This weekend is a better weekend for 'time travel.' It's a long weekend because of Easter, of course, and therefore I'm not spending a quarter of my waking hours doing housework before plunging back into work.
I started out the day putting on another button-up blouse that I don't wear often. The shade of pale brown underneath my face makes me look like I've had two hours of sleep, but then I find Edwardian fashion was not wildly flattering in general. I'd thought about putting my hair into the strange bumpy halo around the face with a knob of a bun on top, to suit the style of the time, but I was just too vain to risk it. That said, I could have gone to Kadewe and splurged on a massive hat with feathers, to add a dashing My Fair Lady element to the dour governess hairstyle.
My mother was reading the Berliner Zeitung newspaper in the living room and was quite pleased that someone else was finally awake to add entertainment to the morning. Since the brothers were still asleep, and I'd wanted fresh berries for breakfast, I changed into a woollen skirt, a corduroy jacket and a red crocheted scarf, however, and went to the market to buy groceries.
A 1902 Trip to the Market
Bushes and small trees are beginning to burst, head to toe, into spring flowers in white and yellow. Winter hellebores are thriving in the shade this late into springtime and the chionodoxa are still out in force, but even the later-blooming tulips are beginning to heighten and their petals are growing from green to warmer hues, and the daffodils have fully emerged in time for Easter. The sky was pouring blue again, and yet again fluffy white clouds spoke of May, June — lazy summer days with airplanes carrying travellers to their holidays far above the trees.
This time I went to a market that reminded me of the Viktualienmarkt in Munich. Produce stalls were partly also locally sourced and organic: they carried ramps (Bärlauch), parsley, radishes, red beets, red cabbages, radicchio, varieties of potatoes, carrots, turnips, leeks, orange Hokkaido pumpkins, and kale that were locally grown. The ones that were not so local carried blueberries, strawberries, oranges, plums, and lemons; as well as green beans, peas that looked like mangetout, garlic, etc. There were clothing stalls, a stall with knitting yarn, a jewellery stand, decorated doughnuts, at least two places with flatbreads and savory pastries, etc., and the flower stands were very tastefully arranged with moss and entwined twigs in springlike arrangements that suggested birds' nests.
I'd felt a not entirely pleasant sense of almost literally going back in time when I was walking to the market earlier and the façade of a late-19th or early 20th-century residential apartment building gleamed in the sunlight. The market and the architecture represented a type of respectable traditionalism of the educated classes — there was an intellectual appeal in the approaches of the stall owners to displaying their wares as well as speaking with the shoppers, as well as a pecuniary and culinary appeal; and the buildings weren't just very solidly and well built, but were partly also showcases of more or less over-the-top sociocultural flourishes — that in my view held late traces of the German imperial time. Even the FFP2 mask that was tucked in my jacket pocket didn't dispel the feeling of atavism. There are quite a lot of reasons why I wouldn't literally want to live in 1902.
Anyway, I ended up finding everything I wanted in the way of groceries, and it was nice to see people chatting who knew each other.
Breakfast
When I returned home, the brothers were awake. We started breakfast with the bread buns that Mama had bought from the bakery. To go with them, I served the blueberries and strawberries I'd bought. Then I unwisely tried to whisk whipping cream by hand. I kept whisking and whisking, and my puny efforts were delaying the breakfast .... In the end, Ge. helped. After that, with an atypical touch of decadence, I cut a croissant in half lengthwise, and layered in the whipping cream, pieces of strawberry, and blueberries. When I ate it at last, I felt very French — also, like I was going to be in trouble with the Revolutionary Tribunal for eating too much cake. Mama did comment that technically it was not Easter yet! I was a very bad Catholic.
My activities after breakfast were more sober-minded. I played a movement of Beethoven's Sonata appassionnata as well as ragtime pieces on the piano, and quickly checked my messages on the internet so that I wouldn't accidentally be rude during my experiment by ignoring colleagues. I aired my room. And I read an article in the Berliner Zeitung and started a quite good article about the latest former American president in the New York Review of Books.
