RogerBW's Blog

(Guest post from Chris.)

Shortly before I moved into this house, I decided that my pint Pyrex measuring jug was so constantly in use that I might as well have another for when the first was in the Sisyphean washing-up pile, and went out to the nearest kitchens shop (it was called Kitchens) and bought myself a second pint jug. I assumed, in my folly, that since it had the same function and was made by the same company it would be the same.

It does indeed have the same capacity, and the same calibrations up the side, though they are in red not blue and are much more difficult to read even when what you are measuring is milk, which you'd think would be closer in colour to blue than to red — I don't at all understand why this should be, but it is so, and if someone has a good reason to offer I'd be interested to hear it: I am not as far as I know colour-blind in any other context. It is the same jug in most respects.

But it has one very important difference, and for the life of me I cannot think why it has taken me ten years to notice it. Well, to notice the reason for it; I had noticed and deplored the effects occasionally, and tended to use the old one for various particular tasks, because the new one is very bad at pouring. The hot liquid, or milk, or whatever else it may be, dribbles down the edge of the jug instead of going into the saucepan or bowl you are trying to put it into, and it gets all over the work-surface and your trousers and the floor, which is a serious nuisance if it is the juice from under a chicken and some of it is chicken fat.

The red-marked one is OK for measuring liquids, either by fractions of a pint and fluid ounces or by multiples of a millilitre, but no use for then transferring that amount of liquid to anywhere else. Indeed, it actively negates the point of measuring in the first place, by altering the amount as you pour.

About two weeks ago I realised why this was happening, and I have been cursing myself ever since for all the wasted woman-hours spent wiping up after the new jug.

For reasons known best to themselves, Pyrex decided at some point to "improve" their design, and altered the spout. I don't know why they chose to change to red lettering, though that makes the thing slightly less useful; but is it really so much cheaper to have a flat bit to pour over instead of one which is slightly pulled down from the horizontal at a single point to make a spout that is poured through? I know that they must have had the tool set up to do it properly: they had been making the functional design for at least sixty years to my knowledge, since my mother's jug of the same kind was bought some time in the forties. So apart from possibly saving some minute fraction of a cent per jug, what was the POINT of a new design which no longer does the job, and turns the thing they sell from a useful tool into a source of niggling dissatisfaction? I can't believe it was because it was made in France: the French are more likely than the British to be picky about cooking implements. I am forced to fall back on it being simple stupidity, the result of people who don't ever do a job trying to make the tools for that job. It's either that or malice, which seems a bit futile unless they really were got at by Crowley.

Left: modern style. Right: old style.

A second-hand Pyrex pint jug with blue lettering and a working spout arrived in the post this morning, and I now have a red-marked jug that I don't need. If anyone wants a pint jug that doesn't pour properly they can have it, free to an abusive home because it doesn't deserve a good one. It might make a reasonable container for growing hyacinths using glass marbles and water so that you can see the roots, or I suppose one could take it to the pub and annoy them by asking for a proper pint-to-line in it. Other suggestions welcome.