Can you reliably convert American recipes to UK measurements?
Joe, Margate
“It really depends on the kind of recipe you’re talking about,” says the American food writer Sarah Chamberlain, who has converted the likes of Diana Henry’s From the Oven to the Table for US cooks. “People in the UK get caught up on, ‘Oh my god, you use cups!’, but with all liquid measurements, it’s a pretty straightforward conversion: one cup equals 240ml, which you can easily divide, so half a cup is 120ml.” In some cases, you can even “fudge it and say 250ml, because 10ml either way isn’t going to make a huge difference”, but that really boils down to what it is you’re making.
Stews and curries, say, are far more forgiving than baking, which Chamberlain brands “another adventure entirely”. Here, you simply have to look up the conversions, which is what the internet is for: “The information is commonly available online,” Chamberlain says, “but if you’re baking or measuring solids, just buy a set of cups.” Ingredient weights differ – a cup of flour, for example, is 125g, while the same of sugar is 200g – so this will just make your life easier.