Then I scrubbed the kitchen floor. I adapted a technique that I'd seen the British historian Ruth Goodman use in the television series Edwardian Farm, during my YouTube session last evening. First I swept the floor with a broom before applying the technique. Then I mentally separated the floor into squares/rectangles. Each square I scrubbed thoroughly with warm soapy water — I used a rough rag instead of a brush — then wiped clean with regular water, and finally went over again with a dry rag.
(I was quite won over by the technique. Because of the dry rag, I didn't need to play the fun-but-risky game of 'the wet floor is lava' when navigating the room. Also, the floor was shockingly clean afterward.)
'Dinner' and Tea
For lunch/'dinner' and teatime I prepared an afternoon tea:
Eggs, boiled
Scones, freshly baked
Homemade lemon curd
Whipping cream and berries left over from breakfast
Herbal tea
French breakfast tea
Then Mama played a game of parcheesi with me. Last evening I'd rummaged in Ge.'s room to find our board games; after last week's internet-less, TV-less, radio-less disaster I'd vowed, somewhat like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, never to go bored again.
It was quite enjoyable; we rediscovered/reinvented the rules as we went along, without disputing them. The siblings and I used to play it when visiting our Aunt N., I think, so it had been over one and a half decades since we'd played.
But when Mama casually said, 'All right, we can apply that rule in the second round,' during the game, I internally squeaked with horror. At the end I carefully asked her whether she did want a second round, since she showed every symptom of being ready to move on; it turns out that we were both quite satisfied with what we'd had.
*
I'd also thought of a sewing project. While I have tons of holey socks, the prospects of fixing them are dim because the yarn supply is running out. Besides the last time I spent time darning socks, the (literally and figuratively) darned parts were worn through the first time I wore the socks again. It was like a Sisyphus effect with super-speedy boulders. Instead I tried to repair a skirt by hand-stitching a patch onto a hole. It went reasonably well and, ingloriously or not, at least I finished it.
Supper
For supper, I prepared a vegetable broth according to a Dr. Oetker recipe: onion, a hint of garlic, white cabbage, carrots, a leek, parsnips in lieu of parsley root, celeriac and parsley.
There was a ton of white cabbage left over, because I only needed 200 grams of a whole head. So I also made a kind of milky casserole or gratin: salt, pepper and herbs on the bottom, a few slices of garlic, maybe three tablespoons of butter, and then thinly sliced or coarsely julienned or chopped onion, white cabbage, leek, savoy cabbage, and celery stalk, then more salt, pepper and herbs, fresh parsley, and milk mixed with water so that it wouldn't burn. (Unfortunately, half the white cabbage and half the savoy cabbage are still left over, and the savoy cabbage hasn't taken well to the warming springtime temperatures so time is pressing.)
In the end I didn't make pommes duchesse or any of the other accompaniments to the supper that I'd been planning. It would have been too exhausting and I doubt the others would have had enough of an appetite. I just toasted a leftover bread bun from breakfast and sliced it into four pieces, and we ate it with the soup and the casserole. The casserole turned out to be very, very beige; all the colour had leached out of the vegetables. Perhaps I should make it again on Halloween as a Ghost Vegetable Casserole.
As a dessert, we had leftover cookies from the afternoon tea, and roasted chicory coffee, and I finished the whipping cream left over from breakfast. I found out yesterday that substitute coffee is still period-appropriate, since it was recommended in a 1902 cookbook's recipe as a child-friendly swap-in for regular coffee. The old cookbooks I'm finding online are pretty fabulous, incidentally — although the nutritional advice in them is partly hair-raisingly terrible.
After clearing the table a little together with Mama, I read bits of books again and finished knitting a row in my scarf and reached the end of a second article in the New York Review of Books. Then I switched over to the 21st century at a little past 11 p.m.
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