The Library

How to sort scavenged city steel without a laboratory, by the object it came from, its spark on a grinder, a magnet and the grain of a fracture. It explains the European and American steel names, reckons heavy leaf …

17 pages · Chapter 2 · 13 rows

A history and building guide for the coal forge, from Agricola and Moxon to a bottom-blast hearth made from a salvaged brake drum. It explains the three zones of the fire and how coal, coke and clinker differ, gives a …

17 pages · 15 rows

A hands-on companion to the field-metallurgy report, with two builds: a side-blast forge that is little more than a box of earth, for charcoal, and a brake-drum bottom-blast forge for coal. It puts forge-welding heat at …

24 pages

Charcoal for the forge, traced from Agricola and Duhamel du Monceau's Art du Charbonnier of 1761 to the building and tending of an earth-covered clamp, with the old colliers' terms. It reckons yields at 25 to 30 per …

16 pages · Chapters 1, 2 · 9 rows

A first anvil and a first pair of tongs, made from scrap. It weighs railway rail against forklift tines as anvil stock, giving the tines as 42CrMo4 and saying rail hardens in service from 370 to 550 HV, then forges …

18 pages · Chapters 2, 3 · 8 rows

A beginner's course in three tool steels, 1084, 5160 and O-1, from the anvil to the temper. It asks for an anvil twenty times the mass of the hammer, forty at best, cites the German DGUV 109-607 guidance on carbon …

19 pages · Chapter 3 · 17 rows verdict

Knives and cleavers forged in Berlin, with the city's smithies named, among them the Rixdorfer Schmiede, and a table of German limits for forge gases, quartz dust and noise. The edge geometry is the useful part: for a …

18 pages · Chapter 3 · 17 rows verdict

Three field tools forged from scrap: the broadfork, the eye-hoe and the scythe blade. An alloy table matches 1060 to hoes, 5160 to broadfork tines and 1095 to scythes, and the methods cover tines welded to a crossbar …

18 pages · Chapter 3 · 5 rows

Open Source Ecology's PowerCube, a petrol engine driving a hydraulic pump, and the LifeTrac tractor it powers, rebuilt here from salvaged hydraulic parts. It sets both within the Global Village Construction Set, which …

16 pages · Chapter 4 · 1 row

What workshop it takes to build the Global Village Construction Set. It argues that the project's own minimum tools make only an assembly shop and that a true minimum adds a lathe, milling, a radial drill and a 200 A …

20 pages · Chapter 4 · 1 row

Plans for a small combine harvester and a universal seeder, after Open Source Ecology and Farm Hack, built around the LifeTrac tractor and PowerCube. The threshing pages are the strongest: they compare spike-tooth and …

19 pages · Chapter 4 · 1 row

Where to find scrap copper in Berlin and what the law allows, down to the offence of burning cable, then how to anneal, pickle and cold-roll it into sheet. It quotes scrap prices of about €9.70 a kilo for bright wire …

17 pages · Chapter 4 · 5 rows verdict

A seamless copper kettle raised from flat sheet, from annealing and pickling to planishing and tinning. Its Berlin pages name the city's craft bodies and smiths, from a master craftsman's grant it puts at up to €6,000 …

17 pages · Chapter 4 · 6 rows verdict

The cramped or dovetailed seam, the coppersmith's old way of joining sheet for brewing coppers and other large vessels, traced back to John Fuller's Art of Coppersmithing of 1894. It compares brass spelter, which it …

17 pages · Chapter 4 · 4 rows verdict

Why copper pans are lined with tin and how to wipe the lining by hand. It sets tin against stainless steel, explains the verdigris that vinegar and fruit acids raise on bare copper, cites German food-contact law, and …

17 pages · Chapter 4 · 8 rows verdict

The wooden wedge press for seed oil, traced from the ghani of the Indus Valley and the Roman trapetum to Chinese wedge presses and Dutch mills, then designed in timber. It walks through seed preparation, sets cold …

19 pages · Chapter 4 · 4 rows

A hand-cranked stone mill for fine pastry flour, built from Lausitz granodiorite or from Findlinge, the glacial boulders strewn across Brandenburg. It reckons a healthy adult manages up to 75 W at 50 to 60 turns a …

17 pages · Chapter 4 · 4 rows

The copper alembic and its parts, from the pot and Moor's head to the swan neck and coil. A timeline runs from Mary the Jewess and Zosimos to Brunschwig in 1500, and the lute recipes for sealing joints, from clay and …

19 pages · Chapters 4, 15 · 7 rows

Spoons, spatulas and bowls carved from green wood in the slöjd tradition. Its notes on species favour apple, pear, cherry, birch and hard maple, keep ash for spatulas and rule out yew, red oak and softwoods, and it …

21 pages · Chapter 4 · 8 rows

Casting a heavy iron skillet from scrap: choosing metal at Berlin scrap yards, pouring it in green sand and seasoning the finished pan. It explains why high-chromium steel must stay out of the melt, repeats the spark …

