A cup is not a cup, and that is before you get to what is in it
Two things have to hold before a recipe from somewhere else works in your kitchen. The measure has to mean the same thing, and the ingredient has to be the same ingredient. Cooking gets both wrong across the four countries this site serves, and it gets them wrong quietly: nothing looks off until the cake comes out flat.
| One cup | One tablespoon | Teaspoons in a tablespoon | |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 250 ml | 15 ml | three |
| United States | 236.6 ml | 14.8 ml | three |
| Australia | 250 ml | 20 ml | four |
| Canada | 250 ml | 15 ml | three |
America also has a second, legal cup of exactly 240 ml, defined for nutrition labels, and recipe writers use both without saying which.
The Australian tablespoon is the one that catches people. It holds four teaspoons where every other tablespoon holds three, so a recipe asking for three tablespoons of something sharp arrives a third over. Nobody notices in a stew. Everybody notices in a cake.
Weigh it and the argument disappears
A gram is a gram in every kitchen on earth, and an ounce is 28.35 of them wherever you stand. That is the whole reason serious baking is written in weights, and the whole reason this hub prefers them.
The awkward part is the conversion, because a cup of flour and a cup of sugar are not the same weight and no single number turns one into the other. Flour is about 120 g to the American cup; sugar is nearer 200. A converter offering one figure for everything is guessing on your behalf.
Worse, a cup of flour is not even a cup of flour. Scoop the cup through the bag and it compacts, and the same cup can hold a quarter more than it did when it was spooned in loosely and levelled off. Every density here is the spooned and levelled figure, and the page says so, because a number is worth nothing without the method that produced it.
Gas mark 4 is 350 °F, and the reason is a gas tap
Britain has gas marks and nowhere else does. The scale is arithmetic: degrees Fahrenheit are 250 plus 25 times the mark, so mark 1 is 275, mark 4 is 350 and mark 9 is 475. Every one lands on a round 25 °F, because the point of the scale was to mark a tap in even steps.
It breaks below mark 1. The formula would put mark ¼ at 256 °F and every British cookbook prints 225, so the bottom of the scale is a convention that got settled by usage. These tools use the printed table where there is one and the formula where there is not, and they say which.
Fan is twenty degrees below conventional, and that is a British convention rather than a measured law. Manufacturers differ, ovens run hot, and a fan cooks faster as well as hotter. Start checking ten minutes early the first time and you will know your own oven after that. Australia calls it fan-forced and North America calls it convection. Same oven, same fan.
The same ingredient under two names
Half the friction in a foreign recipe is vocabulary. The thing is on the shelf in front of you under a word you did not search for.
| United Kingdom and Australia | United States and Canada |
|---|---|
| Plain flour, self-raising flour | All-purpose flour, self-rising flour |
| Caster sugar, icing sugar | Superfine sugar, confectioners sugar |
| Bicarbonate of soda, cornflour | Baking soda, cornstarch |
| Double cream, single cream | Heavy cream, light cream |
| Mince, streaky bacon, prawns | Ground beef, bacon, shrimp |
| Courgette, aubergine, coriander | Zucchini, eggplant, cilantro |
Australia says capsicum where Britain says pepper, and Canada mostly follows the American column. Tomato purée is the trap that costs a dinner: in Britain it is the concentrated paste in a tube, so an American reading it as passata pours in ten times too much.
One ingredient table sits behind these tools with every market word on the same row, so a page can call something what you call it without anybody writing it out four times.
What these tools will not do
They will not scale a bake and pretend the tin, the temperature and the time came with it. Quantities scale in a straight line; a cake does not. Twice the mixture wants a bigger tin, a slightly cooler oven and longer in it, which is its own calculation on its own page.
They will not tell you a recipe is safe for an allergy. Allergens are flagged from the ingredient list as a convenience. Brands differ, recipes get substituted, and cross-contamination happens in a factory no recipe can see. Check the label on what you bought.
And they will not print a cooking time that reaches less than a safe internal temperature. Where a tool times meat it shows the temperature alongside, from the Food Standards Agency in Britain and the USDA in America, and the time bends to the temperature.