Cooking an American recipe in a British kitchen

7 minute read · updated 2026-10-31

Quick answer: Convert dry ingredients from cups to grams (one US cup of flour is about 120 g, one stick of butter 113 g), keep liquids in millilitres, and take 20 °C off a conventional-oven temperature for a fan oven: 350 °F is 180 °C, or 160 °C fan, gas mark 4.

American recipes are some of the best written anywhere. They are also written for a different set of cupboards, a different oven dial and a different vocabulary. None of the differences are hard once you know them, but they do catch people out.

Cups and sticks

The cup is a volume, not a weight, so the first job is working out what the recipe actually wants. A US cup is 236.6 ml; food labels round it to 240 ml. An Australian cup is 250 ml, worth knowing because plenty of recipes online come from Australia.

Butter is sold in sticks in the United States, and recipes lean on that. One stick is 113 g, which is half a cup, eight tablespoons or four ounces. Two sticks make a cup, so 227 g. British butter comes in 250 g blocks, so a stick is not a neat fraction of your pack and you will want scales rather than guesswork.

Spoons

A US tablespoon is 14.8 ml. A UK tablespoon is 15 ml. The difference is a fifth of a millilitre, which is nothing, so treat them as the same. An Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, a third larger, and that one matters: four Australian tablespoons of oil is five British ones.

Teaspoons are near enough identical everywhere at about 5 ml. Where a spoon measure really counts, with baking powder, bicarbonate of soda or yeast, use proper measuring spoons rather than the cutlery drawer. The spoon you stir your tea with can hold anything from 3 ml to 7 ml.

Oven temperatures

To go from Fahrenheit to Celsius, subtract 32 and multiply by five ninths. In practice you only need a handful of numbers, because recipes stick to round figures:

Fahrenheit	Celsius, conventional	Celsius, fan	Gas mark
275F	140C	120C	1
325F	170C	150C	3
350F	180C	160C	4
375F	190C	170C	5
400F	200C	180C	6
425F	220C	200C	7
450F	230C	210C	8

An American recipe almost always assumes a conventional oven. Most British ovens are fan assisted, and a fan moves hot air across the food so it cooks faster. The usual rule is to set a fan oven about 20C below the stated conventional temperature. If the recipe says 350F, that is 180C conventional and 160C fan.

Gas ovens use marks instead of degrees. Gas mark 4 is 180C, and each mark up is roughly 10C to 15C. Gas ovens also run hotter at the top of the cavity than the bottom, so the shelf you choose does some of the work.

Whatever your oven says on the dial, it is probably out by a little. An oven thermometer costs very little and tells you the truth.

Ingredient names

Half of the difficulty is translation rather than measurement.

All-purpose flour is plain flour. It has no raising agent in it.
Self-rising flour is self-raising flour, and it already contains baking powder and salt. Do not swap the two without adjusting.
Baking soda is bicarbonate of soda. Baking powder is baking powder in both countries, and the two are not interchangeable.
Heavy cream or whipping cream is double cream. Our double cream is a little richer, which helps rather than hurts.
Superfine sugar is caster sugar. Confectioners' sugar or powdered sugar is icing sugar.
Light corn syrup is closest to golden syrup, though golden syrup has more flavour.
Eggplant is aubergine, cilantro is fresh coriander, zucchini is courgette, scallions are spring onions and shrimp are prawns.
Kosher salt is a coarse flaked salt. If you measure it by volume and substitute fine table salt, you will oversalt the dish. Use weight, or use flaked sea salt.

Coriander is the trap worth repeating. In a British recipe, coriander on its own in the dry ingredients usually means the ground seed. In an American one, cilantro is always the leaf.

Tins and dishes

American tins are described in inches. One inch is 2.54 cm, so the common sizes come out as:

8 inch round is 20 cm
9 inch round is 23 cm
9 by 13 inch rectangular is 23 by 33 cm
9 by 5 inch loaf is 23 by 13 cm
10 inch bundt or tube is 25 cm

Depth matters as much as width. Going up one size in a round tin adds roughly a third more area, so the same mixture sits shallower, bakes faster and browns more. If your tin is bigger than the recipe's, start checking well before the stated time. If it is smaller, the mixture will rise higher and need longer, and you should leave a couple of centimetres of clearance at the rim.

If you would rather not look all this up each time, the kitchen tools on Tantoo cover oven temperatures, tin sizes and a recipe translator that converts a full American method into grams, millilitres and Celsius in one go. There is a little more on volumes in our guide to cups and grams.