Conclusion

© Fiep Westendorp

So this is my last post. It feels like eating the leftovers after a perfectly ruined dinner...

As for the questions I asked myself in the first post, here's what I've found:

• How is the subject of food treated in Dutch children's books?

Food is used as a catalyst for change. In Otje, it was to set off the story. In Pluk van de Petteflat food was used to resolve a situation. It also worked to offset a transformation. Adults behaved as children and it helped one of the kids' mother, Mrs Helderder, to become a little less uptight.

• How is it treated in Dutch literary work?

In literary work, food is used for its strong metaphorical potential. Interestingly enough, the focus lies on hunger and lack of food.

• What difference is there between food aimed at children and adults?

The difference is the real, tangible food that often serves an extra purpose (comfort, transformation) in children's books, and the aspects we associate with food (eating, starving, tasting) used in a different context (often sex) in adult literature.  

• How is Dutch food portrayed in foreign literature, if at all?

It is represented, but in a rather generic, maybe even stereotypical way (Edam cheese as the main identifier of Dutch-ness).

Thank you for reading!

Speculaas(ions)

I suppose it's only reasonable to include one post about the titular biscuit of this blog. The exact origin of both the biscuit and the name are unclear. One theory of etymology is the Latin 'speculum' which means mirror, since the biscuits turn out as the mirrored image of the stamps used to create their design. Often they are simple windmills like the ones above, but more complicated patterns exist:

A boat, barn, elephant and horse, apparently.

What makes these biscuits special is their distinct flavour. The spices commonly used are cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white pepper, though I'm fairly certain the ones I usually eat have some anise in them as well. These spices you can buy in store.

I have two of these, just to be sure.

Though these crispy biscuits are all fine and dandy, the moist version, 'filled' speculaas (it's got almond paste in) is my absolute favourite and I could eat buckets of it!

Our family's old cookbook just so happens to have a recipe to make it from scratch. These days, we can buy the almond paste, or 'amandelspijs' in Dutch, ready-made, but making it from scratch tastes better, I find. Here's how you make it according to Het Nieuwe Kookboek:

Mix together:

100g ground almonds

100g sugar

grated lemon peel

juice of a quarter lemon

1/2 (half) egg

Then for the speculaas, mix together:
75g self raising flour
75g flour
100g butter
50g light brown sugar
1 1/2g salt
2-3 tsp speculaas spices
(1 tbsp milk - if necessary)

to form a cohesive ball. Roll it out to a 18cm by 26cm rectangle. Cut in half, and put the lower half on a well greased baking tray. Roll out the 'amandelspijs' in a shape just slightly smaller that the lower half, lay it on top of it, and then the other half of the speculaas dough on top of that. Press edges together if wanted. Decorate with some extra almonds. Use the rest of the beaten egg to brush over the top. Place in an oven, preheated to 170 degrees Celsius, for about 40 minutes. Let it cool before serving.

Honestly, it's the best thing you'll ever taste. Here's my attempt from Sinterklaas (the national holiday we usually eat this at, our Christmas basically) two years ago:

Let me tell you, this is still the best thing I ever made!

Something smells fishy!

© Fiep Westendorp

With almost half the country situated below sea level, the Dutch have had to learn to make water our friend. We use if for:

• transport 
  
  
  
• leisure 
  

• enclosure (nature's very own fence)
  

• and of course, food
  

The most famous Dutch fish dish, by far, is herring. Every year, the first tub of the season of 'Hollandse Nieuwe' herring is sold at auction for charity. Last year, it raised €56,500. That's a lot of money for a few fish, but it's tradition. As is the way we eat it: raw. After carefully being undone of the head and the bones, it's topped with sauce, or raw shredded union, or gherkin, or all of the above, or none. Now, you can eat it like this:

But most common is this:

And yes, that is supposed to be traditional Dutch attire.

It's a true Dutch delicacy, along with our smoked eel, and 'kibbeling' (deep fried bits of cod in batter):

And of course it comes with its own sauce.

As you can see, we don't do 'haute cuisine'; our dishes aren't very refined. Which is why I found it interesting to see that the fish dish mentioned in Annie M.G. Schmidt's Otje was a beautiful salmon paté in the shape of, you guessed it, a fish. Though I doubt it was as astonishing as Alice B. Toklas' Bass for Picasso, it was supposed to be the 'piece de resistance' of the fancy dinner Tos, Otje's father had cooked up. 

