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!

Copy and paste into Claude or Chapt GPT, and ask for a metric version.

Ooh!

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

Proceeds to tell us how they aren’t. 😂
Just convert the recipe, or try using cups, you might like it.

Some British butter is wrapped like that too. The blocks are about double the size though.

You just use a cup! Any cup! Then fractions of the cup or double the cup. It’s hardly difficult.

I agree, I hate cup measurements as not all cups are the same itms

I have converted some recipes but it is irritating

I got a set of cups off Amazon, not very expensive at all.

What I don't know though is do you level off the cup of flour or whatever, heap it, round it, pack it down?

Maybe a US reader could enlighten me.

I live in a country where a lot of recipes specify decilitres! ... and don't get me started on a US pint being different to a UK pint!

Although a lot of online recipes are clickable these days so you can change units of measurement.

Just look on amazon and buy yourself a set of measuring cups - or bypass the USA recipes and look for UK ones. Simple! (If a post begins 'I'm all for respecting cultural differences but ..' you just know it's going to be a complaint about another culture)

Yes, I've got a great butter dish from the states and I have to cut the butter to fit and it brings me great sadness when I have to put the other half in the fridge all wrinkly. Maybe I should start a thread on why British butter is so fat?😂

A cup is 236.588 ml

and don't forget the decimal places

If it doesn't say heaped or packed down, a cup is a cup is a cup. So level

Dark brown sugar would usually be packed.

a cup is half a US pint

I'm quite happy to use imperial weights and volumes. But using volume to measure cherry tomatoes? That's plain daft. Apart from the fact that "cup" is not a thing on my measuring jug, and an American pint is smaller than an imperial one.

I love using cups because I’m lazy.
In fact I search out US recipes for this very reason.

just use any cup! you don't need to buy a particular cup. They use cups (just like we used to) because a cup is just a quick and cheap way of measuring how many parts flour vs water vs sugar etc.
If a recipe is 100g of flour and 200g of sugar you could say its 1 cup of flour and 2 cups of sugar or 1 part flour one part sugar.

People had cups in their houses but they couldn't afford scales.

I like cups for measuring, it's easier than trying to get everything to the exact gram.

I prefer accurate recipes especially when baking cakes

Thank you, much obliged.

I found a magnet conversion chart - cups - ozs - grams ; Fahrenheit - gas mark- Celsius, on Amazon, about £5.

The US has about 5 times the population of the UK.

So for very every 1 exasperated baker in the UK, there are more than 5 Americans to whom it makes sense.

Yes cups are ok for dry ingredients but not butter

I do have measuring cups

Er lots of cooks do! The unit of measurement for Mediterranean cooks is a glass. It’s about proportions and works. Not had any cakes go wrong with a glass, but have done with scales.

No, I've always bought them in tins.

You go to all the effort to start a colony, you teach it Imperial and then the bastards go and refuse to change to metric when you really just want a decent recipe for clam chowder.

As above, butter has the cup measured on the paper in America.