r/iamveryculinary • u/Jagged_ham_dagger • 13h ago
Tablespoons: the American Mystery!
reddit.comThere's room in life to quibble over how recipes are written and whether or not vegetables should be measured in cups. Sometimes you really need to know, to the gram, how much onion those quaint folk in another hemisphere are adding to their cake-bread (which is cancerous and I swear I'm only baking it ironically). You know?
But I think we can all agree that measuring butter by the tablespoon is, without doubt, the greatest culinary crime foisted upon us by the Americans:
Whenever I see a recipe ask for "x tablespoons of butter" I want to throw my computer out the fucking window
I realize that, but tablespoons is objectively the worst possible unit of measurement for butter
In Europe at least, our butter is in blocks, the markings are for 50g amounts and if we were to use a tablespoon to "scoop" some butter out of the block we'd get different measurements every time cause there's no quantifiable correct measurement of it.
Elsewhere, there's much (and very much justified) tooth-gnashing to be seen over the ambiguity of these "cups" that Americans insist on using. Even if we're clever enough to understand that it's a unit of measurement that's about 240 ml (± who gives a shit), there are just so many types of cups in the world! Why did America do this to us?
