One yogurt

British Neighbor called yesterday as her kids were eating breakfast (mid morning, yet another snow day). She was trying to sort out a very American-sounding recipe: M&M cookies. It called for 1½ sticks of softened butter, and she and her daughter were scratching their heads. Her daughter was guessing that it meant one and a half boxes, but that would have resulted in buttery puddles on the baking sheet: the recipe was referring to 1½ of the four "sticks" that are individually wrapped in the one-pound package typically sold in the US. Armed with that vital bit of information, we were treated to some lovely, buttery cookies after our first snowball fight of the day.

So much depends on packaging that we often forget this when submitting recipes across borders. A quick Google search shows many people, from Australia to Germany, asking the same "stick of butter" question, with at least one poor soul confused by a request for a tablespoon of chilled butter, noting that when it's chilled, it's extremely difficult to force into a spoon, you see. When you buy your butter in a block like the rest of the world, there are no handy tablespoon markings on the package!

I ran across this the first time I was tempted by a foreign recipe. It was an elegant-sounding saffron cake I found in a French woman's magazine while I was still in college here. But I was confused by the ingredient "one yogurt." I was petrified, on my student budget, of making a mistake with my expensive saffron by putting in the wrong amount of yogurt. It's just as well, since I also didn't realize that French yogurt was an entirely different creature from the gelled stuff you get in American supermarkets. And no, I've never made the recipe: I have spent literally an hour in a French hypermarché looking at the different sizes, and can find no standard. I remain stymied--but I still have the recipe in my files!

This bit me again this year, when I tried to make marzipan crescents amidst the Christmas baking madness (you can read the sad tale here). The recipe called for "½ Fläschchen Bittermandelöl" (½ vial of bitter almond oil). I knew I didn't have anything like that in my cupboard, and I couldn't recall ever seeing it in a store. I turned to the Internet, both to find out what it was and how much a ½ fläschchen was. Luckily for me, the Germans are big on standardization: I learned the Dr. Oetker product was an almond flavoring based on oil and the vial contained about ½ teaspoon of it. Wonder of wonders, I also learned that ¼ teaspoon of the Bittermandelöl corresponded roughly to one teaspoon of what we call almond extract. Which was exactly what I needed to make the cookies.