In Russia, cannabis was measured in "matchboxes" (around the amount that gets in to a small ziploc) and "glasses", where glass is a 220ml glass Russians drink vodka from in the movies.
So it goes full circle when you start measuring cannabis in glasses, sounds really American!
You might be right, I think I got annoyed with fluid ounces in cups in a recipe with flour also measured in cups, and some other random third measurement.
No word of a lie, one of my university roommates came up to be the first week we were living together with a drinking glass in his hand and asked me if it was what a recipe meant when it said "add a cup of water."
I get the rocket and coriander ones, also the units of measurement but what do you call a bell pepper? (Also how do you differentiate dried cilantro seed powder from the fresh herb? I like to know if I should be using a spice or the fresh plant)
Cilantro is the herb, coriander (seed) is the spice/dried powder. Often you can tell by what you are making and how it's being used/added, but typically they are differentiated as above in American recipes.
Genuinely confused as well about the pepper, a bell pepper is a pretty universal name for it as far as I knew. Folks also refer to them as green/yellow/red peppers here, or sweet peppers occasionally (usually when used in Italian food), but bell pepper is the generic name.
In a whole load of languages, you call bell pepper paprika. If you just say "pepper" to me, that's usually black pepper in particular. If you say chilli pepper, that means a spicy variant of the capsicum genus. A non-spicy capsicum genus member? That's a paprika.
There's no name to put in front of "pepper" in my language that would make it refer to paprika.
That said, in English, it's apparently almost always something something pepper. Or capsicum. Or apparently according to Wikipedia, in the American mid-west, mango???????
I just want to know if you are cooking using European recipes are you constantly weighing every ingredient out into a separate dish or just get used to estimating "This much butter is about X grams"? I'd go nuts if I had to sit there carefully weighing out everything instead of just going "1 tablespoon, done".
You literally put a bowl on scale and add to it the semi correct number of grams.
Or alternatively put the package on scale and remove until scale shows correct number of negative grams.
Same with liquids since 1g = 1ml roughly.
It couldn't be easier. Also some packages eg butter have gram measuring lines written on them.
Most of the time you don't even use it unless it's baking or fermenting or anything else where its hard to do it by feel.
What is funny is Americans are doing the same thing to measure their butter, cutting off chunks according to a ruler on the package, it is just marked in volume on the side of the package instead of weight:
Why would you have to carefully weigh anything? Butter doesn't really need to be measured, just eyeball it and go from there.
In the U.S., butter is sold in sticks of half cup/4 fl oz/8 tbsp by volume, but it's basically fine to think of them as little 100g portions too. Tolerances for cooking are pretty high, and people aren't that precise at cutting off whatever portion they need.
If you're baking, there needs to be a bit more precision, but that precision matters whether you're measuring by weight or volume, or imperial versus metric. Plus, a lot of baking can be done by feel when you have experience anyway.
Just go and do. Cooking is fun. Some people like to measure, and some don't. It all works, though, as all the different styles still converge on the principle that making tasty food for yourself and loved ones is a pretty universal experience.
I have different sized spoons at home and I never know which is the correct one for the recipe. On top of that I don't know if the spoon should be leveled off or if it should be with a heap on top.
But if the recipe says 15g, I can put the bowl on a scale and put the stuff into it until the scale says 15g.
Opinion discarded due to coming from a country that elected a felon dictator and an immigrant african nazi to stage a coup.
After they failed at a coup during their last term.
Finding something annoying is not the same as not understanding it. Don't worry, at some point you will figure out the difference, it's actually not that hard, you can do it.
Unit conversions are something that AI chatbots can be programmed to do normally, by simply providing them with a unit converter alongside their language model
Aeons ago Cracked did a skit called "Cooking with Babelfish." First of all remember when it was called Babelfish? Remember Alta Vista?
The one thing you could count on with one of those...feels wrong to call it 'old'...translation algorithm programs was it would get the quantities right. It might tell you to put in 5 kilograms of earth apples, because the French don't have a word for "potato" and Babelfish didn't know that, but the recipe did indeed call for 5 kilograms of them.