18th Century Feasting

The feast is behind me, and in the end I believe it was questionable as a source of knowledge about the 18th century, but a roaring triumph as an enjoyable oddity.

The menu:

Breads

Oaten 'Schulbrot' and Kastenbrötchen, from the bakery

French Bread, homemade

Wiggs Seed Cakes, homemade, sugary and with caraway seeds

Dutch/Lower Rhenish honey cake

served with Butter and Apricot marmalade

Drinks

Switchel

(drink of water, honey, powdered ginger and apple cider vinegar)

Sparkling mineral water

Apple juice

Rhenish white wine

Pale beer

Hefeweizen beer

Tea

Coffee

Accompaniment

Toasted American pecan nuts

Grapes, red and green

Purple plums

Apples

Apple chips

Dried apple rings, store-bought and homemade

Clementine

Walnuts, in the shell

Main Course

Roast Chicken with Bread Stuffing and marjoram, thyme and rosemary sauce

Rice, steamed

Lettuce and Spinach Salad with vinaigrette

Baked pumpkin, Rondini and Hokkaido

Cornbread, homemade

Dessert

Pfeffernüsse

Spekulatius

Nürnberger Lebkuchen

Dominosteine

(German Christmas delicacies)

The wiggs seed cakes and the cornbread were too dry, although the former tasted delicious in my opinion, so I will have to introspect about what went wrong. I did notice that the homemade yeasty 'barm' foamed up nicely, probably indicating an active yeast culture, after all my doughs had been made; this partly explains the seed cakes, perhaps. I had read a warning that 'cornmeal' in American Revolution times was a wetter product than the store-bought polenta we have now. At least Mama, kindly, remarked that 'the colour looked good'! By the end of the day, in any case, I was so happily replete that I felt great reluctance to speak of food any more.

The Apple Dumpling, etc.

Yesterday (or, as I'll still call it, today) I woke up when the sky had brightened to the point that I thought was not too grim to awaken to, which was still not superlatively cheerful since it was cloudy and rainy and true autumn weather.

In the U-Bahn — this morning, I think, although the memories of different U-Bahn trips melt together — I read more about the Structure and Evolution of the Stars, which is becoming easier to read again and is addressing radioactive processes. There were laconic paragraphs about the phase of a star in which hydrogen transforms into helium and then one by one into the heavier elements, as neutrinos and gamma rays flit out, which were fascinating. This is, of course, the reason why Earth is populated with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and so many other elements.

I arrived early enough and researched what work to assign to colleagues. But the workload was mildly overwhelming and in the afternoon I had also scheduled a meeting, and altogether I was inwardly grumpy. In the afternoon I announced that I would be cooking historical food, from Revolutionary-era America and Britain, on Saturday, and instead of one or two polite comments there was a deluge of interest. I felt guilty for distracting my colleagues... But I have the feeling that Saturday will turn out to be an entertaining and worthwhile day.

In the train on the way back home, I finished reading the introductory essay of a Voltaire novel, since I've finished Montesquieu and am now returning to another Enlightenment thinker. It turns out that I may have to read a few entries in the Encyclopedias of his time, because the articles seem much more relevant to public debates than Wikipedia articles of the present day, and Diderot's Encyclopedia has information about daily life in the early 18th century, too. Finally, I went to the organic food store near home and bought pears.

After hewing the lid off of a pumpkin and after pushing in chopped, salted pear spiced with cinnamon where the seeds used to be, I baked that in the oven until it was softened. And I also roasted the seeds with salt and olive oil.

Lastly, I put a camping recipe for an 'apple pudding' to use. I set a pot of water to boil, made a paste with flour and water, cut the core out of a halved red apple, then when the water was boiling, J. helped me by soaking a kitchen towel in the boiling water, lifting it out again, spreading flour over the inside of the towel, and folding the red apple covered with the sticky paste into the cotton cloth. Then I tied it into a bundle with a 'little room to grow.' Then he dropped it into the boiling water with our tongs. This recipe is taken from the YouTube channel Townsends, which I've been watching regularly from the earliest episodes to the newest ever since I read a New Yorker article about it.

Townsends itself is a harbour of tranquillity; the apple dumpling was more chaotic, however. J. and I were both doubled over with giggles as we lifted the pudding out of the cloth at the end of an hour. It was a glutinous spectacle that had a medicinal smell and a bland beige colour, and its texture was like an alien birth or brains; it was bathed in a thin gruel of flour mixed with water, and of course cradled in the wet cloth. With sugar and cinnamon it tasted nicer, but I wouldn't recommend making the dumpling with the expectation of an extremely wonderful flavour. (But I imagine that the medicinal smell and taste came from the cloth that we used; and I should have tied the cloth a little more tightly so that we could have a spheric dumpling instead of a flattened ovoid; and then it might have been more pulchritudinous and appealing in every sense.)

Aside from that, I tried to plan how to construct the 18th-century meal on Saturday, and I lined up the recipes and ingredients for a shopping list already.

In between all of that, I read news on Twitter and the Guardian and Jezebel as usual, and tried one ballet stretching video, since Monday's ballet class didn't take place.

Westward to Brandenburg and the Revolution

It has been a quiet Sunday. The blue sky shone through the gaps in the apartment buildings, tree leaves were bright in dark summer green and saffron-yellow and even brown, and sunlight poured over almost everything. Walking along cobblestones or setts, acorns can tumble with your steps, and tiny pot lids of acorn husk are lodged here and there. Mama and I took the train to the southwestern periphery of Berlin to visit my uncle and we sat out in the garden with the other guests, amongst the pines and cotoneaster and grass and rosebushes, with its suggestion of the seaside with the rustling breeze. One or two mosquitoes drank from us while we drank more politely from cups of coffee or water, ate rolls with apricot marmalade or cheese, spread butter on Lower Rhenish honey cake with candied sugar as well as lemon and orange peel, and had apple cake fresh from the oven. A crow croaked in the canopies and magpies, apparently, gathered nearby; and a wedge of migrating birds pulled by.

At home I spent my time on the computer and watched videos about day-to-day life in colonial America of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It feels relevant to the French Revolution research that I am tugging away at, alongside the database job I do, and it overlaps a little with the letters by Montesquieu that I read in the U-Bahn.  (Which in turn overlap with the modern history of Middle Eastern progressive rulers, movements and proponents that I am also reading the U-Bahn in a pathetic attempt not to let my interrupted studies go to waste.) I had despaired of this ever happening, but I am beginning to understand the French revolutionaries' point of view better and better. Amongst other things I'm beginning to imagine that the influential aristocrats were like the worst magnates in the United States, and that the Church was like the retrograde leadership of modern-day 'Christian' movements that prefer to regulate the morals of others according to long irrelevant and disproven misconceptions, and that magnates and churchmen had the same effect on government policy and public discourse; and at once I feel a lot of sympathy. Also, Montesquieu seems to be reeling off a string of commonplaces in his writings when he describes by what principles one should govern, what freedom of and from religion should be, etc. But back then they were not as evident as they are now, I think. Even now they are not so evident; and the relevance to present-day political discourse is so immediate that it is difficult, I think, to be bored or to fail to be engrossed by most of the subjects that he brings up. I still think that admiring Rome for anything is a huge mistake and that its republics were probably a crock; but since Montesquieu doesn't go in depth into Roman history in them, that doesn't bother me so much in his Letters.