The Index · A place

Berlin and Brandenburg

The first book's one place, fully: the city on the Spree and the Havel, and the sand of the Mark around it.

62 documents · 3 chapters · 3 dishes · 100 rows

In the chapters

Chapter 11 Salt
The Story: Brandenburg's own salt
Chapter 13 Sour
At the Bench: 2. A rye starter from Berlin flour
Chapter 15 Drink
The Story: The apple on the Havel

Documents 62

On the Menu

Spreewald dill pickles Berliner Kartoffelsuppe Berliner Weisse

Sources

Primary Thaer, Grundsätze der rationellen Landwirthschaft (1809 to 1812)
Practitioner A working village smith in Brandenburg

All the sources

In the log 100

56 confirmed
17 amended
13 partly confirmed
13 unresolved
1 dropped
10 marked for safety

O3 amended Safety Wild garlic look-alikes: Convallaria, Colchicum, Arum all lethal/severe; smell test fails by olfactory fatigue; Brandenburg Red List Cat. 1, picking forbidden
O9 amended Safety Mushrooms: Brandenburg pine forest boletes/chanterelles; Chernobyl Cs-137 still present; Pilzberater; death cap
A1 amended Safety Zoonoses: Germany brucellosis-free 2000, bovine TB-free 1997, worthless without testing; Q fever in the Mark; Listeria from silage and soft cheese kills the unborn; …
A4 amended Safety African swine fever in Brandenburg wild boar from September 2020, still present, ~100 % lethal to pigs, no vaccine, not a human disease; one pig, fenced from woods, no …
B9 amended Safety Trichinella: every part of an untested pig cooked to 70 °C at centre; no raw Mett, cold-smoked raw sausage or air-dried ham from an untested pig; dies in 1 min at 60, at …
E10 amended Safety Cyanobacteria toxin (microcystin) passes a cloth, survives boiling, has killed dogs on Berlin lakes in recent summers; no bathing, no drinking, gut fish at once and burn …
E14 confirmed Safety Brandenburg: traps, weirs, nets and unattended multi-hook set lines forbidden for anglers; fine and loss of licence; only licensed professional fishers on named waters
E15 confirmed Safety Fischereischein: Brandenburg issues without exam for Friedfisch since 2006 on payment of Fischereiabgabe; exam needed for Raubfisch; Berlin requires exam for all; …
E16 amended Safety Closed seasons and minimum sizes: Brandenburg pike closed 1 Jan–30 Apr, 45 cm; zander closed to 31 May, 45 cm; eel 50 cm; trout closed autumn/winter; Berlin near but not …
E9 unresolved Safety Spree/Havel eel: state consumption advice on dioxins and PCBs (and recently PFAS); lean fish (pike, perch, zander) carry far less; pond fish none the household did not …
P1 amended Table salt in a Berlin shop comes from a mine near Bernburg on the Saale
P2 confirmed Iron smelted from bog ore in clay furnaces in the Brandenburg woods
H21 confirmed Holznot debate: real in places, exaggerated by governments; Brandenburg pine planted by the square mile from the 18th century because nothing else pays on sand
H29 amended Berlin 3.5 million people; Tiergarten 210 ha; Grunewald 3,000 ha
H35 confirmed Gas in Berlin kitchens from the 1900s, electricity 1930s, last coal kitchen stoves out in the 1980s; Ofensetzer and Köhler a few hundred people
I14 amended Steel in use in a rich country 10 to 14 t per person; stable for a generation; Berlin 35 to 50 million tonnes
I18 confirmed A kilometre of track, two rails, about 120 tonnes; Berlin has more than 1,000 km of rail
I20 unresolved Bog iron (Raseneisenstein) smelted by Slavic villages on Spree and Havel from the 8th century in small clay furnaces
I23 confirmed Royal Prussian Iron Foundry 1804 on the Invalidenstrasse; Borsig Oranienburger Tor 1837, first locomotive four years later; by 1900 the north from Moabit to Tegel a …
I24 amended Hennigsdorf steelworks opened by AEG in 1917 for war steel; now an electric arc plant melting Berlin scrap into rebar and rail; melted the 1945 ruins
I25 confirmed Berlin 1945: about 75 million m³ of rubble, a fifth of Germany's; cleared mostly by women; bricks chipped and relaid; rubble railways; Teufelsberg 26 million m³ over a …
K27 confirmed Brandenburg sandstone Findlinge as 600 to 1,000 grit whetstones; water balance; chef's knife on to 3,000 grit, cleaver left toothy
