Convert any foreign recipe to American measures

You brought home a recipe written in another country's measures, and the cup, the spoon and the packet it names are not the ones in your drawer. Start with the cuisine it came from, or with the single unit that is tripping you. Every page below carries the measured weights and the specific traps for one kitchen, and none of it is on a generic converter.

Start with the recipe's country

Each country page decodes a whole ingredient list: the vessels, the packets, the oven and the words a recipe assumes you already know.

German The Packchen that usually prints no grams, and a Pfund that is 500 g, not a pound. French The yogurt pot that measures the whole cake, and sachets that rarely print a weight. Italian The one cuisine that weighs everything, so there is almost nothing to convert. Polish The dekagram: a line reading 25 dag means 250 grams, not 25. Russian and Ukrainian The faceted glass that is two glasses, and an 18 ml spoon heaped by default. British (imperial) Two pints on one word, 568 ml against 473, and gas marks. Spanish and Latin American One taza meaning 200 to 250 ml by country, and a pocillo that flips size. Brazilian The cup that already fits, and a 395 g can that is the recipe's real unit. Japanese A 200 ml cup where scaling by volume fails, and spoons that already match yours. Australian and New Zealand A 20 ml tablespoon in Australia, 15 in New Zealand, and a flour weight that splits with it.

Or start with the unit that is tripping you

When the puzzle is one measure rather than one country, these pages take a single unit across every cuisine that uses it, with the sources and the disagreements laid out.

Cup sizes around the world Every cup and drinking glass a kitchen measures with, up to the 284 ml imperial teacup. Tablespoon sizes by country 15 ml almost everywhere, 18 in Slavic recipes, 20 in Australia. Heaped versus level spoons A level tablespoon of flour runs 7 to 20 grams across published charts. Oven temperatures Gas mark, thermostat and Stufe: the same number means three different ovens. Yeast converter Fresh, dry and instant, and where the 42 g cube comes from. Flour types 405, T55, 00 and hakurikiko: three systems measuring three properties. Egg sizes Europe grades one egg by weight, the USDA grades a dozen. Measuring without scales What a cup of each ingredient costs you in accuracy when you own no scale.

For the American weights each of these pages converts to, see our ingredient pages, and for how we choose a number when the authorities disagree, the methodology page. To convert one quantity now, open the converter, or paste a whole foreign recipe into the recipe converter and set its country of origin.