18 pages · Chapter 3 · 9 rows

The wood-fired masonry oven that bakes on falling heat, from Pompeii to the Hessian village bakehouse. It compares the dome, Alan Scott's barrel vault and the cob oven, works through a model with a 92 cm floor, a dome …

17 pages · Chapter 1 · 6 rows

Rocket mass heaters and multi-burner cookstoves of firebrick, clay and earth. It explains clean burning through time, temperature and turbulence, asks for sticks below 20 per cent moisture, gives the J-tube proportions …

21 pages · Chapter 1 · 6 rows

A second study of the wooden wedge press, opening on the Zaan oil mills, which it reckons at about 600 around 1700. It readies sunflower seed by dehulling, flaking to 0.25 to 0.37 mm and heating to 85 to 100 °C, treats …

21 pages · Chapter 4 · 4 rows

The cooper's craft as practised in Brandenburg, with its three trades: tight casks for liquids, slack barrels for dry goods and the white cooper's tubs, pails and churns. It covers guild history and old Berlin measures, …

35 pages · Chapters 3, 4, 17 · 4 rows

Compost, worms and the chemistry of turning manure, human waste and plant matter into fertiliser. It follows a heap through its phases, a warm one up to about 45 °C, a hot one it puts at 55 to 70 °C that kills …

22 pages · Chapter 5 · 11 rows

A five-year rotation for Brandenburg's sandy soils, opening with a frost calendar that puts the last spring air frost at 8 May and the first autumn one at 22 September, about 137 days apart. Its most usable tool is the …

19 pages · Chapters 5, 6 · 18 rows verdict

Building topsoil on Brandenburg sand with biochar, green manures and no-till. The biochar pages carry the substance: it suggests 10 to 20 tonnes a hectare on sand, co-composting the char at 5 to 15 per cent of the heap, …

18 pages · Chapter 5 · 14 rows verdict

Bread and durum wheat, from the genes that make a grain hard to the winnowing fan. It says winter wheat needs three to eight weeks of cold, puts the winnowing air speed at 3.05 to 4.56 m/s with sound grain blown away …

17 pages · Chapter 6 · 3 rows

Saving cereal seed in Brandenburg year after year. It separates the self-pollinating wheat, barley and oats, which it says need 1 to 2 m between varieties and seed from 50 or more plants, from wind-pollinated rye, which …

18 pages · Chapter 6 · 8 rows

Rice for gallo pinto, grown and milled the Central American way, from the irrigated paddies of the Chorotega region to dry upland fields. It gives germination temperatures, alternate wetting and drying, Azolla as a …

18 pages

Whether chickpeas and black beans will ripen in Brandenburg, counted in degree days. It reckons chickpeas need 1,287 to 1,612 and the April to September season offers about 1,480, so it sows chickpeas in late April or …

19 pages · Chapter 6 · 5 rows

Potatoes and tomatoes in Brandenburg, with late blight, the Colorado beetle and the May frosts of the Ice Saints as the chief troubles. It covers garden fleece, the humus that potatoes draw from the soil, and biochar …

19 pages · Chapter 6 · 6 rows

Sugar beet from the field to the factory. The growing pages are the useful ones: it reports soil carbon 4.6 per cent lower on beet ground, warns that humus calculators can overstate demand, and recommends lupins such as …

20 pages · Chapter 6 · 2 rows

Oilseeds for the wedge press on Brandenburg sand, with a rich local history: Thaer's estate at Möglin, Spreewald linseed oil eaten with jacket potatoes and quark, the Prussian edicts on hemp and flax, and the windmill …

33 pages · 1 row

Paprika, cumin and coriander grown in Berlin for goulash and masala. It reckons fleece can stretch the season to 163 days, the least paprika needs, and its drying pages are the clearest: coriander dried below 9 per cent …

16 pages · Chapter 6 · 4 rows

Chicory and dandelion roots grown in Brandenburg and roasted for a caffeine-free coffee, with tiramisu in view. It says chicory grows best at 15 to 20 °C and bolts above 25 °C, gives sowing depth and spacing, and treats …

17 pages · Chapters 6, 15 · 4 rows

Apples for the table, the tart and the cider barrel, from rootstocks to pollination. A rootstock table compares the Malling stocks with the newer Geneva ones for vigour and resistance to fire blight, woolly aphid and …

22 pages · Chapters 7, 15 · 19 rows verdict

Grafting old fruit varieties onto wild seedling stocks: crab apple, wild pear, wild cherry, mahaleb and blackthorn. It traces the apple to Malus sieversii of the Tian Shan, reports that nearly 30 per cent of wild apples …

19 pages · Chapter 7 · 13 rows verdict

What may be gathered wild in Berlin and Brandenburg, and what may not. It sets out the federal hand-bouquet rule, the bans in reserves and national parks, and fines it puts at up to €50,000, notes that wild garlic is …

