Recent postings show that names for food in different countries can cause confusion, but what about recipes? I don't know much about cooking - Mrs Biggles is rather good at it and enjoys it - but I do find American recipe books use a different format. Everything is quoted in cups, sticks, squares etc with little mention given to weights.

In the UK the first item out of the cupboard at cooking time are the scales - electronic thingies in our house that let you zero them as each ingredient is added. Liquids are usually quoted in spoons of various sizes or millilitres (fluid ounces in older books).

Do other countries use volumes for ingredients, or are cups etc converted into weights and then measured on scales?

We use scales also. Here in the Netherlands all ingredients are indicated in (kilo)grams for solid products and (milli)liter for liquids. Or tablespoons when you need very little of a certain ingredient.

We use both in Australia, I guess. One recipe I just looked at in an Australian publication calls for
1 cup of water
125gr butter
1 cup flour
300ml cream

so I have to get every thing out of the cupboard.

Teaspoons are used for smaller quantities ... I know that a teaspoon for everyone is 5ml, but a UK/US Tablespoon is 15ml and an Australian Tablespoon is 20ml.

I like to wing it Biggles and don't have kitchen scales but can count on every second cookbook having conversions. Race into the kitchen for a flying lesson from your commander.

Although Canada is supposed to be metric, most of us tend to cook in Imperial, or switch back and forth (even in the same recipe, sometimes). Cookbooks printed here will have both Imperial and metric measurements. We use volume rather than weight for dry ingredients (that is, cups rather than ounces).
Someone like me, who bakes a lot, will have two sets of measuring cups, wet and dry. The dry are the kind that can go right into the bag of flour, and then you just level off the top with a knife edge. Wet have a spout, and are printed with both types of measurement right on them.

I only measure when baking, when cooking I wing it.

We rarely use "squares of ____" anymore, because the food manufacturers have changed the sizes of the squares. If "square" is used, it will be associated with some further clarification. (Such as a 3 oz. square of cream cheese.)

We still use sticks of margarine/butter, as that has become a virtual standard in the US. (One stick of butter/margarine = 8 tablespoons = 1/2 cup = 4 oz. = 1/4 pound)

We rarely have to put anything on a scale, which is nice, because the only time recipes ever ask for weights are when they refer to meat or fruit, and there's usually enough of a fudge factor in those recipes to where you can pretty much guesstimate the weight of the meat or fruit. ALMOST everything else, from coconut to pomegranate juice, is done in cups or spoons. This makes it very easy to visualize how much of each ingredient belongs in the reicpe.

BTW, why do UK recipes say 750ml? It seems easier to me to just think 3/4 of a liter. I'm guessing you guys are just so used to metric that you automatically picture 750ml.

>>>> am 58, I can't be bothered with this new fangled metric stuff

Yessssss - only been around a short while When I was a kid it was metric but because all the adults had grown up with Imperial it was hard for them to teach the new way so I'd have a guess that most my age are pretty bilingual. Except for miles, I can do feet and yards but I have never got the hang of miles. Give me kilometres any day.

I like that - bilingual! That's what I am too, and for about the same reasons. I was in my early teens when it changed, the only thing I still think in Imperial for is people's height and weight. Everthing else I can go back and forth - the other day at the deli I said "Give me a pound of that ham...no, on second thought, make it 500 grams."

A mile is about as far as an Olympic standard male runner can travel in four minutes!

At the gym the silly machines are in kilometers, I walk at 3 km per hour, real fast - I even get knackered even at that speed.

Are you sure it was only 100km/hr, Dave? Usually the big divided highways are 110.
Our speedometers here in Canada have the km/hr big, and the mph smaller and lower down.

The big divided highways in Ontario are 100 km/hr. The secondary highways are 80 km/hr.

Ah, we drive faster in Alberta, then. Not surprising, really.....

"I like that - bilingual!"


I'm bilingual too. I grew up with the Imperial system (lbs and oz) until Australia went metric in 1970, which was the year I started high school. Then I married Maynooth and moved to America, and had to re-learn Imperial. Five years later, we moved back to Australia and back to metric. Now I can convert fairly easily between the two.

We get quite a few American Mormon missionaries in our area and on more than one occasion, I've seen them in the supermarket or at the butcher's, trying to work out how much they need to buy. I always stop to help.

Actually, Imperial isn't what we use as ours is slightly lower. Imperial is bigger. The only reason I know this, and perhaps it's changed by now, is that the ice cream was much better in Canada when I took my first trip out of the States. We marvelled at it, and also, the gas gallons were slightly bigger. My father was the one who explained as he filled up the tank.

I'm bilingual but I think it's easiest to learn it this way, from English standards to Metric. Metric is incredibly easy for almost anything but temperature and perhaps weight where they are a little bigger in degrees. You can't indicate the degrees as easily for temperature if that is important. I mean body temps.

I think you have to live with one or the other to get them.

I was driving in the country the other day and actually saw a bilingual sign up..for miles and kms. I was amazed. California has a few, but out in a tiny town, I did not expect it.

One unknown fact perhaps, much older people in France still use Livre or pound for half a kilo or thereabouts at the marketplace for fruit. It's a remnant of the past, like lieus or leagues, or other measurements.

Measurements are arbitrary so the human types are actually easier to use for some things (an inch is a thumb in French)and Metric is infinitely easier to calculate between liquids, solids and distance etc.

What bugged me was calculating height, weight, distance with English standards and converting feet to inches for height etc. My kids have problems with this because one began in American then went to France then came back. They get this trouble with math problems.

For weights and liquid measures, I’m bilingual in small amounts – the sort of quantities that make up a bachelor’s shopping list, like half a kilo of butter or a litre of oil. For larger amounts I tend to think in Imperial units: if I’m told that someone is 170 cm tall and weighs 70 kg, I have to translate before I know whether the person looks like a beanpole or a barrage balloon or something in between.

For distances, I can only really think in miles. The EU has allowed the UK to keep the mile for road signs and speed limits, so we tend to cling to it.

I don’t have any problems with Fahrenheit or Centigrade for weather forecasts, but (like Bruyere) if it’s a matter of my body temperature I prefer to have it in Fahrenheit.

Some British manufacturers have decided to be more European than the Europeans. In my experience, three quarters of a metre will usually be called 75 cm in Europe. But apparently the officially recommended metric sub-multiples are thousandths, not hundredths, so in Britain you see “750 mm.” Most of our houses were built long before metrication, so the height of a door will typically be a nice round Imperial measurement like 6ft 6in. Go to a D-I-Y store or a builder’s merchant to buy a door, and you’ll be offered the exact metric equivalent – a nineteen hundred and eighty-one millimetre door.

Edited to correct typo