Originally Irish (Apple) Pancakes

This recipe is adapted from Biddy White Lennon.

Pancakes are hearty and everyone seems to likes them! They are also energy-efficient to cook; and the apples I cadged from an allotment garden.

A gardener's basket with apples and pear quinces
August 2023, photograph by the author
(Any non-commercial use permitted.)

🌿Environment Alert: Butter (although I adore it) is one of the foodstuffs with the highest greenhouse gas footprints there is. So it's best to experiment with other delicious cooking fats.🌿

• 2 medium eggs
• 110 g flour
• 125 ml milk
• 125 ml water
• 1 pinch salt (if butter not salted)
• Butter for frying
• Thinly sliced apples

1. Prepare a traditional crêpe batter from the first five ingredients.

👉Tip: as my sister's and my French teacher told us in the early 2000s, it's good to mix together the eggs and flour first.

2. Let stand for at least 10 minutes.

3. Then add a ladleful of the batter to the pan when the butter is sizzling.

4. Sprinkle the thinly sliced apple over the batter before the batter is firm. (The thinner the apple is the better: otherwise, you'll have a hard time flipping the pancakes without destroying them.)

5. Fry golden-brown on both sides.

Experiments ⚛

• I experimented with sprinkling vanilla sugar over the finished pancake: tasty, but again it will widen the carbon footprint.
• Julienned plums are also tasty fried into the batter, but they left caramelized residue on the frying pan.

Cowslip Wine

An old-fashioned flower that has appeared this March in a few Berlin allotment gardens, and below the tracks of a railroad that was built in the 19th century through my neighbourhood, is the cowslip (Primula veris).

Related to the primrose, the cowslip's leaves are wrinkly, and its pale yellow flowers are arranged like old-fashioned keys on a key ring.

"Tuft of Cowslips" (1526) by Albrecht Dürer
From Wikipedia

Wikipedia reveals that the leaves are also edible in salads. But it's mainly the flowers and their use in cowslip wine that are familiar to me from literature. — Although I've never tried drinking or producing the wine myself.

The website Old Timey Winey has a feasible-looking recipe for brewing the flowers with water, sugar and yeast, at the end of their lovely article here. I'd love to try it! But the chances I can lay hands on all the supplies — a 12-litre wine barrel, or 475 grams of cowslip blossoms — are low.

Steamed White Cabbage with Pepper and Juniper

Green Vegetables Keep you Fit
Poster by the New Zealand Department for Health, 1950s
Found on Wikimedia Commons

Ingredients

1/2 head of white cabbage, larger than a grapefruit; chopped

1 tbsp olive oil

3 peppercorns

3 dried juniper berries

water

Still life with cabbage, celery, grapes and game
1666, by Peter van Boucle (1610-1673)
Found on Wikimedia Commons

Method

In a pot, sauté the cabbage lightly in the olive oil and seasoning, trying to coat the leaves and make them a little translucent, no more than 5 minutes.

Pour water just to the top of the cabbage.

Bring to a boil.

After it has boiled 1 minute, place the pot in a heating box or (if you are happy to wash the tea cozy right afterward to get rid of any cabbage scent) put it underneath a tea cozy for 1 hour. Bring to a boil again just before eating.

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Tips

1. If you don't have a heating box or a tea cozy, keep simmering until tender enough for a fork to pierce all the way through the largest piece.

2. Generally the advice for boiling cabbage is not to overdo it, as this increases the risk of flatulence after eating it. 

***

Can be served with sausages, if you eat meat. If not, it would probably be nice to eat in a modified bubble & squeak with potatoes.

Cooking a Baroque Omelette

For lunch I tried a Baroque period recipe for mini-omelettes.

Michael Barczyk published the German-language book Essen und Trinken Im Barock ("Eating and Drinking in the Baroque Period") in 1981. It concentrates especially on Upper Swabia, a region in eastern Germany, and gives a cross-section of the food eaten by the social classes of the time.

"Colourful fowl" (1882)
by Carl Jutz
Found on Wikimedia Commons

His Eierflädlein recipe was presumably cooked for the middle class, as eggs were a precious commodity. I served them with a spinach soup.

*

Eierflädlein (adapted, makes 4 mini-omelettes)

1 level teaspoon flour

4 eggs

2 teaspoons milk

Butter for frying

1. Beat together the ingredients.
2. Melt butter in a pan until it sizzles. Pour in 1 ladleful of the egg mixture.
3. Fry until the omelette is almost set.
4. Roll it up and transfer to a serving plate, and repeat with the next ladleful.

***

"Eat these every day"
American World-War-II-era poster from the Work Projects Administration  (1941-1943)
Found on Wikimedia Commons

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Environmental impact of eggs

Eggs have a lower CO2 equivalent footprint than white or red meat. However, a 2014 article in the journal Poultry Science notes that the chicken feed required for egg production is still resource-intensive:

Eggs represent a relatively low-carbon supply of animal protein, but their production is heavily dependent on cereals and soy
— Taylor, R C et al. “The greenhouse emissions footprint of free-range eggs.” Poultry Science vol. 93,1 (2014): 231-7. doi:10.3382/ps.2013-03489

During World War II, fresh eggs were rationed in the United Kingdom: 1 egg per person per week with exceptions for children, pregnant women, and some invalids. It was more common to consume them dried, powdered, and imported from the United States.

