Today is Pancake Day. Or at least I'm pretty sure it's Pancake Day, so let's just roll like it is. However, due to an accidental jar opening incident, I'll be having chili for dinner tonight and not pancakes. My bad.
Speaking of pancakes and making food, I was casually flipping through my Nigella cookbook last night looking for some ideas on things to make while Mark was slaving away in the kitchen with all four burners and the oven going. Leisurely scanning some of the recipes, I realized that a great deal of English-English translation was necessary for the same cookbook to be sold in both the US and the UK. Now aside from changing most measurements from weight to volume (or volume to weight), there was a surprising number of other differences. Like, the ice cream cake. It was talking about cling film ('saran wrap') and chopping up Crunchies ('chocolate covered styrofoam candy bars'). And then if a recipe involves something like a specific type of potato that has to be taken into account as well. I've even heard that our tablespoons are different sizes and there are key differences between bicarbonate of soda and baking soda. Yet at the same time there is very little guidance available on these things.
So now I'm thinking that I shall become an English-English cookbook translator. While not fully qualified, I think a few months of intensive training would get me up to speed. I mean, you just need to know some densities (some of which I have found and I have successfully used English muffin recipes with American measuring devices) and some key terminology differences. And I can be like, no don't include that the other people will think it's horrible. Needless to say, I'm quite pleased with my new career plan. Or as the English would say, I'm quite chuffed.
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4 comments:
I bought a digital kitchen scale with a similar goal in mind. The Christmas dessert disaster is one of the many results. By weight makes so much sense though, add stuff... zero out... add the next thing, etc instead of using all those measuring things. Also, if you use metric increasing and decreasing recipes is insanely easy. I've collected the density of some common things like all the different types of flour and sugar. But I find vastly different opinions on the density of each. So, I've been reduced to figuring out my own which unfortunately requires an awful lot of baking.
So what's "pancake day"? Is it an annual deal, or a weekly deal, like "bagel day"?
According to "Online Unit Conversion":
1 Tablespoon [UK] = 0.9607599 Tablespoon [US]
Note that this is "rounded to significant digits".
Now if only the exchange rate were in T...
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