Cups - aargh!

[Jaded]

Cups are for drinking tea out of, not measuring ingredients, you silly American people!

[Cudzoziemiec]

Recipes by Starbucks?

[SteveC]

It's all American recipes and they are a bloody nuisance.
My standard bread recipe is from the Tassajara Bread Book (Tassajara being a Californian Zen Buddhist establishment) which uses cups and spoons throughout.
I've got used to those, but all the ingredients are either a powder or liquid. How you are supposed to deal with cups of butter or whatever I have no idea.
(And don't get me started on 'sticks' of butter)

[L CC]

But in USAnia butter is sold in sticks. https://www.foodlionuk.shop/product/land-o-lakes-salted-half-sticks-butter-uk-on-sale/

If you're doing it properly you weigh your ingredients.
The entremets I made the other week I had to weigh out egg yolks for the mousse. That might have been a weigh too far.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Weigh to go!

Or at least, weigh to cook.

[Jaded]

But in USAnia butter is sold in sticks. https://www.foodlionuk.shop/product/land-o-lakes-salted-half-sticks-butter-uk-on-sale/

If you're doing it properly you weigh your ingredients.
The entremets I made the other week I had to weigh out egg yolks for the mousse. That might have been a weigh too far.

This gem from that link:

[Legs]

Also, if you're looking for butter in a large supermarket, there are likely to be three or four completely separate places where you can find it.  My standard quip to Mrs Legs whenever we've been looking for something in a Walmart  is "have you tried between the Peloton bikes and the machine gun ammunition?" 

[Hot Flatus]

Cups are for drinking tea out of, not measuring ingredients, you silly American people!

 

I know exactly what's going on here

[Mr Larrington]

Also, if you're looking for butter in a large supermarket, there are likely to be three or four completely separate places where you can find it.  My standard quip to Mrs Legs whenever we've been looking for something in a Walmart  is "have you tried between the Peloton bikes and the machine gun ammunition?" 

This is why I went foraging in Albertsons rather than Walmart yesterday.  It's on a human scale, and doesn’t sell anti-tank weapons.

[Kim]

Also, when USAnians do weigh their ingredients, they tend to use Florida Ounces.

[FifeingEejit]

I bought some measuring cups
Just like spoons being standard sizes
It's so much easier to use
than weighing out
the recipe books I'm following show both.

The one thing I always find, is every recipe I follow from any source is bitter, so I double the amount of sweet stuff and it tastes right.
Like Sweet and Source sauce is meant to be sweet not slightly sour

This may be my perception of sweet of course...

[Legs]

Also, if you're looking for butter in a large supermarket, there are likely to be three or four completely separate places where you can find it.  My standard quip to Mrs Legs whenever we've been looking for something in a Walmart  is "have you tried between the Peloton bikes and the machine gun ammunition?" 

This is why I went foraging in Albertsons rather than Walmart yesterday.  It's on a human scale, and doesn’t sell anti-tank weapons.

My wife paid $4.99 for a loaf of sliced white bread in Albertsons in Jackson, WY. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Also, when USAnians do weigh their ingredients, they tend to use Florida Ounces.

We have standard cetaceans, they have wild cats.

[lissotriton]

Measuring cups make sense for liquid ingredients.
But don't really work for powder, ie flour or sugar etc. The density can vary depending on how finely it is ground, and how much it is packed down.

[Kim]

I bought some measuring cups

We got a pet USAnian to buy us a set back when you couldn't easily obtain such things on the internet.  Which method is superior depends on what you're trying to measure, but they're certainly worth having for other people's recipes, in much the same way that scales that can be switched to imperial are.

[Flite]

The entremets I made the other week I had to weigh out egg yolks for the mousse. That might have been a weigh too far.

ISWYDT
However, not as silly as it sounds.
A good few years ago, I realised that even modern cook books still use eggs as they were in the 1950s, where as the eggs in my store are modern large size. I only managed to make decent choux pastry when I wrote on the recipe in red pen "not this much egg" and did it by perceived texture not number of eggs.
Same sort of thing with victoria sponge.
Cook book writers just copy historic ingredients lists over an over.


I always assumed the american use of cups was because the pioneers didn't have scales.
You would have thought they would have made a bit of progress by now...

I commend the book Muffins by Susan Reimer. She not only gives US/UK conversions charts, but explains why american flour is not the same as UK flour...

Sadly, my cooking does not have the ambition to make entremets....

[hellymedic]

A cup is around 240-250 ml/gram with a fair degree of tolerance. Your Audax mug will do fine.
4 eggs make a cup.

[Regulator]

Cups are for drinking tea out of, not measuring ingredients, you silly American people!

Cups are also a UK measure... and a UK cup (250mls) is different to a US cup (240mls).

[Cudzoziemiec]

Both half of the relevant pint, according to Wikipedia. Which makes some sort of sense.

[slope]

What about bras?

[Kim]

What about bras?

I wouldn't recommend them for baking measurements, as cup sizes mean different volumes depending on what the band size is, even if the style is the same.

[slope]

What about bras?

I wouldn't recommend them for baking measurements, as cup sizes mean different volumes depending on what the band size is, even if the style is the same.

Just as I thought = cups are confusing

But not quite so with those neat brass screw cups (countersunk and raised) = simples = screw gauge size👍 But only British?

[Wowbagger]

It seems to me that eggs have got smaller.

In my youth (1960s) I worked for a mostly-retired farmer who has sold the bulk of his land but still kept 500 or so hens and a cow on one field. I used to feed and water the hens and collect the eggs. It seemed to me that most of the eggs would be "large" when weighed on the egg scale.



The nearest I can find online is the one on the right, but the one I used also had the divisions for small, medium, standard and large. I can't recall how much each one weighed. I think the farmer, and my dad, who was very much into poultry, having a Certificate of Poultry Husbandry from the Usk Agricultural College, 1932 (I still have that somewhere) used to keep their hens considerably longer than the year or so that big commercial poultry farmers tend to. I think my dad would keep them for 2 years, and in my experience older birds tend to lay fewer, but bigger, eggs.

[L CC]

and in my experience older birds tend to lay fewer, but bigger, eggs.

This is true. But we have also bred hens to lay bigger eggs, and with such a short generational interval that size change will be noticeable over your lifetime.

[Flite]

Indeed. All my inherited egg cups are too small.