American recipes are annoying

The only thing measured in grams in the US is cannabis.

And bullets are measured in millimeters
- It depends. Ones designed in other countries, yes. But if the bullet was designed in the USA, it is measured in inches like .45 ACP or .223 Remington
I think most medicines are measured in grams over there too (500mg for acetaminophen / paracetamol). And Cocaine.
- Weed is measured in both!
It's actually sold in ounces. And grammes. My local head shop does that.
In Russia, cannabis was measured in "matchboxes" (around the amount that gets in to a small ziploc) and "glasses", where glass is a 220ml glass Russians drink vodka from in the movies.
So it goes full circle when you start measuring cannabis in glasses, sounds really American!
- Yeah but how many hands is your horse?

Cups are ~235ml regardless of wet or dry. They are one of the sane-er measurements
You may be confusing your frustration with the ounce, which may refer to:
avoirdupois ounce, used for mass in most cases
Troy ounce, used for mass when referring to precious metals
the imperial fluid ounce, used for volume sometimes
the us customary fluid ounce, used for volume sometimes
the us food labelling ounce, used for volume like the customary fluid ounce, but rounded to a nice number of milliliters
- In metric, dry ingredients are measured by weight, so how much a cup is changes for each ingredient.
- Also an ounce of common sense!
Oh, and is it an american cup or an english cup? Yes, they're both different.
- If you are complaining about American recipes, then it should be self evident what version of cup it is.
What is a foot? Whose foot?!
Why is it a pound 💷? It weighs nowhere near a pound?!
- One pound sterling (the full name of £) was once worth one pound of sterling silver.
No word of a lie, one of my university roommates came up to be the first week we were living together with a drinking glass in his hand and asked me if it was what a recipe meant when it said "add a cup of water."
What's fun is halving a recipe with a quarter, 3/4, or third...

Just put 1/3 football fields of flour and 1/12 Empire State Buildings of salt and exactly 2 1/4 tsp of yeast (no more, no less)

Don't forget the 1/137th of a blue whale of water.

I get the rocket and coriander ones, also the units of measurement but what do you call a bell pepper? (Also how do you differentiate dried cilantro seed powder from the fresh herb? I like to know if I should be using a spice or the fresh plant)

what do you call a bell pepper
Paprika.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper#Nomenclature
It's very well documented.
what do you call a bell pepper
Capsicum. Or red/green/yellow pepper.
- Red/yellow/green pepper is generally valid anywhere bell pepper is. But bell lets you choose your favorite!
Cilantro is the herb, coriander (seed) is the spice/dried powder. Often you can tell by what you are making and how it's being used/added, but typically they are differentiated as above in American recipes.
Genuinely confused as well about the pepper, a bell pepper is a pretty universal name for it as far as I knew. Folks also refer to them as green/yellow/red peppers here, or sweet peppers occasionally (usually when used in Italian food), but bell pepper is the generic name.
- In a whole load of languages, you call bell pepper paprika. If you just say "pepper" to me, that's usually black pepper in particular. If you say chilli pepper, that means a spicy variant of the capsicum genus. A non-spicy capsicum genus member? That's a paprika.
  There's no name to put in front of "pepper" in my language that would make it refer to paprika.
  That said, in English, it's apparently almost always something something pepper. Or capsicum. Or apparently according to Wikipedia, in the American mid-west, mango???????
- Cilantro is the herb, coriander (seed) is the spice/dried powder.
  That's very much an NA thing. US mostly, but also sometimes in Canada. Coriander is name of the plant.
I call it a bell pepper. Paprika is a spice.
UK and Ireland paprika is pointless and flavourless.
Just call it a pepper, like "red pepper" or "black pepper" for the seasoning.
In Bluey they call them capsicums. Which is a fun word to say, we do that now.

Wait till you learn that pre metric Canadian measurements use the same terms but are different.

What do you guys call bell peppers?

please don't use google. There are plenty of good search engines that aren't evil.

Not my picture.

Cilantro is mui fomoso.🎺🪇🎶

Truth.

You can ask the AI chat bot to do the conversion for you.

nothing like using gallons of water to generate a paragraph that incorrectly describes the conversion
- It's weird to me how it manages to fuck up that kind of simple cut and dry answer thing.
If we made a list of things you can do, that would be on the list.

... And now you have me thinking about whether siccing AI on automatic recipe translation is a good or bad idea ...

Since LLMs suck at maths, it would probably result in me putting 2kg of sugar into a recipe calling for 3 cups.
- LLMs are getting better at math btw.
  There are also techniques considered to have the LLM call functions like a calculator to address arithmetic.
- Aeons ago Cracked did a skit called "Cooking with Babelfish." First of all remember when it was called Babelfish? Remember Alta Vista?
  The one thing you could count on with one of those...feels wrong to call it 'old'...translation algorithm programs was it would get the quantities right. It might tell you to put in 5 kilograms of earth apples, because the French don't have a word for "potato" and Babelfish didn't know that, but the recipe did indeed call for 5 kilograms of them.