English money
I’ll probably sound like a rabid Daily Mail reader for saying this, but I’m nevertheless saddened by the way that England is “modernising” by throwing away our traditional money, weights and measures. We threw away our real money, which had lasted for nearly a thousand years, back in 1972. Now we are disposing of temperatures and weights based on human measures.
Only the other day I was in one of our wretched supermarkets and the woman behind the till wanted me to sum something up (cashback if I remember) to a whole multiple of 10 pounds because the computers would “find it simpler”. Well yes, computers have their counting base. That is 2. Humans have 10 fingers to count with, unless of course we need to divide it into something, in which case 12s, 24s and 360s are a whole lot more useful. And lengths have a relationship to the human body, be it one inch (the length of the midsection of my index finger) or a mile (mille passuum, 1000 paces).
What’s this got to do with cooking? (I hear you ask, as if anyone is really still concentrating on my meandering moans). Well I’m collecting old recipe books and they’re all in pounds and ounces, so when I scribble down my ingredients and go over to the butchers and vegetable stalls, I give them those measures, and I’m happy to say they are glad to serve me in imperial units. For The Book Hugh has opted to go entirely metric, which I respect, and when I make recipes from there I order in metric units as well … converting in my head back to more familiar units.
I grew up being taught entirely in metric units, but at home and around people everyone was using imperial, and that’s really how I think of things. People are weighed in stones (yes, quite a lot of rocks in my stomach!). People are 5-foot-something-tall. This is never going to go away. And I hope it never does.