When 'Catty' is not about a cat...

On several occasions, I have had transient pets in my home - mainly stray cats and dogs. Most of these animal must have had owners before because they were not scared or intimidated by contact with humans. Every time a stray animal returns to our gates, I'll give it a name - so that it'll be easier to call him/her. Therefore many cats have been named "Catty" - the generic name for all cats who stop by No.1.

Today, as I was searching for the mud method of making salted eggs, I came across a scientific paper written by someone in the People's Republic of China. The paper explained what happens during this process of egg preservation and is an interesting read if you want to attempt making century eggs and salted eggs. As I was reading it, the term 'catty' and 'catties' came up. And then I remembered seeing mum scribble down recipes using measurements in 'kati' units. So I Googled 'catty' and this Wiki page came up!

I was amused to discover that 'catty' originated from the Malay word 'kati' (which we, Malaysians, are so used to hearing but never really knew how much it represented - well, at least I didn't know how much it represented in metric terms... hehe) and is actually a traditional Chinese unit of mass! Well, for the record,

1 catty = 604.79 grams