Cooking Measurements: Cups, Tablespoons, and Milliliters

US vs metric recipes

American recipes almost always measure liquids and many dry ingredients by volume — cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fluid ounces. European, Australian, and most Asian and Latin American recipes use milliliters, liters, and grams instead. A US cup is legally defined as 236.588 ml, which is not the same as the 250 ml “metric cup” used in Australian and some other recipe books.

Australia adds an extra wrinkle: its tablespoon is 20 ml, while the US, UK, and Canadian tablespoon is about 14.79 ml — roughly 35% larger in Australia. A recipe that says “tablespoon” without naming a country can genuinely produce a different result depending on which measuring spoon you grab.

When precision really matters — bread, pastry, macarons, anything with a tight ratio of flour to liquid — weigh dry ingredients in grams instead of scooping by volume. A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 120 to 150 grams depending on how tightly it is packed, which is a large enough swing to change how a dough behaves.

Common US cooking conversions

Keep these US customary equivalents on hand for quick recipe conversions.

• 1 US cup = 236.588 ml (commonly rounded to 240 ml)
• 1 tablespoon (US/UK) = 14.787 ml = 3 teaspoons
• 1 teaspoon = 4.929 ml
• 1 fluid ounce = 29.574 ml = 2 tablespoons
• 1 US pint = 2 cups = 473 ml
• 1 US quart = 4 cups = 946 ml
• 1 US gallon = 16 cups = 3.785 liters
• 1 stick of US butter = 1/2 cup = 113 grams

Dry measuring cups vs liquid measuring cups

US kitchens typically use two different tools even though both are labeled “cups.” Liquid measuring cups are usually clear glass or plastic with a spout and are read at eye level to the correct line. Dry measuring cups are solid, meant to be leveled off flat with a knife, and come in nested sets (1 cup, 1/2 cup, 1/3 cup, 1/4 cup). Using a liquid cup for flour, or a dry cup for milk, introduces small errors that add up across a whole recipe.

For sticky ingredients like honey, molasses, or peanut butter, weight beats volume every time: a tablespoon of honey weighs about 21 grams regardless of how much air gets trapped in the spoon, while volume measurements can vary by 10% or more depending on how the ingredient was scooped.

Scaling recipes up or down

Doubling a recipe means multiplying every single measurement by 2 — including salt, spices, and leavening agents, not just the main bulk ingredients. Halving works the same way in reverse. For awkward fractions (like 2/3 of 3/4 cup), it is usually easier to convert everything to milliliters or grams first, do the multiplication with clean numbers, and convert back to cups only if you need to for a US audience.

Baking is less forgiving of scaling than savory cooking, because leavening agents (baking soda, baking powder, yeast) do not always scale perfectly linearly in very large or very small batches — professional bakers often adjust leavening slightly when doubling or tripling a recipe rather than using a straight multiplication.

Oven temperature and other recipe pitfalls

Cooking measurement mistakes are not limited to volume. A US recipe’s “350°F oven” equals about 177°C, and confusing the numeral (setting a European oven to 350°C, more than double the intended heat) will burn a bake in minutes. Always check whether an oven temperature has already been converted, especially in recipes translated by hand rather than professionally localized.

Egg size also varies by country: a US “large” egg weighs about 50 grams without the shell, while a UK “medium” egg is close to a US large. When a recipe’s texture depends heavily on egg content (custards, meringues, soufflés), weighing cracked eggs in grams removes this ambiguity entirely.

Tools that make international cooking easier

A digital kitchen scale that reads in both grams and ounces is the single most useful tool for cooking from international recipes, because weight measurements never depend on how tightly an ingredient is packed or which country’s measuring cup you own.

For liquids, a glass measuring jug marked with both milliliters and US cups lets you follow either unit system without doing mental math mid-recipe. When you hit an unfamiliar unit — tablespoons to milliliters, or ounces to grams — ConvertHub’s volume and weight converters run instantly in the browser without needing to install a conversion app on your phone.

Spices, leavening, and small quantities

Small-quantity ingredients like spices, baking soda, and salt are usually forgiving enough for a standard measuring spoon, but precision still matters more than people assume — doubling a teaspoon of cayenne pepper by mistake changes a dish far more than doubling a cup of rice does. Level spoon measurements with a knife or your finger rather than eyeballing a heaped spoon, since a heaped teaspoon can hold 50% more than a level one depending on the ingredient’s texture.

For very small amounts common in baking science — a pinch of salt, an eighth of a teaspoon of baking soda — a set of measuring spoons that includes 1/8 tsp and even 1/16 tsp markings is worth owning, since eyeballing a fraction of an already-small teaspoon introduces a proportionally larger error than eyeballing a fraction of a cup.

Butter: sticks, cups, and grams

US recipes commonly measure butter in "sticks" — a labeling convention, not a formal unit, but one printed directly on the wrapper for convenience. One US stick of butter is 1/2 cup, 8 tablespoons, or about 113 grams, and most wrappers even print tablespoon markings along the side so you can cut off a partial stick without a scale. Outside the US, butter is sold in blocks by weight (commonly 250 g), so a recipe calling for "1 stick" translates to roughly 113 g, and "2 sticks" is close to a standard European 250 g block plus a little extra.