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!

Me. And my husband.
I cook with cups and metric

I have this taped to the inside of a cupboard door. Very useful

If you take a standard 250 gram pack of butter and cut it in half lengthways you will get pretty much a US stick of butter, which is thinner than our standard packet. It will weigh around 125 grams.
Of course, you can equally cut it in half the other way and get the same quantity, 125 grams, but it won’t look like a US stick. (If that is important to you. )

Just use chatGPT to convert your recipe into UK measurements

Also: there's two sorts of American recipes. The kinds you find on recipe aggregators like Allrecipes are user submitted ones and aren't tested. That's where you find so many of the recipes that call for branded mixes and ingredients. Many of them were originally developed by the companies that made the products. It was a massive thing in the 1950s and 1960s. Americans didn't naturally love cooking with Campbell's soup and Jell-O; companies kept sending out recipes to get them to do it! It's not necessarily unrepresentative of a certain style of American home cooking, but it's probably not what you're searching for.

The better recipe sites like Epicurious, NYT cooking, Serious Eats, King Arthur (for baking) and some of the big food bloggers (I still love Smitten Kitchen) are proper, from scratch recipes with fresh ingredients and are actually tested. American recipes come up first because, to be quite honest, Google has been enshittified. If you want British recipes (which I do, sometimes!) you have to add "uk" to your search term.

Gosh. I can imagine the horror when you encounter a Corned Beef recipe.

@knitnerd90 King Arthur is my favorite flour too!

Also US cups are different to UK cups! 1 US cup = 0.8327 UK cup.🤯

You need one of these. Super useful, I use mine all the time.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tala-Traditional-Alternative-Including-Cornflour/dp/B000SA8996

I love "cups" recipes

Also if you think converting US recipes is a hardship, do not attempt Indian recipes, where cooking times are always measured in whistles (from the pressure cooker)

I agree it's annoying, but I just google for equivalents to e.g. 1 cu of flour.

I hate and can’t be bothered with scales and prefer to work it out based on the packets etc. I think this was the norm in UK when I was growing up.

One final thing, and I will get my coat: there is never a need to measure onions for a recipe. Just use the number you have on hand/want to use - whether it’s a small one, two large ones or six or whatever. Likewise garlic - you could do the same recipe with one or 10 cloves, and they would both taste great. Cooking is much easier when it’s instinctive.

Probably because there are 347,000,000 Americans.

A stick of butter is 8 tablespoons.

@Koulibiak Same here, I love onions and garlic so I always chuck loads in!

I have no problem with using a scale and temp chart to translate UK measurement. I think its fun. But then I'm nearly 75 and amusement comes easy.

But just when I think I've got it I messed up.

Brought up under Imperial System. You know like LSD . That is pound shilling and pence not hippy l trippy acid. And before thus use of pocket calculaties where you had to maths in your head

Google a converter to American weights and measures where you can just enter east amount

Long live, ounces,pounds. stones, hundred weight and tons.

🛒⚖️💰🧮

Very few recipes that do not involve baking will suffer badly if you have half or twice as much of one ingredient as the recipe calls for. The author didn't test 16 versions with 1 or 2 onions, 1 or 2 cups of carrots, etc etc. Unless I'm making something truly unusual I tend to do most things by eye. Again, with the exception of baking.

That's strange when I look up recipes it's usually the BBC Good food that's at the top. There are some good recipes on there and don't need to faff about measuring or weighing. The ingredients just say how many you need. Eg quarter of an onion 4 carrots etc.

OP I know just what you mean. And you have to remember that an American pint, at 16 oz, is smaller than our pint - so a pint of cherry tomatoes is probably a pound (lb, ie 16 oz). But what's that in kg (oh dear)?

You remind me that my mum used to have a thing called a Tala measure which measured various cooking ingredients by volume rather than weight.

I did laugh at a pint of tomatoes. I found something online that helpfully said "a pint's a pound the world round", but it really isn't, is it?

I have a set of plastic cups which I bought from Asda. They aren't expensive. I find them really handy for American recipes, and I use them for lots of other things too, like measuring oats for my breakfast.

In the UK? I have never seen any. Spreadable 'butter', yes, though the proper stuff (which will keep a week in a butter dish in a larder cupboard) is better.

I love the internet as you can search measurement conversations 😂