It's almost Christmas and doubtless most families across the country will be planning a 'traditional' Christmas roast turkey a week today. Over the last day or so a few memories of Christmas turkeys have crossed my mind.

One thing I keep thinking of is that roasting a turkey is one time in the year when men who almost never cook get busy in the kitchen. The other obvious occasion is the summer barbeque when turning the meat to charcoal becomes a manly task. In my family though it was also the summer camping holiday. My dad - who has hardly ever cooked - used to take over the cooking in our tent. He trusted my Mum implicitly in the kitchen at home but as soon as we were under canvas, he seemed terrified that she would burn the tent down with our camping gas stove. Of course most people do not normally lug a 5 kilo bird into and out of the oven so it is not surprising that my Dad got involved with the Christmas turkey.

From what I recall of family Christmases around 1970 it was a time when my Mum's sense of hygeine and domesticity was thrown out of the window. The first thing was the thawing. I recall a number of years when the thawing turkey took over the bath for a day or two. When I think back that was not very hygeinic - but on the other hand the safe defrosting over many days in a fridge would never have worked as our fridge was tiny. Defrosting in a fridge requires up front planning - you are talking of about 70-90 hours so 3-4 days for a large bird.

My parents were always concerned to 'clean' the turkey in the kitchen sink. Of course the exercise would have spattered the sink area with bacteria-laden droplets; not a good idea. They seemed to forget that heat rather than washing would kill the bacteria. Most are dead at 60 Celsius which is well below the roughly 180 Celsius you would use to roast a turkey.

In case I appear to be hypocritical telling stories about my family, I admit we are blessed with better facilities than our parents were 35 years ago!

More recently I have been fascinated at the way our weights and measures have been muddled in the early noughties. Britain has been adopting metric forever (but at a tortoise's pace) and it was only in 2000 that most foods had to be weighed in kilos. So in the nineties it was natural that many roasting guides gave rules of thumb in 'minutes per pound'. To me it was obvious that from 2000 onwards it would make sense to change to 'minutes per kilogram' with meat and poultry labeled in kilos. However - probably a result of the government changing the measures by stealth - most food suppliers and supermarkets updated their guidelines in a very amateurish way.

Many web roasting guides offered turkey roasting times in 'minutes per 454 grams'. Er... if you have a 5 kg bird you need a calculator to work that out! Even Nigella Lawson and other writers offered 'minutes per 500 grams'. Some birds were labelled with tables that were based on round numbers of pounds expressed in grams - what a mess!

Today I thought I would do a quick Google search to see if today's roasting advice on the web is more user-friendly in 2006. The first five hits from Google are given below:

i) iVillage has quite a nice guide over 3 web pages. There is a useful thawing guide based on sensible round kilogram weights that you will find in your supermarket. There is a similarly sensible roasting table though I am forever surprised to see fahrenheit termperatures.
ii) Good old Delia Smith has an extensively illustrated guide showing how to use bacon rashers with a roast turkey. However her measures seem firmly back in the 1970s. She works in ounces and Fahrenheit temperatures which is not much use when meat is weighed in kilograms or grams and ovens are in Celsius. Come to think of it I bought my first oven in John Lewis back in 1985 - even then I recall seeing just one Fahrenheit oven in a big showroom and concluded it was obsolescent. Surely with Delia's royalties not to speak of Norwich City FC she has bought a new oven in the last decade or so...or she's just stuck in the past.
iii) The BBC seem even more keen to sit on the fence with measurement units than the government. Their units are given in duplicate or triplicate for example 'turkey, 5kg/11¼lb in weight' and give an awkward rule of thumb '180C/350F/Gas 4 for 20 minutes per 500g/1lb'. Is the BBC scared of offending the old Prussian scientist; Daniel Fahrenheit? Wasn't education part of the BBC Charter? The tip of skewering the thigh to see if the juices are clear though is a good one.
iv) The UK Metric Association gives the simple rule of thumb of roasting 40 minutes per kilo of turkey. They also warn about weighing turkeys on bathroom scales - which is probably what you need to do if using a pound-based thawing or roasting rule - and provide some useful tips.
v) The Food Standards Agency provide quite a thorough description on safe turkey preparation. They provide a kilo-based rule of thumb for defrosting - very useful if your turkey is going to be oven-ready on Christmas day as opposed to a few days late. However they are touchingly nostalgic by providing Fahrenheit fridge temperatures. I have honestly never seen a fahrenheit fridge indicator outside of the USA. Surely everybody thinks that the freezing point is zero? Muddling Celsius and Fahrenheit is dangerous; 39 Fahrenheit is fridge temperature but 39 Celsius would be summer in Malaga! They also have a kilo-based rule of thumb for roasting.

So maybe a bit of progress in modernising our measures - though there are some websites are still caught in the past or are wanting to accomodate museum-piece kitchen appliances.

So I have been rambling on a lot. My turkey roasting tips are:
a) Plan ahead especially with defrosting,
b) Avoid unhygeinic things you would not normally do like defrosting in a bath or washing out a large bird
c) Don't muddle or mix your pounds and kilos. If you muddle your units you might end up with a seriously undercooked bird and foodpoisoning. Since turkeys are weighed in kilograms use a kilo-based rule of thumb e.g. 10-12 hours/kg in a fridge for defrosting and 40 min/kg at 180 Celsius for roasting.

But I will not be roasting a turkey this year. I had turkey at my company bash last week but will spend Christmas with relatives with a veggie menu with roast beef alternative menu.