W19 confirmed Kreuzberg scrap dealers pay about 9.50 €/kg for clean pipe (Millberry 9.70)
W26 partly confirmed Theophilus, De diversis artibus, c. 1120, gives a tinning method; the Kesselflicker worked Brandenburg villages until the 1950s and the trade ended in the 1960s
W43 confirmed Spreewald linseed oil eaten raw with quark and potatoes as the region's own dish
W44 confirmed Rotary quern older than Rome; Vitruvius De architectura X.5 on the water mill c. 25 BC; post mills in Brandenburg villages from the 1200s; Sanssouci's Historische Mühle …
W45 confirmed Granite self-sharpens: quartz Mohs 7 cuts, feldspar 6 wears to expose it, biotite 2.5 to 3 pits and grips; Lausitz granodiorite at Demitz-Thumitz and Kamenz; Brandenburg …
G13 amended Brandenburg soils are Pleistocene glacial sands, Arenosols, rated 25 to 40 Bodenpunkte; the scale runs 7 to 100, set by the Reichsbodenschätzung of 1934, with 100 at the …
G14 confirmed The "sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire" (Streusandbüchse des Heiligen Römischen Reiches) as an eighteenth-century name for the Mark Brandenburg
G15 confirmed Berlin rainfall 539 to 618 mm, mean about 591 on 167 rainy days; July 75 mm, February 36; comparable to London
G18 confirmed The Spree ran for a century on water pumped from the Lusatian lignite pits and shrinks as they close; Berlin drinks mainly bank-filtered river water; the 2018 to 2023 …
G19 confirmed Albrecht Thaer, physician, founded the academy at Möglin in 1806 and taught the humus theory; Liebig's 1840 book replaced it with the mineral theory
G28 confirmed Berlin Rieselfelder from 1876 (Hobrecht's sewer system), about 10,000 ha at their peak, closed in the 1980s when Ruhleben and other works took over; grew vegetables for …
G42 unresolved Brandenburg sand mostly pH 5 to 6.5
F33 unresolved VERN e.V., Greiffenberg (Uckermark), >650 cereal provenances; five ryes named; Champagnerroggen pre-1900, 2 m, no fertiliser
F57 confirmed Elsholtz 1623 to 1688, Vom Garten-Baw 1667 (133 gives 1666); Reichart 1685 to 1775, Land- und Gartenschatz six volumes 1753 to 1774; Werder as Berlin's market garden; …
F68 confirmed Teltower Rübchen: 2 to 4 cm, sown 10 to 25 August, 60 to 75 days, coarse on loam; Goethe supplied by Zelter, Kant; Edict of Potsdam 1685, c. 20,000 Huguenots; Lenné 1789 …
O40 amended Brandenburg ~one third forest, mostly pine; Prussian 18th-c. pine plantation; Eichelmast pannage
O49 confirmed Pomologen-Verein 1860 / 1991; NABU Streuobst register; mundraub.org Berlin 2009; Werder Baumblütenfest; Berlin forests ~one fifth of city area, open access
A17 unresolved Kreuzberg pigs in the winter of 1946, courtyard and cellar pigs, black slaughter (Schwarzschlachtung) punishable by prison, the grandmother's street
A22 confirmed German (and Brandenburg) soils selenium-poor, feed supplementation supplies eggs and pork; phytate halves zinc absorption from whole-grain diets; inland goitre, iodised …
A26 confirmed Deutsches Schwarzbuntes Niederungsrind: village cow of Brandenburg and Pomerania 1880s–1960s, dual-purpose, 4,000–5,000 kg at 4 % fat; Holstein absorption in the West …
A28 partly confirmed Zentralvieh- und Schlachthof Eldenaer Straße 1881; Tierarzneischule Berlin 1790 under Friedrich Wilhelm II; Rinderpest through the Mark in the 1740s
A31 confirmed Brandenburg sand grassland 3–5 t DM/ha unfertilised, 5–7 with manure and clover; 60 % grazing utilisation; 200 grazing days × 18 kg = 3.6 t = 1.2 ha
A39 partly confirmed Deutsches Sattelschwein assembled after 1948 in the GDR from Angler Sattelschwein and Schwäbisch-Hällisch, near-extinct after 1990, largest herds in Brandenburg, lard …
A40 confirmed 118: 200 kg sow 588 kg concentrate/yr = 0.084 ha; finisher 278 kg = 0.039 ha; doubled on sand at 3 t/ha; 4 kg boiled potatoes replace 1 kg grain, 278 kg grain = 1,100 kg …
A51 confirmed Hardware cloth ≤12 mm, never chicken wire, skirt 45–60 cm, roof net, 1 sq ft vent per bird, shut at dusk; fox, stone marten, raccoon (released Hesse 1934, in Brandenburg …
