A Saturday in '1905'

For once in my life, I woke up before 8 a.m. Therefore I spent time wiping down the countertops in the kitchen and taking out the compost, as well as assembling the batter for a pound cake (to be eaten at tea time) and putting it in the oven.

We had a nice communal breakfast once everyone was awake: coffee and bread rolls and radishes and parsley and cheese and marmalade. There was also ham; J. ate it sanguinely, but I decided it would be best not to consume it at this point in its 'life cycle.' I put the sprig of parsley with the radishes under the impression that upper-middle-class Englishmen during the Edwardian period used parsley to decorate everything.

Then I went to the Turkish street market again, which was as lively as last time. Tulips in bold kindergarten-room colours are growing everywhere along the streets on the way to the market, cheerful and welcoming. Adult leaves in miniature are beginning to spread greenly on the lilacs, maples, and alders; and there were crinkly little leaves on the horse chestnut trees. Many well-grown maple trees are still 'sprinkling' their golden-censer-like flowers into the air as they did last week; it reminds me of the red maple tree that grew on the family's property in Canada and where I took a twig or two (along with tulips and a purple 'silver dollar' flower) to my grandfather in hospital when it was his birthday. But a few trees and bushes are still bare.

At the market I bought two smaller Persian cucumbers, three oranges, and eight pale red apples, but there were a few things I didn't see in the market. So I set off to a Mediterranean import shop nearby in search of white wine; a saleslady recommended a German 'Weißer Burgunder' from the Mosel region as a wine that would pair well with asparagus.

Then I went to the organic food shop that I've mentioned before (I think), the one with the air of having been ensconced in the street for at least four decades: an elegant dark green cloth awning, baskets woven of branches with seasonal produce at the sidewalk, and indoors a long wooden counter. There I found raspberries and whipping cream, a piece of poppyseed cake, and fennel bulbs. But the asparagus was eye-wateringly expensive — over 7 Euros for a little 500 g bundle — so I didn't get it.

Lastly, I went to the newspaper kiosk.

*

I've had a long-running one-sided feud against Die Zeit but was going to buy it anyway. Yet when I saw in the kiosk that one issue cost 5.70 €, I went with Die Welt instead. I'd never read it before and wanted to see what it was like. It was amusing to see the election of the Green Party described as the first stage of a horrifying dystopia — the newspaper is politically aligned to centre-right parties in Germany; and I hopped with rage when I read the relentless whining about anti-coronavirus measures by the people who seemingly in every real financial metric are affected least.

*

Lunch:

Macaroni and cheese

Salad

a plate with cucumber and tomato cut into flowers, flower stems and leaves, and grasses

(thanks to YouTube tutorials I'd watched last week)

Pommes duchesse

I think I never want to make pommes duchesse again... Hopping around the kitchen while forcing the potato mixture through the piping tube was highly entertaining for the ringside audience, but a little embarrassing for me.

*

Afternoon tea:

Plain scones

Rhubarb compôte

thanks to Mama

Lemon curd

Poppyseed cake

Pound cake

garnished with lemon leaves

Coffee

Tea

thanks to Ge.

***

After we had eaten our fill, I went to my room and — like a typical Edwardian young lady of means — 'took a drawing class.'

For that purpose, I took out The Natural Way to Draw. It is a textbook started by an American art teacher who died young in the 1930s, Kimon Nicolaides, but finished by his students and published by his family.

I read the introduction and part of the first chapter, found a cardboard box and a large piece of wrapping paper and paper clips and pencils, and began practicing contour and gesture sketching for over half an hour.

For the contour sketch I drew a lamp on the desk; the result looked far from good, but it was less horrible than expected. For the gesture sketches, I looked out the window at the sidewalk as dusk fell. It was entertaining sketching (mostly stick figures of) passersby. It was mind-blowing that there are such striking differences in the way in which people walk, run or cycle — and how many different things (shopping bags, backpacks, disposable coffee cups) people carry — once I really look.

As night fell and it felt better to do something else, Ge. helped me start our vinyl record player. It seems pretty state-of-the-art, but I have been pretending that it is an early 'gramophone' for Edwardian-experiment purposes. I listened to classical music while reading and perching on the coal stove for warmth. It was genuinely nice.

Programme — please excuse the laziness of not finding out the KV numbers etc.:

Beethoven: a concerto

performed by Géza Anda and the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin (fabulous recording quality)

Beethoven: 'Spring' sonata for violin and piano

Yehudi Menuhin and Wilhelm Kempff

Mozart: a piano concerto

Ingrid Haebler

*

At 10 p.m. I had to stop because a work task needed to be done. So I left the Edwardian experiment and turned on my laptop.

A Rambling Day in (Imaginary) 1904

This morning I woke up earlier than usual, and prepared to spend another day in Edwardian England, this time in the year 1904.

