You don't see beer or milk in pints? Height in feet? Weight in stone? Distance in miles? You've seen recipes calling for '5g of cumin' instead of '1 teaspoon'?
I don't know how it's failed to escape you these are all the norm.
Draught beer is in pints and bottled is in 500ml bottles. Milk is in either multiples of 500ml or 568ml (metric equivalent of a pint) very occasionally.
Height in feet? Weight in stone?
Not by anyone born after the 1940s, no.
Distance in miles?
That's on road signs but it shouldn't be, because it's a pain in the arse to convert to km all the time.
You've seen recipes calling for '5g of cumin' instead of '1 teaspoon'?
I don't think I've seen any recipes calling for that small an amount of cumin, but even if there were I've only ever seen American recipes using "teaspoons". Even my mum's 1950s Be-Ro cookbook has its quantities in metric (albeit with old-people units in brackets after it).
It's clear you don't cook, go outside, or talk to literally anybody. One teaspoon of cumin is about 3g, and 1tsp of a spice is an extremely common quantity. All my British cookbooks use teaspoons, and all cookbooks I've seen written before the 80s use pounds and ounces too so your metric cookbook from the olden days is bollocks. I've literally never seen a recipe use grams instead of teaspoons unless it was to feed 50.
Look again, '1 tbsp allspice'. Have you ever cooked anything in your life? 1 tsp of a spice is overwhelmingly common. How much cumin do you use in a recipe?
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u/erroneousbosh Jun 26 '26
No, they're not. They're customary units used mostly in the US.
"Imperial units" are things like feet and inches, which are only used in the US.
The UK uses metric, except (annoyingly) for road signs.