20 pages · Chapter 7 · 8 rows verdict

Plant rennets for cheese, from cardoon and fig sap to lady's bedstraw and nettle, traced to Aristotle and Columella. It explains where each enzyme cuts the casein and why some cheeses turn bitter, extracts the enzymes …

21 pages · Chapter 14 · 1 row

Watering by gravity on dry sandy soil, through keyline design, swales, earth dams and tank-fed drip lines. It sets out Yeomans's scale of permanence and the keypoint for a dam, prefers UV-stabilised polyethylene pipe to …

22 pages · Chapter 5 · 3 rows verdict

Organic pest control in Brandenburg and the law around it. It sorts remedies into basic substances such as horsetail and willow-bark extracts, registered products such as neem, potassium soap and spinosad, and banned …

19 pages · Chapter 6 · 4 rows

How to cut grain by hand, from choosing the day to standing the sheaves. It explains why the scythe goes in at yellow ripeness, which it puts at 25 to 30% kernel moisture, compares the heavy American snath with the …

16 pages · Chapter 6 · 3 rows

A guide to reading soil, first through its chemistry and then through the plants themselves. It sets out the Morgan, Bray and Olsen extractions, a vinegar and baking-soda fizz test and a red cabbage pH indicator, then …

23 pages · Chapter 5 · 6 rows

Onions, garlic, leeks and shallots on Brandenburg sand, from Elsholtz's garden book of 1667 and the Werder market gardens to seed crops and the kitchen. It tabulates heirloom onions such as Zittauer Gelbe and …

32 pages · Chapter 6 · 7 rows

A year-round kitchen garden for Brandenburg sand, rooted in Elsholtz, the Huguenot gardeners, Reichart, Lenné and the Teltow turnips that, it says, Goethe and Kant had sent to them. It covers humus from leaf mould, …

44 pages · Chapter 6 · 7 rows

Seed saving for the vegetable garden of a 300-person settlement on the Brandenburg plain, from flowering biology and isolation distances to roguing, biennial stecklings in the cellar, harvest, drying and storage. It …

29 pages · Chapter 6 · 6 rows

Mushrooms in Brandenburg, grown and gathered: oyster and wine cap on stumps, logs and straw without a laboratory, and the forest species worth picking. It carries a lively regional history, from Falck's wartime stump …

32 pages

Whether rice could ripen in Brandenburg, and what to cook if it cannot. It sets the region's warmth against the needs of rice from the Po valley to Heilongjiang and finds a shortfall, then tries millet, hulless barley, …

41 pages · Chapter 6 · 3 rows

Feeding and grazing a herd of dual-purpose cattle, from Fleckvieh to the smaller Dexter, through summer pasture and winter fodder. It tables milk yields by breed and dry matter intake by body weight, reckoning that a …

23 pages · Chapters 8, 14 · 9 rows verdict

The breeding year of a herd: the cow's 21-day cycle as it gives it, heat signs, follicle waves, insemination with unfrozen semen and help at a hard calving. It explains how the shared village bull, the Gemeindebulle, …

19 pages · Chapter 8 · 5 rows verdict

How to kill a bovine animal with the least suffering, grounded in the anatomy of its skull and brain. It explains concussion, where to place a captive bolt or bullet, why pithing is barred for meat animals and why a …

18 pages · Chapter 9 · 5 rows verdict

Slaughter hygiene for cattle, from the stick to the split carcass, with the aim of keeping gut and hide bacteria off the meat. It covers the 60-second limit from stun to stick it cites, the two-knife method, sealing the …

17 pages · Chapter 9 · 5 rows verdict

Breaking a beef carcass by hand with cleaver, bow saw, hook and knife, primal by primal. It names the bones that mark each cut and the muscles inside them, from the chuck and the rib, which it sets between ribs 6 and …

17 pages · Chapter 9 · 2 rows verdict

Where each beef cut comes from and how heat changes it, leaning towards slow braises such as ragù alla Bolognese and Wiener Saftgulasch. It describes the cleaver and bow saw in detail, sets the Chicago break between the …

16 pages · Chapter 9 · 3 rows verdict

Beef suet from the carcass to refined tallow, and on to frying, lubrication and soap. It explains where suet sits in the body, how it is rendered and then bleached, dried and filtered, and why its saturated fats stand …

20 pages · Chapter 9 · 4 rows verdict

Keeping pigs well: housing, feeding, behaviour and the parasites that pass from pig to people. It tables floor space and comfortable temperatures for each stage, from piglets, which it keeps at 32 to 35°C in the creep, …

18 pages · Chapters 8, 9 · 5 rows verdict

Pig breeding from heat to farrowing, written for commercial units as farrowing crates are phased out. It times service at 12 to 24 hours after standing heat is first seen, tables the treatments used to time heat and …

19 pages · Chapter 8 · 3 rows verdict

Pig slaughter as an abattoir runs it, with the skin kept on for crackling, bellies and cured hams. It covers resting pigs before the kill, stunning by current or gas, sticking, scalding, scraping and singeing, clean …

