Cooking an American recipe outside America

The honest short answer: weigh it

If you are in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or Canada you very probably own a kitchen scale, because your own recipes are written in grams. That makes you better equipped for an American recipe than most Americans are: convert the cups to grams once, weigh, and every question on this page stops mattering. Which cup the author meant, how firmly they packed it, whether your cup set is metric, all of it goes away.

Paste the whole ingredient list into the recipe converter and you will have it in grams in one go. The rest of this page is for when you would rather use cups anyway, or when you want to know how far off you would have been.

The same ingredient in three different cups

Every row is “one cup” as written by an American, an Australian and a mid-century British cookbook author. Same word, three weights.

The metric cup runs 4.2 percent over the American one and the imperial cup 18.4 percent over. Four percent is inside the error you introduce by packing flour differently, so for a single cup it is genuinely not worth worrying about. Eighteen percent is not: an imperial cup of flour is 148 grams against 125, and across a whole recipe that is the difference between a scone and a rock. All six standards are compared on cup sizes by country.

The spoon problem, which is worse than the cup problem

A US, British and New Zealand tablespoon is 15 ml. An Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, a third larger. That sounds minor next to an 18 percent cup until you notice what gets measured in tablespoons: baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt, spices, yeast. These are the ingredients where being a third over is not a texture change but a taste failure, and a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda where the recipe wanted 15 ml is genuinely unpleasant.

Teaspoons are 5 ml essentially everywhere including Australia, so only the tablespoon is affected. If an Australian recipe gives tablespoons of a raising agent and you are working with a 15 ml spoon, use four teaspoons rather than three.

Ingredient names that differ

Most of these are the same product under two names, and this site redirects the British spelling straight to the right page: searching plain flour lands on all-purpose flour. Two of them are traps, marked below, where the names look equivalent and the products are not.

Two more worth knowing that have no entry on this site yet, precisely because we have not found a published density we trust for them: self-raising flour is plain flour with raising agents already in it, so it is a different product rather than a different name, and golden syrup is not corn syrup and not molasses. Rather than publish a guessed weight for either, we have left them out.

Oven temperatures and gas marks

American recipes give Fahrenheit, British ovens have gas marks, and most of Europe and Australasia works in Celsius. The anchor to remember is gas mark 4 = 180 C = 350 F, which covers a large share of all baking.

Fan ovens run about 20 C hotter than the dial suggests for the same effect, so drop the temperature by roughly that much. Full detail on oven temperature conversion.

Sticks of butter

American recipes measure butter in sticks, which are not sold anywhere else. One stick is 114 grams, half a cup, 8 tablespoons or a quarter pound. Two sticks make a cup at 227 grams. A standard British 250 g block is therefore a shade over two sticks, and a 250 g block with a quarter cut off is close enough to one and a half sticks for any recipe.

Frequently asked questions

Figures last verified 5 August 2026. Cup volumes are exact definitions, not rounded figures; see the methodology page. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.