How big is a “cup” as written in American recipes. ie: what size of cup?
If one were to fill that cup with liquid, what would be the volume?
If any non-Americans have worked it out, and can give me an easy parallel (like “the equivalent to a 160g can of tuna” or “half a coke can” etc) that would be great.
I am sure this must have been asked before, but I cannot run a search on “American cup” (I tried) because “cup” is only three letters long.
One cup is 8 fluid ounces, or about 236 ml.
In other words, if your Coke can were 12 ounces, you could fill it up 2/3 of the way to get 8 ounces. Or you could cut off the top 1/3 and it would be the right size.
<puts Mom hat on>
Do you need a care package containing a set of American measuring cups?
<takes Mom hat off>
Fat Bald Guy has it right.
For further questions of this sort, you can also use the MegaConverter web site, where, under Kitchen Measure, you can convert a US cup to 8 US ounces or 8.32674 UK/Imperial ounces or 236.58825 milliliters/cc s.
(Or to 0.0625 US liquid gallon or 0.05371 US Dry Gallon or 0.05204 UK gallon.)
At 8 ounces, that is also 16 tablespoons or 48 teaspoons of US volume measure.
Brilliant thanks!
I think I have a cup of the right volume (going by the coke can example).
I did look in one big supermarket for measuring cups of any kind, but to no avail.
If you use the standard metric cup of 250 ml, it doesn’t make much difference.
I was at the link and couldn’t figure out how you converted to an “Imperial Ounce.” The UK liquid ounce is the same as the US liquid ounce, and a cup is the same too. The UK pint is 20 oz., however (vs. the US 16 oz.)–good news for beer drinkers–and the UK Imperial gallon is also bigger.
American volume measurements are the ones that’ll give you headaches and send you whimpering and moaning for the sane metric world if you weren’t in and of it already.
My favorite is the coffee maker.
Coffee makers tend to have little lines on the carafe and again in the water reservoir. They are marked off in “cups”.
They apparently don’t mean cups “cups”. They mean “coffee cups”.
Which are apparently not the same size as the coffee mugs that all true coffee drinkers actually drink out of, those being roughly equivalent to two “coffee cups”, each of which is somewhat less than a cup “cup”. Probably ~ 6 ounces or thereabouts.
Meanwhile the coffee comes in a can with a scoop and the scoop is not a tablespoon. Oh no, of course not. You have of course learned how many Official Coffee Scoops per Coffee Cup produce the best coffee, but if you ever lose the coffee scoop, you’re sunk until you buy the next can. It’s not an eighth of a cup. Maybe a seventh. Or 3/23 of a cup.
I think the method we have here in the UK ( and the rest of Europe ) where all dry goods are weighed out on kichen scales.
This is especially true if you have a digital model which , at the push of a button , can weigh in either imperial or metric values.
Surely you cannot use cups for eveything in the US . How about s big thingssuch as potatoes or apples. How do determine the correct amount of these for a recipe if you do not weigh them out ?
I find that darned annoying. A quart (four cups) is 944 ml, or almost a liter (we were told in school when they were prepping us for a conversion to metric, “A liter is a quart and a liter bitmore…”).
I buy a one-quart pyrex measuring cup, look through it to the metric lines to compare them, and the quart line matches up exactly with the liter line. I know one of them is off, but not which one. Pretty darned annoying.
Few of my recipes call out dry ingredients by weight. So, chocolate chip cookies might take 2 1/2 cups of flour and a soup might require 1 cup diced carrots. My mother always told me that you use the pitcher-like measuring cup for liquids and the cylindrical nested-style measuring cups for dry measure.
I guess that works - I don’t think I’ve poisoned anyone with my cooking as yet.
You know what, I always wondered why americans seemed to say they were lighter than they actually seemed to be when measured…you have different ounces!
They weigh more!
No, the ounces are the same, but the pints and gallons are different. A US pint is 16 ounces, but an Imperial (UK) pint is 20 ounces. On either side of the pond a gallon is 4 quarts (8 pints), but since the UK pints are bigger, so are the gallons. Pounds (weight, not money) are also the same in both countries
Entering cup (US) as the first entry, I click the drop-down for the second entry and among the options of measures to be converted, I find fluid ounce (US) and fluid ounce (UK). The conversions for 1 cup (US) are different by the .32674 ounce I posted for UK ounces.
And, while I have seen the two assertions that the US and the UK use the same ounce, the MegaConverter site says:
1 fluid ounce (US) is equal to 1.04084 fluid ounce (UK) or to 29.57353 milliliter/cc
and
1 fluid ounce (UK) is equal to 0.96076 fluid ounce (US) or to 28.41308 milliliter/cc.
The Encyclopædia Britannica supports that notion with the following description:
So not only are the pints a different number of ounces, but the ounces are of different sizes, making the Brit pint 568.2 ccs and the Yank pint 473.12 ccs.
(Mind you, these ounces are for volume (liquid measure). The ounce as a measure of weight, (avoirdupois) is equal to 28.35 grams or 437 1/2 grains in both the U.S. Customary and the British Imperial systems.)
Sorry, I stand corrected tomndebb.
I think the US pint is defined as some number of cubic inches, and the US fluid ounce is defined as 1/16 US pint. The Imperial fluid ounce is defined as the volume of an ounce of water at some temperature and pressure which I don’t remember.
You’ll often see it listed in cups of chopped/diced/shredded potatoes or apples, or sometimes you’ll see it read as something like “2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced”. Sometimes meat portions like chicken breasts will have a weight listed.
Well, I bought a plastic cup that I am hoping is the right size, more or less.
It is about 6.5cm high, and about 7.5cm in diameter.
Does it sound about right?
volume = pi x radius squared x height
3.14 x 1.47^2 x 2.56 (all in inches)
I get 17.53 cubic inches - which is only about 4.86 ounces.
Can anyone check my math?
6.5cm tall with 7.5cm diameter is about 287 ml which is about 20% to large.