18 pages · Chapter 9 · 6 rows verdict

Cutting a pig into primals and curing them in salt, grounded in the chemistry of fat and brine. It tables the three layers of back fat, explains fat firmness by iodine value, and follows salt into lean meat, swelling it …

19 pages · Chapter 9 · 2 rows verdict

Leaf lard, the fat from around a pig's kidneys, and how to render it white and neutral for pastry and frying. It tables the pig's fat depots and their uses, with the old European butchery names Flomen, Filz and Liesen, …

20 pages · Chapter 9 · 2 rows verdict

Raising dual-purpose chickens for eggs and the table, with breed portraits, housing and plant-based disease control. It compares more than ten breeds and two hybrids by eggs a year, cockerel weight, comb and broodiness, …

16 pages · Chapter 8 · 10 rows

Killing and dressing chickens, from the hours of fasting before slaughter to the chilled carcass. It explains why feed is withheld for 8 to 12 hours by its account, tables the stunning currents that German and European …

18 pages · Chapter 9 · 4 rows verdict

Taking a chicken apart for the kitchen, joint by joint. It gives soft scalding at 50 to 54°C, by its figures, to keep the yellow skin, then goes through the classic eight-piece cut, finding the knee along a white line …

16 pages · Chapter 9 · 1 row verdict

Building and running a fish pond that needs no mains power, from the first survey to a working food web. It sets out pond types, soil tests with a ribbon and a ball sunk in water, embankment slopes it gives as 3 to 1 …

20 pages · Chapter 10 · 6 rows verdict

Old ways of taking fish that work while the fisher is away: woven basket traps, river weirs and trotlines. It explains how willow, hazel and dogwood were chosen and why the wands are soaked before weaving, why the …

14 pages · Chapter 10 · 8 rows verdict

Cleaning, filleting and keeping fish, with the chemistry of spoilage at its centre. It contrasts round fish with flatfish, explains pin bones, tables fillet yields, which it puts at 55 to 60% for rainbow trout, and …

20 pages · Chapter 10 · 2 rows verdict

Turning cattle and pig hides into heavy leather by brain tanning and bark tanning, for forge aprons, belts and straps. It compares the two hides in a table, explains why the fat inside pigskin makes it hard to tan, and …

18 pages · Chapter 9 · 4 rows verdict

Bones used twice: first simmered for broth, then burned to ash for phosphorus on the fields. It compares knuckle, marrow and neck bones, roasts them at about 204°C, tables stockpot, slow cooker and pressure cooker, and …

17 pages · Chapter 9 · 2 rows verdict

A herd health manual that pairs plant remedies with basic surgery, under the European organic rule that puts herbal treatment first. It opens on feeding disorders, from ketosis and rumen acidosis to copper locked up by …

18 pages · Chapter 8 · 8 rows verdict

Goats and sheep for a smallholding on Brandenburg sand, from the sheep folding of Thaer and Koppe to the cheese vat and the spindle. It profiles hardy breeds such as the Thüringer Wald goat, which it credits with 700 to …

41 pages · Chapters 8, 14 · 19 rows verdict

Hens through the Brandenburg year, from the daylight that brings on laying to the egg on the plate. It explains why laying falls away in the short days, by its reckoning from 70 to 80 per cent in summer to 5 per cent or …

37 pages · Chapter 8 · 6 rows verdict

Game in Brandenburg's forests as meat for a 300-person community: wild boar, roe, fallow and red deer, hare and waterfowl. It sets population densities beside the state's 2024/25 hunting returns and the appetite of some …

31 pages

What keeps an earth-sheltered root cellar at the 0 to 4°C and damp air it calls for all year. It explains how the ground's warmth lags the seasons, places the cellar 2 to 4 metres down with insulation above, tables the …

18 pages · Chapter 12 · 2 rows

A Berlin root cellar divided into zones, damp for roots at the 90 to 95% humidity it asks for and drier for onions. It works from Brandenburg's sandy loams, sets out the DIN 18533 waterproofing classes for buried walls …

18 pages · Chapter 12 · 1 row

Why apples and roots should not share a cellar, told from inside the ripening fruit. It traces ethylene from its making in apples and tomatoes to the harm it does in store: bitter carrots and potatoes that sprout or …

20 pages · Chapter 12 · 1 row

Burying a chest freezer as a small root cellar, with the law set out first. It explains why a certified technician must recover the refrigerant under the European F-gas rules of 2024, gives the penalties under German …

21 pages · Chapter 12 · 2 rows

Salt as industry makes it, from seawater ponds and solution-mined caverns to crystallisers and centrifuges. It tables the stages of solar evaporation by Baumé degrees, with common salt, by its account, crystallising …

22 pages · Chapter 11 verdict

The glass salinometer explained from first principles: why it floats upright, how its narrow stem is calibrated, how it is made now that lead ballast is being phased out, and how standards laboratories check it by …