*

Sources

"Rationing in the United Kingdom" [Wikipedia]

"The Supersizers Go...Wartime" BBC: 2008

Sick Day: Arrowroot Pudding

Ingredients 

1/2 litre milk

3 tbsp arrowroot powder

2 tsp sugar

Optional toppings: green apple, nutmeg, date syrup, and/or Ovaltine drink powder

Instructions: Please find them from a cook on YouTube here.

Image from page 137 of "Diet in illness and convalescence" (1899)
Author: Alice Worthington Winthrop
Published in New York/London: Harper & Brothers
Found on Flickr: Internet Archive Book Images

***

When I woke up this morning with a sore throat, I followed the example of Britons in the Regency and Victorian periods, cooking an arrowroot pudding.

 (Arrowroot is mentioned in Jane Austen's Emma)

Arrowroot has been tricky to get right. The key is not to let the milk boil before the arrowroot powder is added. Besides it is necessary to wait for the pudding to thicken, stirring until it reaches a thick and glossy consistency like vanilla pudding.

I ate the pudding warm, after fifteen minutes or so in the hay box, instead of letting it set.

***

Sources:

How to make Arrowroot powder pudding ||Simple Recipes [YouTube] December 11, 2020.

"Arrowroot" [Wikipedia]

"Arrow-root Blanc-mange." in Three meals a day : a choice collection of valuable and reliable recipes in all classes of cookery and a comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home including toilet, health and housekeeping departments, cooking recipes, menus, table etiquette, and a thousand facts worth knowing by Maud C. Cooke. 1902. [Archive.org]

Concord Grapes on the Day of German Reunification

Concord grapes from a Berlin allotment garden, October 2022
Photograph by the author
Public domain

I found apples, two damson plums, and a few bunches of purple Concord grapes at the allotment gardens this afternoon. A lot of the baskets were empty, presumably ransacked nicely by city-dwellers out on a walk on our Day of German Reunification holiday. But the gardener who grew the grapes was sitting in her garden, so we had a chat over her fence and I was able to say thank you.

*

CONCORD GRAPES grew in private gardens around the city where I grew up in Canada. We also bought them (grown in the Okanagan Valley, most likely) on rare occasions from chain grocery stores during the peak season.

They are also native to North America. So I was surprised to find them in a Berlin garden. Ephraim Wales Bull developed them in Massachusetts in 1849.

Their flavour is akin to the artificial grape flavouring in lollipops, fruit gums, and all kinds of other candy. But they are also used to make jellies and grape juice.

*

I've mostly eaten them fresh; I haven't tried to bake or cook them. But Martha Stewart's website has a whole set of Concord grape recipes, from mulled grape juice for Halloween to a grape and lavender sorbet.

Photographic plate of Concord grape
from the book The Grapes of New York, 1908
by Ulysses Prentiss Hedrick
Found on Wikipedia

Source: "Concord grape" [Wikipedia]

A Pot of Nettle Tea

Nettles grow everywhere in Berlin.

They like nitrogen and phosphate-rich soil. But it is not a pleasure to run into them. Their leaves release formic acid and cause stinging, round welts to appear on the skin, which is of course why they are known as "stinging nettles."

One learns to handle them with care and to enjoy their culinary benefits.

Morgan M.873, f.90r
Manuscript in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York City,
Written 1350-1375
Found in Wikimedia Commons

The nettle leaves are often used for tea, when they have not sprouted flowers. Their flavour is reminiscent of raw green beans, however, although their tea already has a pleasant green colour and vitamins (C, B₂, B₅, E, K₁).

So I've taken a leaf from the book of German herbal tea manufacturers, adding fennel seeds to the nettle tea to offer a better flavour.

For this tea recipe I foraged the nettle leaves from my uncle's garden in Brandenburg. From my perspective, almost any chemical or biological substance might be in the soil in Berlin, owing to centuries of industry, warfare, and human and animal waste. Outside of dedicated garden areas, it might be best not to eat city foliage.

*

Recipe

1 big sprig of nettle (~3 tablespoons worth of leaves)

1/2 tsp fennel seeds

5 cups of water

Bring the water to a boil and pour over the nettle and fennel seeds.

Steep for 5 to 8 minutes.

"The British are encouraged to try new tea on the day"
Photograph attributed to Wikimedia Commons user Mg123$, 2017
Found on Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0

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Health Warning

After the stinging nettle enters its flowering and seed-setting stages, the leaves develop gritty particles called cystoliths, which can irritate the kidneys and urinary tract.  Cystoliths are made of calcium carbonate, and will not dissolve when boiled. Leaves harvested post-flowering must have their cystoliths broken down by acid, as in the fermentation process.
—"Urtica dioica" (Wikipedia)

***

Sources:

Urtica dioica [Wikipedia]