Tragedy and Hope in an Original Victory Garden

A few blocks from the old Tempelhof Airport complex in Berlin, I recently stumbled across an old victory garden from the First World War.

It illustrates the dark side of these gardens' history, especially in Germany, and it hopefully explains why I can't make historical references too lightly in this blog.

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The land, beside the train tracks from Südkreuz/Papestraße station up toward the Berlin city centre, was part of extensive lands put aside for the use of the Prussian military. (Before the 1830s, and the advent of the railroad, they had apparently been potato and grain fields.)

Where the gardens stand today, military families ('Angehörige' — I think this means family members, not members of the military directly) from the railway engineers division (Eisenbahnregiment) were encouraged to tend vegetables and fruit after WWI broke out.

One of the paths draws out into a stately, slender green alley that abuts past a hedge on imperial red brick buildings, ex-barracks of the Landwehrinspektion (Home Guard Inspection), in the Northern German Renaissance style. — These buildings are now home to the Epidemiology and Health Reporting unit of the Robert Koch Institute.

So the gardens haven't lost all echoes of Kaiser Wilhelm II's time.

But one building in the Landwehrinspektion complex was used as an SA prison during the early months of Nazi government in 1933. 500 or 2,000 people (accounts vary) are known to have been imprisoned here by the Nazis, including leftwing politicians like Franz Czeminski, and Jewish doctors or businessmen, like Arno Philippsthal. Thirty of them died.

Berlin-Tempelhof RKI Außenstelle General-Pape-Straße*
Photograph attributed to Fridolin F., October 4, 2016
Found in Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0
*This specific part of the buildings was not used as a prison.

A khaki-yellow pillar of concrete and steel, a Schwerbelastungskörper, was built a decade later, experimentally, by Nazi engineers, at the head of the gardens. Nowadays the pillar is half-hidden behind an acacia tree or two, and shrubbery. Although it is not as brutal as the prison, and the pillar was useful after the war for civilian architectural engineering research, it does seem as if French prisoners of war were forced to help build it.

After World War II, the original victory gardens were extended considerably. Military buildings nearby had been damaged by Allied airstrikes, and when the rubble was cleared away, gardens were laid where they had once stood.

In the gardens, a memorial plaque also shows a photograph of the newly tidy grounds being celebrated in 1960.

Like the children — the lawn, the young tree, and the gardens as a whole, were clearly meant to be a new beginning. Now, 60 years later, thanks to those gardeners and their families, who grew so many trees and hedges, the pillar is not nearly as visible any more.

"Festumzug der Gartengemeinschaft um 1960, im Hintergrund der Großbelastungskörper"
English translation: Festive procession of the gardening community circa 1960,
the Load-Bearing Pillar is in the background.
Found on Wikimedia Commons.
CC-BY-SA 3.0, 2.5, 2.0 and 1.0 licenses [sic].

***

Sources:

"1895/97 Berlin Kaserne Landwehrinspektion in norddeutscher Renaissance von Verworn/GBI Herrmann Böhmer General-Pape-Straße 62-66 in 12101 Tempelhof"
[Flickr: Bergfels] Reported date of photograph: September 13, 2018.

"General-Pape-Straße" [Wikipedia]. Retrieved September 25, 2022.

"Eisenbahntruppen", ibid.

"Kasernen General-Pape-Straße"[Landesdenkmalamt Berlin]. Retrieved September 25, 2022.

"Landwehr", Wikipedia. 

"Robert Koch Institute", ibid.

"Robert-Koch-Institut", ibid.

"SA Prison Papestraße"
[Wikimedia Commons: Sargoth] Reported date of photograph: September 11, 2010.

"SA-Gefängnis Papestraße" [Wikipedia]

Other sources linked in blog post itself.

Medlars in Berlin: The Forgotten Fruit

Albanian 2 lek postage stamp, with medlar design (1965)
Found in Wikimedia Commons

In one garden plot at the early 20th-century victory gardens that I discovered in Berlin-Tempelhof yesterday, I spotted a medlar tree.

Medlar and apple quince trees
In the Papestraße allotment gardens, Berlin.
Photograph taken September 24, 2022, by the author.
Public domain

Medlars*, native to the Balkans, grew popular in ancient Greece and Rome. By the 17th and 18th centuries, after appearing in Shakespeare's plays, they became increasingly rare. The Wikipedia article asserts that once the fruit is rotted by winter frosts, it has a "consistency and flavour reminiscent of apple sauce." But it is also an "acquired taste."