22 pages · Chapter 11 · 2 rows verdict

Salt pork as ships and armies once carried it, set beside modern curing chemistry. It covers dry salting against wet brining, how salt moves through lean and fat, nitrite and the pink of cured meat, nitrosamines in …

19 pages · Chapter 11 · 5 rows verdict

Brining and smoking fish so the salt goes deep without crusting the skin, around a brine it puts at 70 to 80 degrees on the salometer. It explains how fat slows salt, why strong brine hardens the surface, how the sticky …

17 pages · Chapters 10, 11 · 6 rows verdict

Designing a smokehouse for cold and hot smoking, with a buried flue to cool the smoke and a staged hot smoke after the Torry kiln. It sets the fire pit 1.2 to 2.1 metres from the chamber, rules out plastic pipe, keeps …

20 pages · Chapter 11

A history of the pressure canner and the arithmetic behind it, from seventeenth-century steam digesters to the domestic canner. It explains why low-acid food needs the 116 to 121°C it gives, sets out the twelve-log …

19 pages · Chapter 12 · 1 row

Water-bath canning and the line at pH 4.6 that, by its account, decides whether boiling is enough. It explains the strains of botulinum, how spores survive and how acid holds them back, the tomato's borderline acidity, …

20 pages · Chapter 12 · 2 rows

Drying food in a solar cabinet that keeps the sun off the food, with the air warmed in a separate collector. It reads the air's drying power from the psychrometric chart, compares natural and fan-driven airflow, and …

19 pages · Chapter 12 · 1 row

How households on the American frontier made lye from wood ash for soap in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It follows the year's round of autumn fat, winter ash and spring soap-making, draws on Martha Ballard's …

15 pages · Chapter 17 · 4 rows

Potassium soap made from beef tallow and wood-ash lye, worked out step by step for kitchen hygiene. It tables the fatty acids of tallow, explains saponification values, the use of calcium to turn the potash into caustic …

23 pages · Chapter 17 · 4 rows verdict

Clean drinking water from roof and well, by slow sand filtration followed by heat. It covers first-flush diversion, which it sizes at 0.5 to 2.0 litres for each square metre of roof, moringa seed to settle muddy water, …

16 pages · Chapter 5 · 4 rows

Keeping rats and mice out of grain stores and cellars by building them out rather than relying on cats. It tables how fast the common species breed, explains why a rat's incisors go through wood, foam and aluminium, and …

17 pages · Chapter 12 · 1 row

Home-grown heat and sweetness for a Brandenburg kitchen once pepper, vanilla, cinnamon, clove and nutmeg stop arriving. After a nod to Germershausen's eighteenth-century household books, it covers mustards and …

46 pages · Chapter 11

Dairying on a small farm, from the cow's fertility to milk heated in a wood-fired copper kettle. The distinctive part is the copper: it weighs the metal's power to slow bacterial films against the off-flavours it gives …

19 pages · Chapter 14 · 3 rows

Why cream rises on milk left to stand, told through Stokes' law, globule size, the thickening of cold milk and the clumping of globules by milk's own antibodies, which it credits for the speed of cold setting. It …

20 pages · Chapter 14 · 1 row

Workshop notes for a hand-cranked cream separator, from Stokes' law under spin to the conical discs nested in the bowl, with a table of disc counts, cone angles, gaps and speeds. It warms the milk to 40 to 55°C, which …

18 pages · Chapter 14 · 1 row

Cultured butter and ghee, from the skin of the fat globule outward, with a table of the proteins in that skin. It ripens cream with cultures at about 20°C until the pH falls from 6.7 to between 4.4 and 5.0, explains how …

20 pages · Chapter 14 · 4 rows

Rennet paste from the stomach of an unweaned calf, beginning at slaughter. The early pages follow abattoir practice: captive bolt, stunning to sticking within 60 seconds, two knives, knife water of at least 82°C. It …

17 pages · Chapter 14 · 4 rows

Fig sap as rennet, from Aristotle and Columella to the enzyme ficin. It times the harvest to green shoots and unripe fruit, warns of bitterness, and tables temperature from a gentle set at 30 to 35°C through the …

18 pages · Chapter 14 · 2 rows

Cardoon and stinging nettle as rennet for a Berlin-Brandenburg cheesemaker. It covers German foraging law (the hand-bouquet rule, no digging of roots), heavy metals in roadside nettles and fox tapeworm eggs on low …

17 pages · Chapter 14 · 3 rows

Mozzarella from the milk up. It explains casein and why it prefers a thermophilic starter to adding citric acid directly, with a table that puts the stretching pH at 5.0 to 5.3 with a starter against 5.5 to 5.7 with …

14 pages · Chapter 14 · 5 rows

Mascarpone, the cream cheese of Lombardy, set by heat and acid rather than rennet. It puts the cream at 20 to 26 per cent fat and the heat at 85 to 95°C, notes the German Doppelrahmstufe category, and compares gravity …

