International Baking

[shermarama]

Graaah. I'm doing yet more Christmas baking today, and while I'm glad people post interesting recipes on the internet, I wish Americans wouldn't write them so stupidly.

• Cups are a stupid unit. In the US, as in everywhere else in the Western world, stuff is sold by weight. Therefore, if you're looking at half a 1 kg bag of something, how many cups have you got left? Some unguessable amount that depends on the density of the stuff. Now let's read a recipe in weight; what weight is left in this half-full 1 kg bag? About 500g. Is that enough for the recipe? Yes or no is pretty easy to guess. If you don't want to guess, you can even weigh the bag, subtract a bit for the bag itself and then see. Cups? Er.. yeah. Maybe we'll just buy some more anyway because we can't tell. Probably best buy a big bag because it's difficult to tell if this 500 g bag of sugar in the shop is enough for n cups. 
• The 'stick', the 'can' and the 'package' are not units. Even assuming that the people reading the recipe are shopping in places that sell ingredients in the same standard sizes as where the writer is, almost everything comes in more than one size depending on how much you need; are readers supposed to be psychic, to guess which size the author bought? I'm prepared to accept that in the UK, a very common size of can of tomatoes is 400 g, for example, but given that that's not true everywhere, how hard is it to write 'a 400 g can of tomatoes'? Especially in a recipe that's going on the internet, where it could be read by people on the other side of the world?
• Packeted, bottled, canned, pre-made mixes have no place in cake recipes. I saw one recently where the two main ingredients were 'a can of cherry pie filling' and 'a package of biscuit mix'. That's not a recipe, it's an insult. Even, even in Vegan With A Vengeance, which is surely a book about making food out of food, the author admits to having had to make up an analogue of a packet veggie crumbles mix, because otherwise her mother was trying to insist on putting the original brand-name packet in. I am prepared to accept condensed milk, for example, as a useful base ingredient to put in with everything else, but this page thinks that '1 pkg. yellow cake mix, 3/4 cup Miracle Whip, 1 pkg. Dream Whip' mixed with some eggs, orange juice and orange zest, fits in the 'Best Cakes' recipe collection. You know, I don't think I have to try that to know that it's going to be pretty ropey.
• Oh, yes, and that recipe suggests that you need to mix it with an electric mixer. If you write 'beat together butter and sugar' then people can make their own choice of what to use; wooden spoon, spatula, fork, electric mixer, whatever. If you write, as today's recipe has done, 'beat together butter and brown sugar... with an electric mixer at medium-high speed for 3 minutes,' then if you're the sort of person who doesn't believe you need to buy bulky consumer electrical goods in order to make biscuits, you have to translate it. As I've already had to translate this recipe using this handy website which knows the density of foodstuffs and can be used to de-cup-ify. 

Of course, I'm making this particular recipe because I think it's going to be good. I just had to stop it being written in gibberish first.

Comments

[xxxlibris.livejournal.com]

Man, the political/cultural/social/economic framing of recipes and food is fascinating to read, and infuriating when you're trying to cook the damn thing (see; post-war cookbooks which make all sorts of assumptions about the type of equipment and foodstuff you'll have access to).

I know that in a number of political online communities, there have been various discussions/bunfights about ethnocentricity and now I wonder if there are any similar ones in the cooking and food comms?

[shermarama]

I think not so much because when discussing something as fluffy as cooking people tend to sit on their instinct to leave comments like HOW MUCH ACTUALLY IS A PACKAGE YOU MORON. Or I certainly do, anyway.

I think the most amusing cookbook I've seen for a while is Chris's VSO one (he wasn't out there with the VSO but was hanging around with people who were) which is tailored for what you can get in Kenya / Tanzania. There are ingredients like '4 bottles of honey (sieved for bees and boiled)' and instructions like 'Buy a large fish, have it gutted, definned and the gills and scales removed.'

[xxxlibris.livejournal.com]

Ha! Which reminds me of my favourite recipe of all time, from '500 recipes for slimmers' by Marguerite Patten (part of an absolutely insane series anyway):

Jugged kippers:
1. Put the kipper fillets into a big jug.
2. Pour over the boiling water and leave for several minutes.

