As a Brit I have been stumped numerous times looking at US recipes. What the hell even is a cup. I looked into my kitchen cupboard and I have cups of all sizes, ranging from mini to pint sized cups.
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EDIT: Thank you all for the responses, as a struggling weed dealer in London I have been convinced by the amazing intellect on here to switch from weighing my product from scales to cups as it is the best method to get a correct measurement. Thanks again.
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A “cup” is a unit of measure, as I suspect you know.
Measuring cups are also cheap and easy to use.
I have both, it’s really not a big deal either way and, as you pointed out, a lot of recipes are in US customary which is why I use it when following one.
> What the hell even is a cup
8 fluid oz
A “cup” in the context of baking/cooking is a set unit of measure. It’s not nearly the issue you want it to be.
A cup is a unit of measurement. Kitchen scales aren’t super easy to use when measuring liquids or powders such as sugar or flour
A cup as in the imperial (or *English Customary*) unit for volume.
The volume of ingredients can be more important than the mass. For example, the mass of vegetables and egg whites can vary based on water content, but you may need an amount that’s proportional to other ingredients.
Do you seriously think a cup, in this context, is just any random cup in your cupboard? Just think about this for 5 seconds, engage the part of your brain that deals in critical thinking. How would any part of cooking or baking in the US work at all if this were the case? Why have you never googled what a measuring cup is? How can you know what a pint of beer is without knowing what fluid ounces, cups, quarts, and gallons are?
You pour it into something and then have to adjust and weigh?
In dry measurements, a Cup of sugar is equal to 200g. In liquid measurement a cup of water is equal to 236g.
But, liquids and solids have different densities, so that amount in metric measurements will change … meanwhile, it’s still a Cup.
There’s absolutely no way that measuring cups are unique to the US.
Those two aren’t necessarily comparable.. it’s a whole different method.
One is weight.. one is volume.
Why don’t I weigh it? Because I want to scoop it.
Seriously, when cooking, there’s no benefit of weighing 120g flour vs filling up a cup with flour
It’s different than your technique? Sure.. different doesn’t mean better.. or worse.. it means different
Even if you didn’t know that one US cup is equal to 8 fluid ounces or ~236.6 ml, the point of those measurements is that they will work *regardless* of what size cup you have. In a recipe, the exact amounts don’t really matter, it’s the ratio between ingredients that counts.
As long as you know that there are four quarts in a gallon, two pints in a quart, two cups in a pint, sixteen tablespoons in a cup (or rather, four tablespoons to a quarter-cup) and three teaspoons to a tablespoon, the recipes should work regardless of how you arbitrarily choose to quantify those units.
A cup in this sense is a specific unit of volume.
Kitchen scales are a bitch to use and cheap ones are rarely accurate. I’d much rather pull out the plastic measure cup, fill it with what I need, level it with a knife and keep on trucking.
Imagine just finding out that some things are measured by volume and not mass.
Why are you confused by this when conversion rates are so easy to look up?
kitchen scaled are cheap but getting a measuring cup is also cheap. why would i use one thing that works over another things that also works that ive been using my entire life?
Here are sone images of measuring cups of you wanted to se what they look like. [Link.](https://www.google.com/search?q=mesuring+cups&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari) It’s a measurement of volume often used for liquids, small loose ingredients like flower, rice, chopped/minced foodstuffs, salt, etc.
>I have been convinced by the amazing intellect on here to switch from weighing my product from scales to cups as it is the best method to get a correct measurement.
That’s not what anyone here said. You got an answer to your question and acted like it was dumb. Don’t try to act like we are the unreasonable one.
1 cup is 8 fluid ounces, or half a pint.
Measuring cups my man, scales aren’t very good for measuring liquids… but you do you.
I think a cup is cheaper than a scale.
For baking I prefer weights and I have a kitchen scale.
For everything else cups is just fine. It’s a set unit of volume. Normal kitchen cooking doesn’t really need exact weights like baking does.
Because that’s how I learned to cook, and because I cook often enough that I rarely *need* to measure anything. I usually just eyeball a cup of [ingredient], especially in situations where the precise amount isn’t super important.
I can’t imagine weighing *every* ingredient *every* time I cook, though. Is that what you do, or are you also able to eyeball about how much 250g of [ingredient] is?
The real question is were you using spring scales 50-70 years ago, when electronic scales weren’t around and even good balance scales were too expensive for home kitchens? If so, how did you put up with the inaccuracy of such scales? If not, how did you deal with the transition; were all your cookbooks rewritten to use weight instead of volume?
Weed dealer? Is it the 90s again?
It’s common in every American household to have a set of measuring cups. A cup is a specific size like a pint or quart. Not just like any cup from a kitchen. Honestly do you really think Americans are this dumb? Weighing on a scale is inconvenient, but I personally weigh food for ounces to measure meat for protein measurements. But for baking and cooking etc I use my measuring cup set. There are also tablespoon/teaspoon sets. You can pick them up in any store. You wouldn’t weigh your milk, sugar, etc on a scale. You scoop it out with the correct cup. The set comes in a 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, and 1 cup.
Well your commonwealth countries define a cup as 250 ~~milliliters~~ millilitres, brothre. Canada is an exception; their cups are one twentieth of an imperial (not US) gallon.
A Japanese cup is 200 milliliters, a Russian cup is either 123 mililiters or 246 mililiters.
An American cup is historically 8 US (not imperial) fluid ounces, but is now defined as 240 ml.
Because cups are cheap and easy to use.
You know that “pint sized cup” you have? It’s half of that.
Please as a fellow Brit do not pretend to be this ignorant. A cup is a cup – think a teacup, not a Sports Direct mug. If you are tossing a cup or a teaspoon or a medium onion or something like that in a recipe it is unlikely the accuracy to the nearest gram is really required.
A “cup” is a measure of volume, not mass. It’s equivalent to approximately 237 mL.
Pour milk onto your scale and let me know how that works out.
Since you’re pouring it into a cup anyway, you might as well use one that measures how much you’ve poured.
OP is the reason half of this sub is so aggressive towards Europeans. There’s no fucking need to be a dick when you keep getting told the same thing over and over that you just can’t seem to understand for some reason.
This dude’s putting malt vinegar on his eel and mash pie fished out of the Thames and acting like we’re the insane ones.