Sunday in 1707: Winter's Chill and Star Watches

WAKING UP past noon to a pale grey Berlin winter day, it was difficult to regret not getting up earlier. My mother had fetched over the Advent wreath and its red tapered candles to the kitchen, and when I arrived a little coffee was left in the pot but everyone else had already eaten their croissant and returned to their rooms.

Wearing a woollen skirt was a good idea given the chilly temperatures, and wearing stockings with slippers over them too, but the 18th-century-esque attire would probably have been more practical had I thrown a scarf over the thin buttoned shirt and linen blouse that completed the look. Theoretically I should have taken out my bobby pins and tried a different hairstyle, but... meh.

THE FIRST Fall-Winter 2022 delivery (half the usual size) of coal for our stoves is melting away. My brothers and mother have already held several councils about how to lay our hands on more.

I'm abstaining from participating in these councils because I'm keeping my room at Arctic temperatures out of social and environmental principle. Only 2 bricks of coal have been fired this year, although I can also turn on an electric portable heater if I am genuinely suffering.

It turns out that our usual coal supplier is making its compressed bricks of coal available for larger power plants. For private households it is now only offering bags of loose coal lumps that are best stored in the old-fashioned way: dropped through a hatch into a cellar.

So we need an alternative. There are Ikea-esque stores around Berlin that have other sources and can promise to have available — or deliver — e.g. 3 bundles on a Saturday.

The long-term neighbours in this building have been merrily gossiping about all things fuel strategy for months; the tip about the Ikea-esque store comes from one of them. I'll confess to hovering in earshot from the stairwell, and eavesdropping on the latest 'deets,' whenever I catch a few words about coal.

My sister returned from a work trip to California in the afternoon, and my siblings and mother went to pick her up.

In the meantime, I played Lutheran Advent songs and Christmas songs on the harpsichord. In contrast to the Catholic song book, which has a lot of modern compositions, that I'd been using before, the Lutheran song book is has a lot of compositions that are Baroque-era or medieval.

Then I began cooking Baroque food again.

Our dinner was Schupfnudeln, which are delightfully pudgy, dumpling-like pasta. The sauerkraut that went with them was just heated straight from a store-bought jar.

Instead of historically accurate drippings, I fried onions, a parsnip left over from last week's Mesopotamian recipe, and a red pepper, in butter, and then added the pasta in there to get the nice golden-brown crust at the bottom. I'm still trusting John Evelyn here not to have deceived me about the existence of capsicum in 18th-century Europe, although I'm pretty certain a farmer in Swabia would not have eaten it often.

Deviating entirely from the 18th century, I prepared a stock from leftover vegetable cut-offs, added it to the Schupfnudeln water, and dropped in semolina and oyster mushrooms. After I taste-tested it, I added chicken bouillon powder. It was piping hot and the mushroom was a fair, robust ersatz for chicken meat. That said, I'd rather have cooked the vegetables and mushrooms fresh, instead of being too distracted to rescue them from the pantry a week ago when I should have...

When my family took longer to return from the airport, I turned off the oven (I'd also used one or two energy-saving techniques while cooking the meal itself) and began to read more of a 17th/18th century British literature anthology.

For the first time I became properly aware of Muggletonians, one of the English Civil War era splinter groups who were too radical for Oliver Cromwell. The Wikipedia page is a quirky read.

Besides the literary events of 1707, there were these political ones: the Great Northern War, Queen Anne's brutal policies with regard to Ireland, and the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession, for example.

But I'm eager to finish reading the dratted front matter of the anthology, since Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and others are awaiting!

The tea light that I used to read the anthology with was not especially strong and there was much squinting even if the beeswax had a nice fragrance. It would have been a good idea to experiment more with aluminum foil as a light reflector, but it's likely the lantern's position was too draughty.

In terms of technology, I've pretty much given up on not using modern clocks during my 1700s experiments.

But last week I stumbled across the fact that 18th-century Europeans could also tell the time after nightfall using devices called 'nocturnals', with little notches based on the positions of stars.

After the failure of the sun dial I'd prefer, however, to wallow in indolence longer, and not to hand-make the worst nocturnal known to humanity until my ego has recovered a little more. I feel like Toad in Wind in the Willows, only rather than chasing mindlessly after the newest fads, I'm chasing mindlessly after the oldest fads.