See also Beef Fizz which is exactly what it horrifyingly sounds like.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

For the first time EVER - I could not click! Curse you, internet.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

http://community.livejournal.com/retro_cookbooks/13260.html

Link unmangled for your viewing pleasure.

[shermarama]

Somewhere, a very long time ago, my grandma put out a recipe book, a product-specific one like the one with the beef fizz in. The family business bagged its own flour at the time, under the name Bake-A-Cake, and they renamed her Betty (what was wrong with Ethel in the homely names stakes I'll never know) and put her on the front cover doing important things with flour. I'm not aware that any copies survive, but I'm sure it would be an amusing read by now..

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

CUPS ARE STUPID!

i saw this article somewhere where some american was going OMG RATIOS YOU GUYS!!!! if you use WEIGHT then pastry is half fat to flour and sponge is 2,1,1,1 like it was the invention of the HOVER CAR or something, rather than OBVIOUS SENSE.

i think "stick" is just about acceptable for american butter (ha, unlike american butter itself which is entirely unacceptable and effectively just whipped cream), cos it means 8oz.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Is it not 4oz per stick?

[shermarama]

My usual translation for it is 115g, I think, which is about 4 oz.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

Um, maybe...

It's certainly a fixed amount which was my point (he says trying to get out of it ;))

[shermarama]

Yeah, fair point, for butter you can take it as a fixed amount. I've had to make several things before I was certain that was true enough to rely on, though.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Argh, yes THIS! Cups are DUMB! They are not even the same size in different countries! My mother has a big box file full of recipes from around the world (English language, mostly), with her own annotations - there was no handy internet to help her, and she's more than a little discalculic.

US-centrism in recipes is everywhere, sadly. IME, Australian cookbooks, even when using prepackaged foods, are far better at giving helpful measurements.

I think the VWAV story was mostly a "pestery Jewish mom" story as much as it was a sheepish confession. Her lovely but interfering mother comes up a fair bit.

[shermarama]

Oh yes, the VWAV thing was mainly about the pestery mother, but it's still her mother's instinct to call a pre-made packet mix a recipe...

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

ISA knows better! Must admit, I do kind of love her mum though.

That said, I do think there's a place for recipes which show you how to use x arcane packaged foodstuff. Preferably, on the Internet!

[tonithegreat.livejournal.com]

Dumb as cups are, people don't have kitchen scales over here that they use regularly to cook. People just have measuring cups. And those are labeled in cups (most also in ounces, but we just use the English measurement side). And people aren't interested in switching. It's the same as our roads still being labelled all in miles and miles per hour, I suppose. No one really thinks it's better, but no ones cares enough to try to overcome the massive inertia that would be involved with a switch to something more logical.

[shermarama]

Yeah, I mean I understand that this is what people are used to, it just grates when reading recipes elsewhere. Because kitchen scales are such a common thing to have over here, you can get them from lots of places, and cheap mechanical ones might only cost you about £3. A set of measuring cups, since they're often only available from somewhere a bit more special interest, could well cost you more here.

The road distances and speeds are still in miles here, despite everywhere else in Europe using km. They changed it so that you couldn't sell foods by pounds and ounces about ten years ago, and now most people here would think of 250 g of cheese, not half a pound, but that took considerable effort to enforce. But they haven't changed the roads yet and I think speeds in kmh are still kind of meaningless to most British people. They must surely be going to at some point, though.

[ukcougar.livejournal.com]

My pet hate with American recipes is their tendancy to use brand names. It's bad enough that it's basically passive advertising (cos presumably other brands are available), but it just serves to alienate the rest of the world.

I can just about cope with cups (though, really, c'mon America, how hard is it to get a set of scales? I've got a tiny electronic scale that's about the size of my hand, takes up less room than a set of measuring cups and cost buttons to buy) and Farenheit, but having to spend half an hour Googling "Crisco" and "Saren Wrap" and other things I've never heard of because they DON'T EXIST outside of the US just drive me round the bend.