It began with sweeping and scrubbing the kitchen floor, then took a nicer turn once the brothers were awake and I had a moment to dig out a piano transcription of Edvard Grieg and play the morning part of his Peer Gynt suite, and then we ate breakfast: croissants and bread buns, and coffee.

After that, we walked to the Kreuzberg. It was a pleasant day and not too crowded yet. The grass has grown lusher these past weeks, and is often speckled with starry white daisies and sunny larger dandelion flowers. I also like seeing the purple leaves and blossoms of red dead nettles, which generally accompany dandelion flowers in my mind. Pink, white and yellow blossoms are emerging on trees large and small, especially on the forsythia bushes; and a green haze hovered amongst the trees that are growing their first leaves.

The waterfall has been turned on again in the Viktoriapark, the danger of frost and burst plumbing apparently being past. That said, the brush is still very thin and so dumpsters, garbage and other things that will be screened by leaves later are still evident.

'Edwardian' Marketing

I left my mother and two of my brothers at the edge of the park, and walked on to visit a market hall in the Bergmannstraße.

Past times I've been on that street have made me think it's not my favourite part of Berlin. I feel a bit like I need to eat kale, wear home-knitted sweaters, buy organic, scold 'lowly' service workers for not doing things Properly, over-parent a child according to half-a-dozen different schools from Montessori to Rudolf Steiner, and preferably free Tibet every time I'm there. Not that most of these things are wrong per se, it's just that put together they're a little much for me. But I appreciate what it was like before a lot more, now that I've experienced what it's like during the social distancing era, which is more uncanny and with fewer people.

When I entered the hall, a grey-haired man in an ex-rocker outfit of black leather jacket and skinny pants was holding out a cup at the entrance and asking for money, as shoppers pushed through the narrow entrance of double doors — one side a wheelchair ramp, the other a low set of steps. After the antechamber with its hand disinfectant dispenser and mask warning, we reached the white-walled, much more spacious hall itself.

A florist's stand is at the entrance, and bristly globe thistles in foggy bluish-purple greeted our eyes. So did a fluorescent security-vested young man who was ensuring that the rules were being respected; for example, nobody was supposed to leave through this entrance, so that foot traffic was circulating and no jams of people were causing virus hazards.

There was a newspaper stand that I wanted but forgot to get back to. (Since newspapers seem the most exciting form of entertainment in the Edwardian Age and it's a bit of a pain in the neck to force myself not even to listen to the TV news.) And deli stands with Middle Eastern food — olives and that kind of thing — and cheeses and meats, bakeries. I mostly ignored the shelves of wines, delicious-looking jarred French specialities from mayonnaise and capers to various confits of different meats, pistachio biscuits and teas and pastel-colored bonbons.

Instead I zeroed in on a fruit and vegetable stand, and began trying to work through my shopping list. 

Large lemons with leaves to match imported from Italy and little orange Hokkaido pumpkins from Germany were grouped amongst the latticed plastic bins; honeydew melons and cantaloupes were there too. Then there were leeks, tomatoes (green and red) of which a few were a ribbed heirloom form, thick single white asparagus stems and green asparagus bundles that have become much cheaper since last week apparently, and cucumbers. Then artichoke heads and radishes, ramps presumably culled from the forests near Berlin, fresh dill and basil, chicory, garlic... In terms of fruit, raspberries and blueberries and strawberries, oranges ... the list goes on. I felt a bit nervous adjusting to the indoors market environment, which does sound silly when I write it down, so I forgot to buy a few things.

After I reemerged onto the street, I crossed off everything I already had and then dropped into a grocery store across the street. Outside it had tubs of strawberries for 1.99 Euros from Greece, and I had to wonder who was paying for that low price, and remembered a terrible news story where a strawberry farmer had shot his underpaid workers ... and yet I got one tub, hoping that these had been picked under less gruesome circumstances.

Indoors, beans, leeks, celery, lettuces, cauliflower, etc. were piled up in plastic bins, and I found most of the other ingredients that I needed. Everything was tucked into a fairly compact space, reminding me I think of low-ceilinged stores in old brick buildings in downtown Victoria back in Canada. It was happy and boisterous as one of the employees — a lady in a headscarf — was tending to a little girl while organizing the parsley... What struck me most in the shelves was the Turkish delight selection. I had to remind myself that I wasn't sure how often Turkish delight was eaten in the UK in 1904...

Anyway, hiking the steep terrain of the Viktoriapark with the vegetables and fruit hanging from my arm was a chore, so I decided to sit down for a moment before proceeding, like a Victorian nursemaid in Kensington Gardens. Altogether the kitchen floor scrubbing earlier in the day had also felt like a(n admittedly gratuitous) Cinderella cos-play.

I did appreciate the food more because of the distance and effort of fetching it, and it put me more in touch with the labour that goes into producing and shipping food before it lands on the table. ... Next week I plan to go to a nearby market again, however.