*Mispeln

Because medlars have a lifespan of 30 to 60 years, the tree I saw was almost certainly planted after World War II.

It's unlikely I will ever have a chance to cook any medlars. So I can recommend reading recipes from American chef David Lebovitz, Guardian food columnist Tom Hunt, and British chef James Martin, amongst others.

Three Medlars with a Butterfly (circa 1705)
Painting by Adriaen Coorte
Found in Wikimedia Commons

A British website, The Foods of England Project, has helpfully reprinted a 16th-century recipe:

To make a tarte of Medlers

TAke Medlers that be rotten, & straine them then set them on a chafingdish of coales, and beate it in two yolkes of Egges, and let it boil til it be somewhat thick: then season it with synamon, Ginger and Sugar, and lay it in paste.

"Reifende Früchte im Rauhreif"
English translation: Ripening fruits in frost
Photograph attributed to Burkhard Mücke, 2014.
Found on Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

(Judging by David Lebovitz's blog, this Renaissance era cook is recommending a helpful technique to address the fact that these fruits have many seeds. The seeds would be annoying to eat if we didn't sift the pulp.)

***

Sources:

"Medlar" [The Foods of England Project] Glyn Hughes*. Retrieved September 25, 2022.

"Medlar Jelly" [The Foods of England Project] Glyn Hughes. Retrieved September 25, 2022.

"Mespilus germanica", Wikipedia

Other sources linked in blog post itself.

[Update: I originally missed when writing this blog post that Mr. Hughes had died. Condolences to his family and friends.]

Test Kitchen: Ancient Roman Melon Salad

While green-and-black watermelons and elongated yellow cantaloupes are mostly imported from Italy when they reach the shelves of the organic food stores I shop from in Berlin, I still figure they are environmentally sustainable enough for this blog!

When I bought the ingredients, however, I'd failed to account for the fact that the weather in Berlin has become rather too chilly for fruit salad.

(My family is holding off on heating so far. I'm relying on warm sweaters, woollen socks, a sleeping bag, fuzzy slippers and exercise to keep from shivering while I'm sitting down to work and then to waste time on the internet after work.)

***

ARCHAEOLOGIST Dr. Ursula Janssen adapts and discusses cookery from ancient Babylon to the Renaissance on her YouTube channel. (I can also recommend her cookbook Garum.)

Her version of Apicius's pepones et melones — a melon salad — uses soy sauce instead of garum, the notorious Roman fermented fish sauce.

Quick recipe: "Pepones et melones" - Ancient Roman melon salad

[Ursula Janssen - YouTube] July 23, 2022

Despite Berlin's chilly weather, I made her recipe this evening with these measurements.

Spoiler Alert (click and drag after the colon to see the text): The dressing tasted like Chinese rice crackers, which was not the dramatically peculiar flavour I was expecting.

Peasant harvesting melons (ca. 1390 AD)
Taken from the Tacuinum Sanitatis manuscript, fol. 21 recto
Found in Wikimedia Commons

Salad

• ~1 to 2 cups of watermelon, diced
• ~1 to 2 cups of cantaloupe, diced

Dressing

• 1 tsp honey
• 1/2 tsp aceto balsamico
• 1 little splash of soy sauce

*

If you are interested in Apicius's original recipes, a Latin edition is here ; and here is an unreliable (but at least copyright-free) English translation from the 1930s.

***

VII. PEPONES ET MELONES:

Piper, puleium, mel vel passum, liquamen, acetum. interdum et silfi accedit. 

("Pepper, pennyroyal, honey or condensed must, broth and vinegar; once in a while one adds silphium.") SAFETY WARNING: pennyroyal is not considered safe to eat nowadays. You can substitute mint.

Victorian Household Cleaning Tips: Wallpaper and Stale Bread

3435.—To Clean Wall Paper.

If not very dirty, the paper of any room will be much improved by brushing it over in straight lines with a soft broom, covered with a clean, soft cloth; if, however, the paper be much soiled, very stale bread is the best thing to clean it with. Cut a very stale quartern loaf into slices, and, in the lightest manner possible, wipe the paper with it in a downward direction. Clean about a yard at a time, all one way, and be careful to leave no marks. By this process very dirty paper-hangings may be made to look almost like new.

Isabella Beeton, The book of household management (1899) p. 1532 [found on Archive.org]

In our turn-of-the-19th/20th-century Berlin apartment, the whitewash on the wall behind our kitchen sink is no longer especially white. But it turns out that a housekeeping trick printed during the years where it was built is still effective, even if it's meant for wallpaper instead of whitewash.

