My cousin cooks Pakistani recipes written in Celsius on a Birmingham gas oven marked only in Gas Mark. These are the five conversions she phones me for, in her order.
180 °C is Gas Mark 4. I have said that sentence into a phone, over the sound of a Birmingham kitchen in full Eid morning chaos, more times than I can count. My cousin cooks from the family recipes my mother and aunts wrote down in Celsius, the scale on every oven in Pakistan.
My cousin's oven, a British gas cooker, carries a dial with numbers 1 to 9 and no degrees anywhere. She is a better cook than I am. She is also, every single Eid, one conversion away from a tray of kebabs at the wrong heat, and so the phone rings in Multan.
Her question arrives word for word the same every time: "The recipe says 180, my dial says numbers, just tell me the number and do not explain." The number is 4. On Eid morning that is the whole conversation. The explanation she never has time for is written down below, for the quiet days.
This article is the call, written down. Not a general chart, but the five conversions she actually asks for, in the order she asks them, with the small print that matters while something is already in the oven. If your family is split across the same two dials, her list is probably your list too.
The Five Conversions, In The Order She Asks Them
She does not ask in temperature order. She asks in cooking order, as each dish reaches the oven door. First comes the chicken roast marinade tray, then the kebabs, then the sheer khurma's baked cousin she insists on making, then the cake, then the slow finish for the roast. Here is her sequence with the answers.
Order she asks
Recipe says
Her dial
What is cooking
1
200 °C
Gas Mark 6
Roast chicken, first hot blast
2
180 °C
Gas Mark 4
Kebabs and most everyday baking
3
190 °C
Gas Mark 5
Tea cakes and traybakes
4
170 °C
Gas Mark 3
Fruit cakes that must not dry out
5
220 °C
Gas Mark 7
Final browning, naan, pizza nights
Read the table once and a pattern shows itself. Her whole cooking life lives between Gas Mark 3 and Gas Mark 7. The marks below 3 belong to slow ovens and old books. The marks above 7 belong to commercial kitchens and bravado. The full table, quarter marks included, sits on the Gas Mark to Celsius converter for the days a recipe wanders outside her five.
How often each question reached my phone, two years of calls
Data: my own call notes, Eid and family baking days, 2024 to 2026.
How To Convert Any Celsius Recipe On A Gas Mark Dial
Here is the method I taught her, in the order to do it with a tray in your other hand.
Read the Celsius figure in the recipe once, out loud, so it sticks.
Find the nearest figure in the standard table. Most home recipes land on 140, 150, 170, 180, 190, 200, or 220 °C, and each one has an exact Gas Mark partner.
Set the dial to that mark. Gas Mark 4 for 180 °C, Gas Mark 5 for 190 °C, Gas Mark 6 for 200 °C.
For a figure between table rows, like 185 °C, set the dial halfway between the two marks and shorten your checking interval instead of moving the food.
Write the pair on the recipe card before you put the tray in. Future you is also cooking under time pressure.
One habit matters more than any step above. Convert before you preheat, not after. An oven climbing to the wrong mark wastes ten minutes you do not have on Eid morning, and a cake batter sitting out while the oven corrects itself loses the rise you mixed into it. My fuller piece on The Three Anchor Temperatures teaches the memory shortcut behind this method, the one that lets you place any figure without a table at all.
She never needed the whole chart. She needed five numbers, in her order, on a day when the phone was the slowest tool in the kitchen.
The Use Case: Cooking Ammi's Recipes On A British Oven
The situation repeats across the whole diaspora. A recipe travels as a photograph of a notebook page, or a voice note, or a blog written in Lahore or Karachi with Celsius throughout. The oven at the receiving end is British, older, and numbered. The cook is skilled. The gap is pure units, and it opens at the worst moment, halfway through a dish the family has eaten for thirty years.
Nobody in this story needs a cooking lesson. They need a translation they trust, delivered at the speed of a phone call. That is the entire reason the converter on this site puts the answer first and the reading material below it. The dials themselves have a history, too: older British cookers carry the Regulo name in place of plain Gas Marks, and I worked through one of those books in Regulo Mark 5 And A 1974 Cookbook.
Her recipes also arrive with weights in grams, which her kitchen scale handles happily, unlike my American readers who write to me about cups. When the flow runs the other way and a British relative sends her a recipe in ounces, she sends that one to me too, and the grams to cups converter settles the weight side while the table above settles the heat.
The Notebook Page That Ended The Calls
Last Eid, the phone did not ring. I would like to say my feelings were not hurt. What happened is simpler: at the end of one call I dictated the five pairs, she wrote them on the inside cover of the family recipe notebook in her own hand, and the notebook now answers faster than I do. Roast 6, everyday 4, cakes 5, fruit cake 3, browning 7. Five numbers in pencil have outperformed two years of international calls.
She still phones, by the way. Now she phones to report results, which is a better call to receive. The kebabs at Gas Mark 4 were, by her account, correct to the minute. If your family has the same two dials in two countries, do the notebook thing today, while nobody is mid-recipe. Convert your five, write them where the recipes live, and let the next Eid morning be about the food.
Questions People Ask About This Page
Does My Cousin Need To Adjust Anything Else On A British Gas Oven?
For a conventional gas oven, no change is needed at all: set the Gas Mark the table gives you. The adjustment only enters when the oven is a fan model, where the usual rule is to lower the Celsius figure by 20 °C before converting.
Why Do Pakistani Recipes Use Celsius While Her Oven Uses Gas Mark?
Because oven dials differ by country. British gas cookers kept numbered Gas Mark dials long after Pakistani and European ovens switched to Celsius, so a recipe written in Lahore and an oven bought in Birmingham speak different scales.
Can The Converter Handle Half Marks Too?
Yes. Gas Mark 1/4 is 110 °C and Gas Mark 1/2 is 120 °C, and the full table including every fraction is on the converter page of this site, because older recipes use those marks often.
Talha Kayani is the founder of Trivexa Digital, Multan, and the owner and developer of Ti-84calculator.com. A digital marketing specialist in SEO, social media and Meta Ads, he builds and personally tests every calculator and converter on this site before it goes live, so the figures you read here are the ones he trusts in his own daily work.
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