***

Academics and Tea

When I arrived home, Mama, Ge., and J. soon gathered in the corner room, looking over a theological paper that Mama had written for university.

In the paper she explored different hymns, Christmas carols, and other songs in the Christian tradition, to gather popular attitudes toward questions of theodicy (the source and purpose of evil in the world) and of free will.

As usual when we read over her university essays, we picked apart most sentences and aimed for the utmost clarity. The sentences felt shorter than usual, which is probably why — despite a running family joke — Ge. for once backed off on the commas and didn't request that we add more comma-separated clauses on every page.

We were drinking green tea and the French breakfast tea that most of us love (I like most teas, so feel more neutral on the question). I also fetched out the chocolate fudge that I had made earlier in the week as a snack. Fudge was apparently popular amongst college girls in the early 1900s, at least in the US, which is why it felt proper. But I didn't really have time to cook the dinner.

I did prepare an afternoon tea, unfortunately popping out often from the essay discussion and popping back in again always at least half a page behind everyone else, inconveniently reading and making comments on something that had already been corrected...

In the end, the afternoon tea was served very late, at 6 p.m.:

Leftover breakfast bread buns and pumpernickel

Assortment of toppings: Cucumber, radishes, celery, boiled egg, parsley, thin smoked ham, cheese

Scones, with and without raisins

Lemon curd and whipping cream

Strawberries

Leftover chocolate fudge.

Then we finished looking over Mama's essay.

Miniature Supper

Finally, for supper I cooked a potato soup: potatoes, chicken stock (psst bouillon powder), onions, parsley and a little butter.

In addition I made an arrowroot blancmange of milk, egg and arrowroot powder, with a little lemon curd stirred in for flavour. But it still hadn't set properly the last time I checked and therefore hasn't been eaten. (I have a huge soft spot for arrowroot because it's mentioned in Jane Austen's Emma. It still seems to have been a popular ingredient when people were cooking food for sick people, a hundred years later.)

Altogether, my menus are half as large as the ones suggested in cookbooks from the early 1900s, and yet we still often have food left over ... It does make me worry, because I don't want to waste anything.

After Supper

To unwind, I hopped onto the warm coal stove in the corner room and read more of the Apartheid essays book. The latest essay just described South Africa's apartheid government being excluded from Olympic Games in the 60s and 70s for its incredibly racist sports practices (it was a big deal that Maori cricketers were allowed to represent New Zealand in a tour in South Africa...).

Besides I read another page or so of an Irish women's fiction book (I'm omitting the title so as not to malign an author or their efforts directly) that I am wrestling with at present. I see that it's partly very well written; especially the first chapter was more disciplined. But then there are passages like this one that tempt me to slam shut the book:

When I summon my eldest stepdaughter to mind now I see a selfie, a distillation, an expression of joy that makes her look so like her father I am haunted at the thought of her inner life. She seems a more exquisite thing than I, better formed and more protected.

Anyway, I also read more of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which provided great literary relief after the other book.

Besides I read Beatrix Potter's Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. The Tale of Peter Rabbit appeared in 1902 or thereabouts, so I've taken this as an excuse to read her books again. I think I found Peter Rabbit's story too strict when I was a child, and it turns out that Squirrel Nutkin is entirely new to me. The pictures are really fabulous; they make me feel calm and happy just looking at them.

Bertrand Russell also wrote his Principia Mathematica around this time, and being a Russell fan I wanted to give it a try; but I wasn't able to find it in our home library. Émile Zola also died in the early 1900s, so I presumed that an Edwardian person in 1904 might try to read his backlist and I could try to do the same. But the thought of adding Germinal (which I started because it was prescribed reading for a history course at UBC, but never finished) to my mountainous to-be-read pile was too daunting.

As for non-reading historical occupations, I cut my finger during my supper preparations and had daubed blood on my shirt by accident before I noticed what had happened. So I had an excuse to bandage my finger and not to hand-wash more dishes or to keep mending the pyjama trousers I'd started to mend last week... What. a. pity!

P.S.: My small obsession with my fashion magazine subscription continues; the samples are interesting to me, and the very sparse texts that intersperse the fashion shoots and thinly veiled advertisements are helping me gather knowledge related to work (without traumatizing me by being too work-related).

A Weekend in 1902

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:

Sandwiches, cucumber, radish, and thin parsley stems,

seasoned with salt and pepper

(kept fresh underneath an overturned bowl)

Eggs, boiled

Scones, freshly baked

Homemade lemon curd

Whipping cream and berries left over from breakfast

Stem-ginger shortbread cookies, toffee and pecan cookies, and chocolate-coated oat cookies

(store-bought)

Espresso

(anachronism, and made from instant crystals; a stand-in for coffee)

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.