A53 confirmed Berlin law as the library gives it: register with district vet office, holding number, animal disease fund, flock register kept 3 years; allotment colony rules forbid …
A56 confirmed Turn: Red List breeds with per-head subsidy; water buffalo on the Tegeler Fließ, Heck cattle at Hobrechtsfelde for the birds; hens legal in Berlin gardens, a hundred …
A60 confirmed Plantain and chicory roots reach nearly 2 m; milk on such a ley 12 to 19 µg iodine per 100 g, egg 23 to 43 µg (Norwegian and British figures, none from Brandenburg)
A61 partly confirmed No skin vitamin D at Berlin's latitude from late October to mid-March; 148's eel arithmetic wrong by about seven
A65 confirmed Rauhwolliges Pommersches Landschaf 60 kg, 1.5 lambs, 3 to 5 kg wool, 80 to 120 kg milk at 18 to 20 per cent solids after weaning; Skudde 40 kg, heath sheep of the …
A70 confirmed Thaer to Möglin 1804; Frankenfelde royal sheepfold 1816 with Hardenberg; Koppe on the Eckardstein estates and in the Oderbruch; the Gemeindeschäfer and the Pferchrecht; …
B24 partly confirmed Berlin Zentralvieh- und Schlachthof Eldenaer Straße opened 1881, ~40 ha (check: about 39 ha), own station on the Ringbahn, animals arrived at night, last hall closed …
B25 confirmed Hedersleben 1865: 337 ill, 101 dead from one pig; Virchow's life-cycle work in Berlin; Prussian compulsory Trichinenschau (Ch 8 gives 1866); yard slaughter off the …
B26 confirmed Schlachtfest: home pig slaughter common in Brandenburg villages into the 1970s, between first frost and Christmas; Hausschlachter ~20 pigs a season for a fee and a …
B38 confirmed German seam cuts and uses: Hals/Kamm goulash and Kochfleisch; Bug: Schaufelstück, Falsches Filet, dicker Bug (Sauerbraten); Hochrippe roast; Querrippe and Brust …
E22 confirmed Cölln first recorded 1237; Fischerinsel fishers' houses stood until the 1960s tower blocks; Berlin's origin as fishing settlement on the island
E23 partly confirmed Kietz: Slavic fishers' settlements beside castles in Brandenburg towns, outside town law, rent paid in fish; Spandau, Köpenick, Rathenow, Brandenburg/Havel, …
E24 amended Havel/Spree lakes shallow (Müggelsee mean < 5 m, Havel lakes 2–3 m); eels once counted in tonnes a year from the Havel; fish tithe in eels; fast days two to three a week …
E31 partly confirmed Brandenburg ponds freeze most years, 20–30 cm in a hard winter about one in five; water densest at 4 °C; carp overwinters in mud at a few heartbeats a minute; suffocates …
E33 confirmed Summer: shallow Brandenburg pond > 25 °C in July; dawn oxygen minimum; carp gulping at the surface at dawn as the sign; cyanobacteria > 30 °C
E42 unresolved Wild sustained yield of a Havel-type lake 20–50 kg/ha/yr all species
E44 partly confirmed Spreewald Sorbian kit: Einbaum, Fischzaun, Zugnetz, Bünn
E46 unresolved Aalreuse of the Havel: ~1 m, 40–50 cm first hoop, two funnels, second 8–10 cm, thumb-width gaps; set on the bottom, mouth downstream in autumn, baited, lifted every …
E57 confirmed Wood: alder (Baltic/Havel), beech, fruitwood; never pine, spruce, fir; barrel smoker layout; juniper twig at the end as Spreewald signature
S19 confirmed Berlin road-salt winter stocks (thousands of tonnes, BSR depots)
S24 amended Distances Berlin to Lüneburg 250 km, Halle 150 km, Schönebeck 130 km
C13 confirmed Soil at 1 m around Berlin holds about 9 to 10 °C all year; daily swing vanishes within 0.5 m
C14 confirmed Frost reaches 80 cm in an ordinary Brandenburg winter and 120 cm in a hard one
C15 unresolved The clamp is called a Miete in Brandenburg; a well-made clamp loses about one in ten
R12 confirmed Dickmilch as a Brandenburg farmhouse staple, eaten with sugar and breadcrumbs or drained to quark
R5 confirmed Rye starter: false rise day 2 to 3; Berlin hard water delays pH drop to day 4; climax by day 14 at 100:1 LAB to yeast
R8 amended Dutch settlers brought cucumber pickling to the Spreewald in the 14th century; Fontane on Spreewald pickles (1860s)
M23 dropped Quark with potatoes and linseed oil as the Spreewald dish "on a Friday for three hundred years"
