A pound by any other name is a whole different animal

Valentine's Day 1966.  Some got flowers.  Some, luckier, got a lovely dinner.  One country got taught how to count to ten.

The introduction of decimal currency was just the start.  With the Australian ability to count to ten while our hands were full of beer and pies - thank you thongs - the government came over all metric.  It took years.

My height changed in fifth grade, when I was ten.  We were all lined up against one of those new-fangled metre rulers, to see how tall we were in metric.  Inches to centimetres - fantastic.  We were suddenly double our height and then some.  But feet to metres?  Bad enough to become shorter when I was already the shortest in the class (the year, possibly the school), suddenly I was the spokesbody for the new measurement system.  How tall was a metre, sir?  Jenny, can you just go stand beside that boy?  Got it?  Or, Sir, how long is two metres?  Jenny, just lie here.  See, two jennies is equal to two metres.  Understand?  Yes, sir, I've got it now.  If only I'd known about deed poll in 1972.  I could have changed my name to Exactly One Metre Tall Heward.  Saved a lot of bother.  Or One Metre is Equal to 39.37 Inches Heward.  I envied babies.  They were - still are - measured in imperial as well as metric.  Sort of bi-measured.  Easily translated.  How ever else can one grandmother go boasting to another grandmother about how strapping the new grandchild is?

And how about our weight?  We became enormous. I went from three stone to nineteen kilograms.  Metrication made us all either really tall and fat, or very short and fat.  And as for criminals?  For years when the police were on the lookout for a 68 kg 175cm male, I, for one - I know of others - would look for an incredibly big man.  I'm surprised criminals didn't make the most of it.

But, in the manner of children, we got more fluent in metric.  We became bi-measuring.

Cooking was where we came up against the hidden pockets of imperial measurement resistance.  For most of us, cooking was done by our mothers (not my mother), and our mothers' cooking language was old-fashioned.  And old-fashioned - imperial ounces and pounds and pints - didn't add up neatly when translated into metric.  A pound cake was a 454g cake.  Thank goodness someone out there was thinking and updated a classic.  With Cookery the Australian way (revised metric edition), we only had to look at page 26 and we were done.  After all, it's cooking, not applied mathematics, we were doing.  And it worked for anything in old-fashioned:  ovens, stoves, temperatures, fluids, those family recipe books.

There is one problem.  It's not the one where we end up with a bit more food, going from imperial to metric.  No, there's nothing wrong with having a bit extra.  It's those other measurements that are so pesky.  A pinch.  A smidge.  A dash.  A glug.  All those measurements of taste, a flick of the wrist, a twist of the fingers.  If only they'd been more precise. 

There must be a conversion chart somewhere...

Mel made me do it

This blog may occaisonally stray into cooking.  It may often stray into reminiscence.  It may often just stray...

I was asked recently what I would save if my house was on fire.  I thought about it keenly.  I could save all those documents that prove who I am, those kindergarten pictures that have some kind of pasta stuck to them that I've hauled halfway across the world, the first edition Barbara Cartlands.  I could save my wedding photographs or the Erstwhile's music collection.  In the end, there really was no contest.  What I would save first would be my Cookery the Australian way.

It is not the most attractive of books.  It is the antithesis of the Donna Hay, Nigella Lawson, Women's Weekly, or Jamie Oliver cookbooks that crowd other shelves in my kitchen with their gorgeous staged photos and a recipe or two per page.  It no longer has a spine per se - that was lost somewhere between one move or another - but you can see it has been put together the old fashioned way, with linen tape and bound sections, like battle wounds, spiked with that glue that hardened like lacquer.  Its cover is not so much buff-coloured as bruised.  The pages fall open at well-worn places, leaving others untouched.  Inside there are very few pictures, not in colour - which is lucky, because the pictures tend to be the dismembered corpses of meat.  It has all the essentials of a book that should be discarded.

But it won't be.  Not this one. 

What it holds is household management, invalid cookery, the first metric cooking measurements I ever encountered, the D I got helping a young Yugoslav girl understand schnitzel, cold afternoons with fresh scones and home-made blackberry jam, earning money to buy new clothes, school days, young motherhood, cream puffs, breakfast, lunch and Christmas.

It is scruffy - yes.  Its pages threaten to abandon the cookbook - yes.  Its most exotic recipe is beef stroganoff (Russia).  But in the great tradition of those notebooks that mothers and grandmothers left to their children, this cookbook - Cookery the Australian way 2nd revised metric edition - this book will be mine to pass on.  I haven't decided who to will it to yet, mainly because I haven't met the child I'd trust with it.  But in those reveries that happen while waiting for the potatoes to boil, I imagine a grandchild of mine will fondly remove it from a bottom drawer to show my great-grandchildren Grandma's favourite recipes.  And my great-grandchildren, as they gaze at the stains and damage and the dried-out pastry in the spine will, in traditional fashion, go "Urgh!  How did anybody ever eat that?  Can we have pizza for tea?"