measuring by cup isn’t ideal but I always sift my flour which makes a huge difference. I always think cups and tablespoons are easier to me. Not saying anyone else. It hasn’t been converted in the us yet and I don’t want the gaff of weighing stuff.

When cooking meals onions and garlic are really just going by your preferences. We don’t really measure vegetables. It’s a, well that looks good or I want more garlic or less onion. It’s a matter of taste

@EscargotChic but why dont they just use weighing scales?????

Right, so why say tablespoon? Why not just say the weight and be done with it? It's impossible to measure certain things by the spoonful and butter is one of them. If a tbs is supposed to correlate to an exact weight for butter (but a different weight for something else) then the recipe should just say the weight!

Ah no - you’d obviously have to increase the size of everything in proportion - eggs, sugar, butter, and yes, the size of the baking tin - but if you did this then you could use the sports direct mugs IYSWIM. You’d just get a massive cake!

You have been lucky as that only holds true for water.

1ml of water weighs 1 gram but different ingredients have different densities.

100ml of sugar weighs 60g,
100ml of flour weighs 85g,
100ml of butter weighs 96g,
100ml of oil weighs 89g.

So you'd have to know that a Sports Direct mug is worth roughly 2.4 US cups and you'd have to be sure that the recipe wasn't Australian or whatever.

Much easier to have properly defined measures. You can still scale them, but you're working from a proper standard to begin with.

@ModerateOrGoodOccasionallyPoor I am not certain why we do it the way we do, but since we have been pretty successful at it, it clearly works out for us. Bakeries and commercial producers use weights because it is faster and more accurate. I am a pretty good cook and home baker and, personally, I prefer working with weights. But, it is not hard to go back and forth, and I do it all the time. More and more US recipes are including weights, alongside the volume measures.