My massive cooker, with trusty kettle!

Firstly, the ovens I’ve come across are huge!  They are much wider than British ovens, though they still seem to come with four rings as standard.  They also use fahrenheit, as Americans use the imperial system, so thank goodness for conversion charts. Quite a few of the recipes in my collection have both metric and imperial weights – old family recipes such as my Gran’s flapjacks are just in pounds and ounces – but as you probably know America uses cups.  Now here I have a confession.  Despite assuming cups were another example of laziness (Why walk when you can drive?  Why enter a bank when you can drive through?  Why weigh flour when you can scoop?) I actually love it.  It really is much easier to dip a cup in than it is pouring the flour onto the scales, then having to spoon some of it back because you got too much.  Another thing that’s quite handy is the pats of butter come in sticks, so a recipe might call for half a stick or whatever, which again makes it so much easier and quicker to assemble your ingredients.

So that side of things, once you’ve bought a set of cups, is quite straightforward.  However, actually cooking is rather different.  Yes ok, if I want to roast a chicken I heat the oven and pop it in, but whereas in the UK we simply cook it at a certain temperature for so many minutes a kilo and then when the time is up we insert a fork into the thickest part and check the juices are clear, here in the USA everything is calculated to internal temperature.  This means I finally gave in and bought a meat thermometer which has on it all the different temperatures for different meats and how well cooked it is.  So if you want your beef joint to be medium, just set the probe and insert it into the meat. Actually, it works quite well and I’m getting better at remembering to use the blooming thing, but you still need to calculate how long to cook it for so the rest of the meal is ready at the same time.  Still, it was easy enough to get my head around, and it’s nothing previous generations haven’t had to do.

Other problems have arisen simply because of the differences in language.  My oven has two settings, bake and broil.  Broil?  Huh?  So I shoved my head in there and yep, there’s an electric grill at the top of the oven.  So broil means grill, right?  Well, actually no.  I finally had it explained to me by a local friend and fellow foodie, and out here grilling means the open flame comes from the bottom, like a barbecue, whereas broiling is done from above.  In the UK, it doesn’t matter whether the heat is from above or below it’s still grilling, though that might be in deference to our climate; most of the times you will cook under the grill except on those beautiful days when you can barbecue it instead. So to summarise, in America to grill is to barbecue and to broil is to grill.  Got it?  Good.

Now all I’ve got to do is figure out why, in this part of America at least, you can buy tripe and chicken gizzards in the supermarket, but not lamb.

Eat well, and may your larder always be stocked.