Seven tablespoons of butter

[snousle]

Dear European chefs,

Converting a recipe to American measures involves more than multiplying by the appropriate conversion factors. It also requires scaling the whole recipe to match typical American package sizes.

We can tell when you are being lazy. Half a cup of cream, plus one tablespoon? Three and a quarter cups of flour? Seventeen ounces of chocolate? And the worst - the absolute giveaway - is your repeated insistence on seven tablespoons of butter.

Please stop.

Thanks,

- The American Cook

Comments

I hear your pain…

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

The real problem is the insistence of using "cups" for dry ingredients instead of grams. Add to that the US cup is 8 fluid ounces while the rest of the "British empire" uses 10 fluid ounces makes it difficult for us ex-pats.

You might be interested to know that dessert recipes here in Spain (as offered by US companies like Kraft) use half as much sugar as their American counterparts. I'm talking about those on-the-box recipes.

The US is so confusing. Don't you have 2 l bottles for Coke? And of course all medicine is metric. And there never were "English" units for electricity (volts, amps, watts) or magnetism.

And for nutrition, the "energy" unit is Calorie (really kilo-calorie).

Chuck, my town is famous for being the point where the Paris Meridian dips into the Mediterranean which was used for determining the length of the meter.