How Many Cups in a Pint?

Two cups if it pours, more if it's a berry basket

A pint of cream and a pint of blueberries are not the same size of pint, which is the one fact about this conversion worth carrying to the store. Liquid pints are 2 cups, and everything poured from a carton follows that. Baskets of fruit are sold by the dry pint, and the difference is big enough to change how many you buy.

Buying cream by the pint

A recipe asking for 1½ cups of cream sends you to a dairy case that offers pints and half-pints. The pint gives you 2 cups, so you use three-quarters of it and have ½ cup left. The half-pint is only 1 cup and leaves you ½ cup short, so buying one of each would be paying for 3 cups to use 1½. I'd buy the single pint and decide what the leftover ½ cup becomes before it goes back in the fridge.

If a recipe gives cream by weight, the King Arthur ingredient chart lists a cup at 227 g, so a pint comes to 454 g. Recipes that give it in milliliters are a one-step job in the conversion calculator: 1½ cups is 354.88 mL. And if you've run out altogether, the heavy cream substitutes page has the options.

A berry basket is a dry pint

A pint basket of strawberries or blueberries is measured by the dry pint, which NIST Handbook 44 lists at 33.6 cubic inches, about 0.551 liters. The liquid pint is 28.875 cubic inches, about 0.473 liters. Put in US cups, the basket holds about 2⅓ cups of space, some 16% more than the 2 cups of a pint of cream. A recipe asking for 2 cups of whole berries is asking for one level basket with about ⅓ cup to spare, and a heaped basket gives you more. The converter above works in liquid pints only, so for fruit go by this paragraph.

What I won't do is turn that into a weight. Berries differ, and I'd rather give you no gram figure than one I can't stand behind; if a recipe measures berries in ounces or grams, go by the weight it gives. The wording of the recipe matters too. "2 cups berries, sliced" means measure first and slice after, while "2 cups sliced berries" means slice first and then fill the cup. Sliced or crushed fruit fills in the gaps, so one basket may not reach 2 cups once it's been cut. I'd read that line twice before shopping, because the difference could be a second basket.

Ice cream, by the carton

Two cups by the carton, which works out to four ½-cup portions. If a milkshake or an ice cream pie asks for 2 cups, a pint is the shopping answer. Where it needs a closer measure, I'd let the ice cream soften just enough to press into the cup and level it, since round scoops dropped into a measuring cup leave pockets of air and you'd come up short. The pint on the carton is what you bought. The cup in the recipe is what you pressed in.

Deli tubs: trust the water test, not the stamp

A tub stamped 16 oz is presumably meant to be a pint, and one stamped 8 oz a cup, but a tub with no stamp tells you nothing at all, however familiar its shape looks. I think these tubs are better for storing and portioning than for measuring, because you can't see the level from the side as clearly as you can in a marked glass cup and the stamp may not match the point where you'd stop pouring.

It takes one minute to settle it: pour 2 measured cups of water in and see where they come to. If your 1-cup measure has gone missing for that job, untick it in the calculator and the plan rebuilds as four ½ cups. After that, a "pint" of chicken stock from that tub really is 2 cups. A pint of potato salad from the deli counter I'd treat as a different kind of pint, more of a good-faith estimate with a lid on. Two of these tubs make a quart, which is why the quart conversions are worth a look if you're buying more than one.