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!

With a sausage, so it is like a savoury 99 😜

Ugh I hate cup measurements.

Also... wait till you find out the difference in size between US eggs and UK eggs. Makes a big difference for recipes with a lot of eggs..!

Can I recommend the perfect solution to this battle here, and that's never cooking and online recipe except from RecipeTinEats, the revered and pre eminent Australian cookbook author and recipe website creator. She provides ingredients in weight and cups, and the recipes are simply superior!

This thread must be like Whack a Mole for MN but with cunts instead of plastic moles.

And me. I LOVE Eccles cakes!

I have the best recipe if you use sourdough. It's so good but the cake needs to be completely cool before you eat it to get full goodness. It's so nice and also non upf unlike lots of vegan cake. Not sure why but it uses very little chocolate but still has a great chocolate flavor.

zerowastechef.com/2020/04/27/sourdough-discard-vegan-chocolate-cake/amp/

These days I put the recipes into chatgpt and ask them to convert to grams

Well, if that were true the Internet wouldn't be over run with American recipes, now would it? 😉

@Mingenious No, most Americans do not use mixes. Some do. I do not.

No, rude is expecting other countries to follow your conventions.

It's going to Spain and having a a full English.

It's starting threads complaining that other countries have their own culture.

I do a lot of recipes from Pinterest.
Almost all american.
Some do have a conversion on the recipe-otherwise alexa a queen!!
The frustrating thing is that the tins etc are not the same but I persevere...
edited to add not recipes that start with jello or add yellow cake mix but actual recipes-which do exist!

Loads of American recipes seem to call for boxes of 'yellow' cake mix, whatever that is. And lots of cans of stuff. And tubes of biscuit dough and things like Velveeta processed cheese. Sometimes it's not so much a recipe as an exercise in opening five or six packets and tins, tipping them all into a slow cooker and pressing go.

If you look to a tiktok influencer to learn American cooking you get what you deserve. It's usually tradwives trying to make dinner for their family of 17. The mix means they can sleep sometimes.

You'd hope the rest of the world isn't expecting British culture to be what's found on TikTok

I bought cups and tbh they are a godsend and useful beyond recipes

Thanks, I’ll give it a go!

@EscargotChic ha ha - I’m always saying this - what size of cup etc !! lol

For flour you spoon it in the cup and level it off so it it not tightly packed. For sugar just pour it in. Brown sugar you pack it in if it says tightly packed. However weighing is more precise especially in baking as it is chemistry. For cooking, most recipes are a base of how much to add and then changed based on preferences. It for the most part isn't a reaction of ingredients so you can be more free with amounts used unlike baking where the proportions need to be precise.

That being said, most people who really bake use a kitchen scale that converts between imperial and metric measurements. Good glass measuring cups also have both measurements printed side by side so they are easy to read. We also use miles for driving distance and our car have miles and kilometers on the odometer. I assumed things in the UK would have both measurements like our cooking utensils do. It makes it so much easier to measure everything no matter where the recipe comes from. The utensils do the converting for you.

For what it is worth our schools teach the metric system and the imperial system and we learn them both so maybe the recipe writers assume everyone knows both as well.

Pint is a package that cherry tomatoes are usually kept in, and cup is exactly what it sounds like - a regular 8 oz cup

You are meant to just estimate, and adjust according to taste

I think baking is the only cooking where a scale or exact measure would be necessary

If you have metal ones they are great for making a perfect poached egg.

Good job I’ve never used any American recipes!

I have cultural envy, America seems to have access to a vast array of tasty things in their supermarkets that go in everyday recipes that we don't have. A cake pop recipe last night called specifically for a branded vanilla velvet cake box mix, and they had meltable candy "wafers" in hundreds of colours. The end product looked amazing!

Don't get me started on American crochet terms.

She`s all ways bitter she was raised by lemons.

I bought some measuring cups in a supermarket. They are different sizes, plastic, on a little chain, didn't cost much.

Yeah but I think flour is a weird one for cups. Do you kind of scoop it so it’s light and fluffy still, or is the flour compacted down? Surely you use more then?

im with you op. Use the scales!!!