20 pages · Chapter 14 · 2 rows

The bacteria that turn alcohol into vinegar: how they oxidise it, how they bear their own acid, and the cellulose mother that floats on a still jar, set against stirred tanks, with a table sorting the genera. The …

18 pages · Chapter 13 · 1 row

How a sourdough starter comes to life in Berlin, beginning, it argues, with microbes in the flour rather than the air. Its table of Berlin tap water (hardness 14 to 17 °dH, rich in hydrogen carbonate, unchlorinated) …

19 pages · Chapter 13 · 2 rows

A bakery-laboratory guide that repeats the Berlin water and rye groundwork of document 90. A clear table follows a starter through three phases over 7 to 14 days, including the false rise of days two and three. The …

20 pages · Chapter 13

Ale from barley field to fermenter. It explains why barley's husk forms the filter bed while wheat, threshed bare, clogs the runoff, gives harvest moisture of 15 to 17 per cent, and follows malting: steeping to 44 to 46 …

22 pages · Chapter 15 · 7 rows

Sauerkraut, kimchi and brined cucumbers from the salt crystal up. It weighs sea, rock and refined salt (anti-caking agents, microplastics), works a sum for salting by the combined weight of vegetables and water (100 g × …

19 pages · Chapter 13 · 2 rows verdict

Ripening cheese in a Berlin maturation room run as a registered food business. It covers EU, German and Berlin hygiene rules (852/2004, LFGB, HACCP), the exemption for spruce or pine boards, and a table that puts hard …

16 pages · Chapter 14 · 7 rows verdict

Yoghurt the old way, from Neolithic pots with milk fat in their walls, which it dates to about 7,200 years ago in Croatia, to the haybox. A table of heirloom cultures runs from Bulgarian kiselo mlyako and matsoni to …

18 pages · Chapters 13, 14 · 2 rows

Wine and cider for Berlin-Brandenburg's dry sand, where it dates vine growing to the thirteenth century and names city vineyards at Viktoriapark, Humboldthain and Britz. It argues for windbreaks, which it says cut wind …

22 pages · Chapter 15 · 4 rows

Beekeeping on the Brandenburg plain without bought frames, chemicals or extractors. It opens with the forest beekeepers of the Zeidlerei and Grüwel's bee book of 1719, describes log hives, straw skeps and the …

38 pages · Chapter 15 · 5 rows

Tiramisu, the Italian layered dessert of soft cheese, sponge fingers and coffee, rebuilt from scratch. It makes its mascarpone from 1,000 g of cream at 25 per cent fat and 5 g of citric acid, raises the sponge fingers …

18 pages

Tarte Tatin, the French apple tart baked under its pastry and turned out upside down. It rebuilds the tart from Boskoop and Berlepsch apples kept in a root cellar at 3 to 4°C, caramel of unrefined beet sugar (which it …

18 pages

Fresh egg pasta of northern Italy, rolled into sheets by hand with a wooden mattarello, made here with stone-milled wheat from around Berlin. It explains why bran-rich flour drinks more liquid, reports that yolks alone …

19 pages

Ragù alla Bolognese, the slow meat sauce of Bologna, traced from Alvisi, a cardinal's cook, in 1785 through Artusi's recipe 87 of 1891 to the Accademia Italiana della Cucina's versions of 1982 and 2023, compared in a …

17 pages

Chickpea butter masala, a meatless butter chicken in a gravy of tomato, ghee and cashew, for a Berlin kitchen. It grows the chickpeas on Brandenburg sand, inoculated and buffered with biochar, reckons they need 1,287 to …

17 pages

Gallo pinto, the 'spotted rooster' of rice and black beans from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, cooked in Berlin. Its local sourcing is a list of city grocers selling imported paddy rice, black beans and guajillo chillies, so …

18 pages

Gulyásleves, the paprika beef soup of the Hungarian herdsmen, cooked in an iron bogrács. It braises shank (Wadschinken) and chuck for hours at 80 to 95°C, starts from lard rendered from pork back fat, grows and dries …

15 pages

Potato gnocchi, Italian dumplings of potato bound with a little flour and yolk. It explains why floury potatoes make them light and waxy ones rubbery, names German floury varieties (Adretta, Agria, Finka, Ackersegen), …

18 pages

Latkes, the grated potato pancakes Ashkenazi Jews fry for Hanukkah, grown here from a Brandenburg field. It raises floury potatoes on sand in a five-year rotation, with a table of humus figures, biochar and …

15 pages

Hard cider from orchard to cask. A rootstock table weighs vigour and disease resistance and favours the American Geneva series, and it suggests a dwarfing interstem for dry sandy soils, Oeschberg pruning and calcium …

20 pages · Chapter 15 · 4 rows

Herbal teas from the wild plants of Berlin-Brandenburg. It sets out the German hand-bouquet rule, the ban on digging roots, protected areas such as the Spreewald and Schorfheide-Chorin, and the endangered status of wild …