Taking a plain wheat baguette that has been desiccating for the past month and cutting off a slice — the slice crumbled to pieces, but at least the pieces had flat surfaces — and scraping it over, I did manage to remove much of the accumulated dirt without damaging the paint.

It's a low-waste, environmentally friendly way to clean.

"Artichoke" wallpaper
designed by John Henry Dearle for Morris & Co.
pre-1900
Found on Wikipedia

September Harvest: Three Ways to Use (Damson) Plums

 

"Natura statică cu fructe"
Painting by Constantin Daniel Stahi (1915)
Found on Wikimedia Commons

It is nearing the end of the damson plum season in the allotment gardens, although many species of apples and pears and grapes are flourishing.

My mother used to battle tubs full of plums to be eaten raw (a few of these we brought along on visits to her father-in-law) and cooked into plum compôte, from fruit trees in our old garden in Canada.

Leftover plums always fell to the ground, where they were eaten away in dark dots and tunnels by wasps. Mowing the lawn was a little riskier, and the plum pits would ping against the machine.

Baking a plum sheet cake — yeast dough topped with rows of dark plum slices, flavoured with their faint bitter edge — is a family favourite in years when we get around to it.

Still Life with Plums (1666)
by Pierre Dupuis
Found on Wikimedia Commons

ONE YEAR in Germany I also made Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe for plum sorbet, published on the website of the Guardian. It is worthwhile making, although roasting the plums and freezing will of course use more energy. I made it without an ice cream machine, but whizzed it up in the food processor after freezing to make the texture easier to eat.

2kg plums, halved and stoned

2 vanilla pods

100g caster sugar, or more depending on the sweetness of the plums

The plums are roasted with the vanilla pods, sugar and water, and the rest of the instructions are here.

Source: "Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's plum recipes" [Guardian]
August 7, 2010

Getting Started with Energy-Efficient Cooking: A Hay Box

By the end of World War I, cooking boxes or hay boxes became an implement of war on the Home Front, of sorts, as they were used to compensate for fuel shortages not just in the UK and the US but also, for example, in Germany. You boil the food, then let it finish cooking in an insulated box. The gas, oil, or coal you'd otherwise use for cooking the food after it's been brought to a boil, is saved.

Mrs. C.S. Peel published the second edition of her "Daily Mail" cookery book in 1919. It describes an elaborate box made of a wood packing case, lined with newspaper. Over the paper, flannel or felt is "neatly" nailed on. Balls of newspaper cushion the bottom of the box, 3 inches deep, and the pot or lidded casserole dish is put in. More balls of newspaper are crowded in until the pot is surrounded.

These weren't called only 'Cooking Boxes' but also 'hay boxes', because often wooden crates stuffed with hay were used. You will see this variant in the British television series Wartime Farm or Further Back in Time for Dinner. Mrs. Peel included instructions for it right after the instructions for the newspaper ball variant. In World War I and its immediate aftermath, it's also what the subjects of the Kaiser were using.

Construction of a hay box cooker
Photograph by Marie Goslich. Taken between 1914-1918.
Found on Wikimedia Commons.

Because I didn't have a wooden box, I made my own cooking receptacle with a cardboard box and the balls of newspaper. Regular folded newspapers, pot holders, and tea towels are layered on top until I'm satisfied the heat can't escape much.

But while I air the box for several days after each use, the cardboard box is damaged by the steam of the food. It also absorbs food smells. So it needs to be renewed periodically.

*

Real hayboxes are an art form.

Like this beautiful 'marmite' prepared by family members presumably for a Norwegian soldier in the 1940s and now displayed in the Museum of the Bretagne:

Marmite norvégienne - Musée de Bretagne*
1940-44, Found on Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Or like this Ikea-esque blue Danish creation:

Danish Design Haybox - Høkasse (2009)
Author & date of photograph: Vibeke Danmark, 2013
Found on Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-3.0 license)

* The museum added this description of the Norwegian box in Wikimedia Commons: 'Of family manufacture, this Norwegian cooker box is made of an osier receptacle lined with varying pieces of upholstery fabric [moquette] and cloths. Two pillows could be slipped inside to improve the thermal insulation at the top of this kitchen utensil in which cooking was done. The osier lid is lined with a piece of upholstery fabric [moquette]. The whole is draped in a 'bag' of upholstery fabric whose four flaps fold over the lid.' (My translation; it might be inaccurate.)

