American recipes measure liquids in cups, tablespoons and teaspoons; most of the world uses milliliters. This converter bridges them instantly. One warning that saves bakers everywhere: cups measure volume, and flour by volume is wildly inconsistent — when precision matters, weigh it.
How big is a cup, exactly?
A US cup is 236.588 ml (usually rounded to 240). A metric cup, used in Canada and Australia, is 250 ml. The difference is under half a tablespoon — negligible for most recipes, but stick to one system within a single recipe when scaling up.
Tablespoons and teaspoons
1 tablespoon (tbsp) = 15 ml = 3 teaspoons (tsp); 1 teaspoon = 5 ml. Watch the capitalization in recipes: capital T or "tbsp" means tablespoon, lowercase "t" or "tsp" means teaspoon — a threefold difference that can ruin cookies.
Fluid ounces are not weight ounces
A fluid ounce (fl oz) measures volume: 1 fl oz ≈ 29.57 ml. A weight ounce (oz) measures mass: 1 oz ≈ 28.35 g. They are different units that happen to share a name. For flour and sugar, the gram weight on the recipe is always more accurate than any cup measure.