21 pages · Chapters 7, 15 · 9 rows verdict

Mead, the honey wine, traced from medieval German tree beekeepers (the Zeidlerei, and Karl IV's charter of 1350) to Berlin's city hives in Schiffer trees and BienenBoxes. Its seasonal table of Berlin honey runs from …

23 pages · Chapter 15 · 2 rows

Sourdough baked in a wood-fired masonry oven in Berlin, from starter to loaf. It covers hard city water, a table of German flour types (405, 550, 1050), baker's percentages, bulk fermentation, a cold retard of 12 to 24 …

18 pages · Chapter 13

Stock and consommé, from slaughter to the spent bones, which it burns to ash for the land. A table shows which bones give gelatine, fat or flavour, and it quotes Escoffier's brown stock: 6 kg each of beef and veal …

17 pages

Salami and raw sausages such as Plockwurst and Teewurst, with a nod to nineteenth-century Berlin cervelat, explained as hurdles of salt, acid, loss of air and curing salts. It picks pork shoulder at 70 lean to 30 fat …

19 pages · Chapter 11 · 3 rows verdict

Shortcrust (pâte brisée) and choux, two pastries that treat fat in opposite ways, made with cultured butter blended with rendered leaf lard. Shortcrust keeps the fat solid until the oven, while choux melts it into …

16 pages

Jam and marmalade set with beet sugar and pectin drawn from under-ripe apples, apple pomace or citrus pith. It aims for 65 per cent soluble solids (water activity 0.80 to 0.82), explains why beet sugar foams (saponins) …

19 pages

Barrel-fermented dill cucumbers, framed by the Spreewald tradition of Dutch settlers in the fourteenth century, Theodor Fontane and EU protected status. A cultivar table rates resistance to bloating (Vorgebirgstrauben, …

17 pages · Chapters 11, 13 · 4 rows verdict

The rye breads of Brandenburg: sourdough by the Detmold three-stage and Monheim salt-sour methods, scalds and old-bread additions, Pumpernickel, which it bakes in sealed tins for 16 to 24 hours of falling heat, quick …

17 pages

Five soups for the farm year, each with its history and chemistry: Berliner Kartoffelsuppe with marjoram, Prussian pea soup by way of the Erbswurst, borscht soured with beet kvass and served with sour cream, Hühnersuppe …

17 pages

Charcuterie beyond salami for a community of 300, mostly from the pig's head, blood, fat and offal: Griebenschmalz with apple and onion, Sülze, Leberwurst and poultry pâté, and Blutwurst with rye, plus a game terrine …

16 pages

Havel and Spree fish for the table, in five dishes: hot-smoked eel, pike or zander cured with salt and dill in the gravlax way, pike dumplings (Hechtklößchen), a clear fish consommé, and the Christmas carp cooked blue. …

18 pages

The winter vegetable table of the North German plain: Grünkohl with Kasseler and Pinkel, Kohlrouladen, sauerkraut with apple and juniper, roots roasted in tallow, a creamy mushroom ragout, a February salad of forced …

14 pages

Egg and grain dishes for the Brandenburg table: Eierkuchen with foraged jam, baked crème caramel on beet sugar, a mushroom Graupenrisotto of pearl barley, Sorbian Hirsebrei (sweet millet porridge) and savoury buckwheat. …

14 pages

The meat mains of the Berlin and Brandenburg table: Königsberger Klopse, Sauerbraten, the Berliner Bulette, Eisbein with sauerkraut, roast chicken with herbs, coq au vin from a spent rooster, duck with apples and the …

17 pages

A four-part cheese board: an aged hard wheel in the Bergkäse or Tilsiter manner, a Camembert-style bloomy rind, quark, and fresh goat cheese with linden or heather honey. It builds starters from clabber and whey, doses …

12 pages

Six North German sweets: Rote Grütze with cream, sourdough Streuselkuchen, Apfelstrudel, quark Käsekuchen, Honigkuchen raised with alkaline leavening, and baked apples. They follow the bread through one firing of a …

16 pages

Berliner Weisse and the small drinks: the sour wheat beer made as an unboiled raw ale with lactic bacteria and Brettanomyces, woodruff and raspberry syrups for taking it mit Schuss, elderflower cordial, an orchard …

14 pages · Chapter 15

Cooking on an open hearth, from the woodpile to the dripping pan. It sets 20 per cent moisture as the limit for firewood, weighs hardwood against resinous softwood, sorts coals by size, and tables hardwoods from osage …

18 pages · Chapter 1 · 7 rows

How eating becomes a meal, read first through Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias and Margaret Visser, then through three objects. The wooden trencher brings a table of timbers, the carving axe and Sloyd knife, …

18 pages · Chapter 17 · 14 rows

How much land a family of four needs to feed itself from Brandenburg sand. It sets the need at 4 million kcal a year, tables targets for protein, fat and carbohydrate, and weighs each crop by its humus balance. Worked …