*

The best pans to use in a haybox are casseroles, block tin, or enameled pans 
The Daily Mail cookery book

I haven't tried those. But, more importantly, as Mrs. Peel mentions: if you don't have neat little handles that lie close to the sides, tucking the pot into the box is awkward.

Cooking box in the Göpelschauer Museum in Seestermühe (Germany)
Photograph by Frank Schwichtenberg, ca. 2010
Found on Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-3.0 license)

Mrs. Peel advises:

Dish	Time on Fire.	In Haybox.
Lentil Soup	3/4 hour.	4 hours.
Potato Soup	1/4 hour.	1.5 hours.
Fish stewed	3 minutes boiling.	0.5 hours.
Oats	5 minutes boiling.	2.5 hours.
Potatoes	5 minutes.	1.5 hours.
Boiled Rice	2-3 minutes boiling.	2.5 hours.
Old Vegetables	18-20 minutes.	2.5-3 hours.

Adapted from pp. 16 and 18, The Daily Mail cookery book

I've generally found her times on the long side. I work with 1 or 2 litres, smaller quantities that are easy to heat and easy to keep hot.

Potatoes in cubed pieces, boiled carrots, beetroot, and tinned beans might require longer boiling than, for example, rice or apple sauce. But I've cooked all of them with the haybox without disaster.

(But mung beans took an incredibly long time to cook. They look like infinitesimal beads and would seem fast to cook; but they would have stayed hard if I hadn't rescued them from the haybox again and returned them to the stovetop.)

*

For the sake of food safety, I'll stress her advice:

• All food must be brought to boiling point and must be actually boiling when put into the haybox
• And, especially if food has been in the box for more than 2 hours, Food must be re-heated before serving.

*

I also like hayboxes for reasons besides energy efficiency:

1. Letting Me Leave the Kitchen

The food doesn't require eternal vigilance. I bring it to a boil, stow it away into the box, and go off again to work at my laptop (or do something more lighthearted) until I have time to eat.

Mrs. Peel mentions this benefit in her cookbook, and Cornell University home economics researchers did in the US in 1920 too:

If fuel is being burned, there is always more or less uneasiness about leaving the house or the room in which food is being cooked. The amount of heat may vary or the food may be forgotten, with the result that the food may stick to the bottom of the utensil and burn. This gives a poor product and makes dishwashing a difficult task. The fireless cooker makes it possible to leave the food without worrying about the results. Thus other occupations may be carried on while the food is cooking.

Fireless and Steam-Pressure Cookers

2. Keeping Food Warm Until Everyone's At the Table

It's good for keeping delivery food warm until everyone has returned from work in the evenings.

Again, the researchers had the same idea 100 years ago:

The fireless cooker is found to be a time-saver when the various members of the household have their meals at different hours because food may be kept hot in it until each member is ready to be served.

***

Note: American wartime brochures also recommend sawdust as an alternative to hay or newspaper insulation. Asbestos, however, is obviously a terrible idea because of the likely health impact.

*

Sources

The Daily Mail cookery book [Hathi Trust]
Mrs. C.S. Peel, ed. London: Associated Newspapers (1919)

Fireless and Steam-Pressure Cookers [Internet Archive]
Ithaca, NY: State Extension Service in Home Economics, The New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University (1920)

How to build and use a fireless cooker [Internet Archive]
Creswell, Mary Ethel and Ola Powell. Washington, D.C.: United States. Office of Extension Work in the South (1916)

Let the fireless cooker help you cook [Internet Archive]
Washington, D.C. : U.S. Dept. of Agriculture [and] U.S. Food Administration (1918)

Wartime Farm (BBC Two) 2012

Further Back in Time for Dinner (BBC Two) 2017

September: Apples, Purple Plums and Green Grapes

Even in the midst of this German city, allotment gardens are yielding harvests of orchard fruit.

Apple with wormhole from a late August 2022 harvest in Berlin.
Photograph by the author. Public domain.

I brought home this apple a week ago. As I was cycling through the gardens, a gardener in a Breton stripe shirt had been working away in her plot behind the English garden style foliage. I didn't see her, but she saw me.

She came to lean on the wooden fence. Then she inquired if I'd like to have nicer apples than the rotten ones (defeated by weather and time) that were left in the crate beside the pathway. I did!

Like another gardener, she warned me that there might be worms and other creatures in the apples, as this is organic, unsprayed fruit. While I am not too worried about pesticides, it was a relief to learn that the gardeners weren't soaking their harvest in DDT.

