Why do Americans make recipes such hard work?
Over the past couple of years I have come to realise that cooking is one of my greatest passions in life. There is nothing better than spotting a new recipe and attempting to pull it off. Korean fried chicken? Sure, why not?
Matcha doughnuts? Let’s give them a whirl.
Not only are you left with a sense of accomplishment when the cooking is done but you also get to eat some delicious food.
However outside of BBC Food, most of the recipes I end up stumbling across online come from American websites and blogs.
Which leaves you not only having to scroll past reams and reams of text before you reach the ingredient list or the instructions, but you are also left trying to decipher the bizarre measurements our cousins across the Atlantic use.
I mean, what on earth is a cup? Cups come in all shapes and sizes, there isn’t a standard ‘cup’.
Should I fill up the small mug I use daily for drinking, or do they mean the giant stein in the corner of our kitchen
– it could be considered a cup after all.
It feels a bit like the climax of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, pick the wrong cup and your meal will just crumble to dust (that’s sort of a spoiler for a 30-year-old movie, I guess).
That or you can use a Google converter and end up needing 33.4 to the power of 12 grams of flour.
Are we doing alchemy or weighing out ingredients to bake a cake?
Isn’t it time that Americans stopped being so stubborn and just accepted the metric system like the rest of the world?
Surely using measurements like grams, litres and degrees Celsius just makes more sense in the 21st century?
I know they are all hooked on that drug of American exceptionalism, but surely it leaves them just as confused when they come across recipes in the metric system.
Let alone weather forecasts using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.
It makes it feel a bit like you are trying to translate a lost spell from Arthurian Britain instead of just cooking a Bolognese, it makes it very frustrating.