18 pages · Chapter 18 · 8 rows verdict

Land set aside only to keep animals alive, before they yield anything. A table compares feed conversion for broilers, pigs and beef cattle by live and edible weight, and it sets the human-edible measure against the …

14 pages · Chapter 8 · 4 rows verdict

A Berlin household's year of wood: heat, hot water, cooking and canning for four. It starts from a 116 m² home at 100 kWh/m², adds 3,200 kWh for hot water, and splits the year into 215 winter days on a masonry stove and …

18 pages · Chapter 1 · 8 rows

An inventory of field and kitchen tools, how long each lasts and the hours it takes to keep them working. It sorts salvaged steel by carbon (leaf and coil springs, bearings, files) with the spark test, uses the magnet …

17 pages · Chapter 18 · 6 rows

The farming year of temperate Europe, season by season, set out as a table of field work, the weeks when hands run short and the preserving each season allows. It follows coppiced wood into the autumn kitchen, explains …

17 pages · Chapter 18 · 5 rows

Water for a large farm with its own dairy and restaurant kitchen, modelled at a thousand meals a day, 2,000 litres of milk, twenty cows, thirty pigs, two hundred hens and half a hectare of vegetables, starting from …

17 pages · Chapters 5, 18 · 8 rows

A woodlot plan to keep a Berlin family of four in heat, hot water, cooking fire and tool handles year after year. It reckons the household's need at 7,689 kilograms of seasoned hardwood a year, burned in a masonry stove …

19 pages · Chapter 1 · 9 rows

The seed a Brandenburg farm must hold back each year from its rye, wheat, barley and oats, and how to keep it true and alive. It covers lupin rotations on sand, isolation distances, population size for rye, heritage …

19 pages · Chapter 6 · 8 rows

The salt budget of a family of four with one milk cow, two pigs, thirty poultry and two small ruminants, from the evaporation pan through table, livestock, ham and fish curing and cheese brining to the waste brine. It …

19 pages · Chapters 11, 14 · 4 rows verdict

The space a family of four needs to store a year's food, worked from German per-head consumption and bulk densities into volumes for a root cellar, a grain silo and a smokehouse. It sets out soil-temperature models for …

15 pages · Chapter 12 · 2 rows

The energy cost of turning one acre of Brandenburg sand, with a broadfork or with a pair of draught horses or oxen behind a mouldboard plough. It draws on Pimentel's hours of hand and ox work for maize and on the LEAFS …

21 pages · Chapter 6 · 2 rows

What a grass-fed dual-purpose cow, Fleckvieh or Braunvieh, gives in a year and how that milk divides into butter, mascarpone and aged cheese. It settles on 6,000 kilograms a lactation as its baseline, and spends long …

16 pages · Chapters 8, 14 · 9 rows verdict

From the stunning of a steer or a pig to the rendering pot: slaughter, dressing, chilling and cutting, with dressing percentages and primal yields for both. It reckons beef carcasses at 58 to 64 per cent of live weight …

19 pages · Chapter 9 · 5 rows verdict

Whether gathering wild food in a Berlin winter repays the effort, tested with optimal foraging theory and set beside cultivated crops. It weighs acorns, sloes, sea buckthorn and inulin-rich roots against the cost of …

19 pages · Chapter 7 · 5 rows verdict

How many households a village needs before it can feed a full-time smith or cheesemaker. It walks through Chayanov's peasant household, Boserup's ladder of intensification and the Brenner debate, with Brandenburg's …

17 pages · Chapter 18 · 8 rows verdict

A plan for eating well from Brandenburg sand, for a household of four and a community of 300. It sets energy and protein needs for hard field work, putting the household at 10,100 to 11,300 kilocalories a day, then …

34 pages · Chapter 8 · 5 rows verdict

Stoneware for the Brandenburg table and pantry, from the Görzke potters and their lead-free Bunzlau glazes to Seger's firing cones, devised in Berlin. It traces the varved clays of Zehdenick and Glindow, then covers …

38 pages · Chapter 17 · 11 rows

Glass for a Brandenburg settlement, from Kunckel's ruby glass on the Pfaueninsel and the Baruth and Neuglobsow glassworks to the cutting of salvaged glass. It names sand from Hohenbocka and lime from Rüdersdorf, …

33 pages · Chapter 17 · 3 rows

Fine table linen from flax grown on Brandenburg sand, taken step by step from rotation and sowing to hand pulling, retting, scutching, spinning, weaving, bleaching and laundering. It follows Thaer's rule of six to seven …

34 pages · Chapters 6, 17 · 6 rows verdict

Willow for baskets, grown on the wet floodplains of the Spree and Havel because, it says, each kilogram of dry wood takes 400 to 600 litres of water. It matches three willows to their work, from eel traps to …

29 pages

Knives, forks, spoons and pewter for the table, set in the history of manners from Norbert Elias and the fork's arrival in Venice in 1004 to the Tafelrunde at Sanssouci. It then turns practical: forging cutlery from …

38 pages · Chapters 2, 3, 4, 17 · 16 rows