*

IN ONE GARDEN that I photographed today, pink roses were still blossoming, and pale green pears were hanging from a tree behind them.

Quince boughs, Virginia creepers, rose hip sprays, tomatoes and grapes bristled and throve elsewhere.

A purple plum had landed on a gravel path; I felt it was fair game, tucking it into my bag beside a paper pouch of green grapes that someone had thoughtfully left for people to take outside their garden.

When I ate the plum at home, it had the mellow flavour that hinted that the season might not last much longer. The green grapes were also very ripe.

*

I ALSO PHOTOGRAPHED A PLOT that had bright red apples, which contrasted classically with the greens of the grasses and tree leaves. It must be a purple hibiscus bush and not a rhododendron that's straggling along behind, while I've forgotten what the dandelion-yellow and magenta flowers are. Yet the stork, I can reveal, is a sculpture and not the genuine article.

Allotment garden in Berlin, with stork and red apple tree.
Photographed by the author in September 2022.
Public domain.

***

APPLES WERE POPULAR EATING during the world wars. The BBC series Wartime Farm shows how women from the Women's Institute gathered and canned them to preserve the vitamin-laden food for winter. 

But lately I've been eating them raw, feeling happy that even without vehicular transport and packaging, I can still get apples that are safe to eat on the kitchen table. The fragrance when I open the cloth bag in the pantry is intoxicating and thoroughly autumnal.

****

Illustration of fruit from Isabella Beeton's
Book of Household Management (edition from 1899)
Found in the Internet Archive

What Does Cooking for Victory Mean in 2022?

"Come into the garden dad!"
Propaganda poster printed around 1918
Canada Food Board, via Archives of Ontario
Found on Wikipedia

We're fortunately not at war. When writing the term 'Victory,' I am not thinking of a victory against another country or another head of state. I am thinking of the 'victory' of humanity against the scarcity of resources and the worsening of our global climate.

It is strange to watch television shows that revisit the 'Home Front' during World War I and World War II in Europe, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, however, and to find lessons that seem appropriate to our time and our current challenges.

*

The cost of food is high as I write this. Inflation has risen at 10% in some countries due to scarce gasoline supplies that make food transport more expensive. To a lesser degree, lingering supply chain problems are also reducing supply. It is not submarines sinking supply ships that are causing it, but causes as banal as a container ship sticking fast in the Suez Canal.

Gas is theoretically (we have imported gas from other sources, reaching the level of winter reserves we want at this time of year) scarcer in Germany due to the shutting off of the Nordstream 1 pipeline this week. Officially it's due to a faulty turbine that requires repair. Unofficially, we're all pretty certain it is linked to Germany's governmental support for Ukraine against its being invaded.

For middle-middle class citizens like me, cost of food is not yet a problem. My family has been using coal stoves to heat our apartment. But we do cook with gas. We also feel the excessive heat in summer, and might smell the smoke of forest fires in the woods of Brandenburg.

*

I want to be a more thoughtful consumer because of the big picture. Reckless consumption not only worsens poverty and hunger. It also forces our government into allying with questionably democratic governments and becoming more timid about defending civil and political rights of fellow world citizens. It also destroys our planet.

It's true that governments and multinational corporations will have the most meaningful impact if they change their behaviour. 'Blaming' citizens doesn't always make sense.

Malthus and others may also have framed the debate of land, resources, and the land's tenants, in a way that treats humanity as an undesirable teeming mass. Whom does this kind of cold-blooded thinking help?

*

But I'd still like to record techniques we can use to help in our daily lives, cooking and baking, shopping and maybe also gardening.

I believe we can use tips and tricks from the early 20th century and other periods in history: growing and buying food locally, cooking seasonally, applying low-energy cooking and baking methods, eating less meat but truly enjoying it if you do, being aware of packaging while buying groceries, and more.

These will help at least the little corners of the world in which we live. To apply again the famous quote of Voltaire, we must cultivate our garden.

***

I'd recommend these British television shows, as they paint a picture of past challenges in an entertaining and thought-provoking format:

- Further Back in Time for Dinner (BBC) [Wikipedia]

- The Supersizers... (BBC) [Wikipedia]

- Wartime Farm (BBC) [Wikipedia]

Radio Corporation of America (RCA Victor, National Broadcasting Company) advertisement
for the beginning of regular experimental television broadcasting from the NBC studios to
the New York metropolitan area on April 30, 1939 [...]"
Found in Wikimedia Commons