M32 confirmed Figs being tried on Berlin south walls; cardoon dies below minus 15 °C; nettle for fresh cheese only; Galium verum as Labkraut, gave Cheshire its colour more than its …
M33 confirmed A Brandenburg sand cellar is cold enough and too dry for cheese; water carried down
M34 amended Carl Bolle, Meierei C. Bolle, Moabit, 1881; carts with bells; inspected Havelland farms; Berlin infant deaths from bad milk
D22 unresolved Hopped beer keeps and travels; Bremen and Hamburg built fortunes on it; Brandenburg brewed for itself
D24 partly confirmed Berliner Weisse: 3 parts wheat malt to 1 barley; wort not boiled; mixed yeast and Lactobacillus; pH 3.2 to 3.4; hops barely used; "champagne of the north" story stands …
D27 partly confirmed Werder: island town on the Havel, two centuries of fruit for Berlin, sand over clay, south slopes, the Baumblütenfest, fruit by barge and night soil back to the orchards
D29 confirmed Press: 60 to 70 l juice per 100 kg milled apples; Brandenburg wedge presses driven with mallets
D32 partly confirmed Cistercians at Lehnin 1180 and Zinna a few years earlier planted vines; vineyards at Werder, Potsdam and the Kreuzberg by the 14th century; thin sour wine; died in the …
D33 unresolved Solaris and Regent grow on Brandenburg sand without spray; 300 vines in the Viktoriapark tended by the city; the Brandenburg summer now longer and hotter than the …
D35 confirmed Zeidlerei: Slavic tree apiaries in Lower Lusatia by the 10th century (965); the word from a verb meaning to cut; the rope loop climbing method; Charles IV's Zeidel …
D37 confirmed Johann Grüwel, mayor of Kremmen, Brandenburgische Bewährte Bienen-Kunst 1719, "Streusandbüchse", straw hives behind screens, willow in April, heath in August
D38 partly confirmed A Brandenburg colony without sugar or medicine makes about 20 kg a year, needs 18 to 20 kg for winter, keeper takes 10 to 14 kg and a kilogram of wax, loses one hive in …
D44 unresolved Korn: unhopped rye or wheat beer distilled twice; Prussian potato schnapps the 19th century's cheapest spirit, sold by the bucket from the estates east of the Elbe; …
D51 unresolved 800 hobby bee-keepers in Berlin, more per head than any German city; linden honey
T20 confirmed Berlin hungry winters 1946–47: meals collapsing into scramble; households that kept the table did better (ARGUMENT, not finding; owner to decide)
T28 confirmed Brandenburg clay: glacial boulder clay; brickworks Glindow (Werder) and Zehdenick (Havel, museum) built 19th-c. Berlin; Velten stove tiles from the 1830s; stoneware from …
T43 confirmed Household of four: 10–15 kg soap/yr, ~7–8 kg tallow, one winter's beech ash; hard water 14–25 °dH by Berlin district turns soap to scum; wash in rainwater or rinse with …
T47 confirmed Spreewald stoneware salt-glazed since the 14th c.; Görzke potters' guild 1706 and kilns still working; Glindow bricks 1716 to 1945 from clay 35 to 38 % CaCO3; Zehdenick …
T53 confirmed Johann Kunckel 1630 to 1703, Hakendamm glassworks near Potsdam late 1670s, Pfaueninsel 1685, Ars Vitraria Experimentalis 1679, ruby glass; Baruth glassworks founded …
T57 confirmed Bleach cycle: lye with lime 8 to 12 h, grass 7 to 14 days wetted every 2 h, buttermilk sour 1 to 10 for 24 to 48 h, repeated 4 to 8 times, lye never over 3 % on cloth; …
J26 confirmed Mühlenzwang (mill compulsion) in Brandenburg villages; quern forbidden; among the oldest and most hated manorial rights
J33 unresolved Brandenburg well water: iron-brown, hydrogen-sulphide smell from peat, varies over 100 m; stains linen; stand and pour off the top for washing
J38 confirmed Hufe in Brandenburg 30–60 Morgen (8–15 ha); a village of 40 Hufen = 400–600 ha of field plus as much wood and Luch; 131's 3,450 acres is the historical village at …
J43 confirmed Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers 1500–1840, Cambridge 2002, Stavenow estate (Prignitz); villagers bargained, sued, shirked, struck
J9 partly confirmed Brandenburg villages sit on sand islands at the edge of the Luch; strips on the sand, common meadow below, one herd under one herdsman; the Angerdorf with green, pond …