© Fiep Westendorp

Tos is described as a 'hot-headed chef' and often throws a tantrum. At more than one occasion, he almost throws the salmon dish against the wall before it could even be served.   

© Fiep Westendorp

Though Otje succeeds in saving the dish every time, it's to no avail. Her pet mice crash the dinner and Tos gets fired, thus setting them on the adventure the rest of the book is all about.

Behold, a great cliché, with the salmon paté in the middle.
© Fiep Westendorp

A brilliant lack (of food)

In children's books there always seems to be an abundance of food. Adult literature, too, seems to appreciate the many metaphorical qualities it possesses. One of the best novels to use this, I think, is Een Schitterend Gebrek by Arthur Japin, by far my favourite Dutch novel. It was translated to English as In Lucia's Eyes. Unfortunately, this misses the all-encompassing theme of the book that the Dutch title alludes to: 'gebrek.' This word, as many Dutch words, translates in several ways. In the context of the title, it would be considered 'flaw' with the full title translating to 'a brilliant flaw.' This is what the young man who we now know as Casanova it told by his friend, when he tells him the girl he's in love with only has one flaw: she's too young. However, in the context of the entire text, I would argue 'gebrek' translates here as a 'lack' or 'absence.' The most powerful metaphor concerning food in this novel is indeed about the lack of it.

The message Japin tries to convey is simple in essence, but the amount of layers of metaphor make it seem overly complex. Bear with me.

With Casanova as one of its few characters, the novel not surprisingly is a comment on love and sex. Lucia, the protagonist, breaks her engagement with, and consequently the heart of, a young Giacomo Casanova.As her face is maimed by smallpox while he was away for a while, she decides she can no longer be his wife (it would be social suicide in the circles of Venice he moves in) and leaves him with a lie before he can return. Years later she meets him again in Amsterdam as the veiled courtesan Galathée, without him ever knowing who she really is.

In the time between their split and reunion, Lucia has gone through hell and back. She has had an extraordinary education, but is reduced to earning money as a whore in Amsterdam, and even that is hard with her 'ghastly'-looking face. Though she works her way up the ladder (by concealing her face with a veil) it is in these times, she says, she's known hunger. With too many women and too little men, getting a client was almost impossible. Japin expertly uses the connection between food and sex. I still don't know whether Lucia is talking about the literal starvation she felt because she wasn't earning enough money to buy food, or if the starvation was yet another layer of metaphor. Here's how the three stages of hunger are described:

1. The gnawing of the stomach. Worry grows to panic and your body wants everything it sees.
2. The lack becomes acute. There is no time or space for fear and nerves. Wild, you scrabble and collect even what is utterly inedible. You grab everything you get and stuff it in your mouth. You no longer think but take.
3. Eventually nature grants mercy. Face to face with death, apathy washes over you like a wave. You conquer everything and let yourself drift along. This gives a blissful peace, because of which you don't look back at life anymore, but think ahead. You no longer want to own, no longer want to take, not even hold. Your thoughts surrender their siege. The spirit opens itself. Here, there's space for hallucinations. This feeling is so addictive that it's hard to be grateful when you are saved after all.

She then likens this to sailors fallen overboard. First they look and calculate all the chances they have. Then they become desperate, clinging to anything they can get their hands on. Only when all of this is to no avail do they relax, and spread their limbs in surrender. They no longer desire, but trust the water. It is in this state that they are most easily saved. Lucia then gets to her point: this was the way she was hauled along by love. She thought that in order to survive it she had to cling to it for dear life. 

So from sex, to hunger, to drowning, to love. Do you follow? 

The entire book is a memoir Lucia writes to her unborn child. A child she only wants to teach one thing: love. Not the noun, but the verb. She urges it to love. She explains how all her life she saw people craved love, the noun. For the longest time she confused it for desire. People spoke of it as a must, as something you had to have. Again, Japin brings hunger into the equation: love was more important than even bread, for whomever had love didn't worry about hunger. But in all the different scenarios of people pining for love, she realised it was always something given to them. She, too, clung to it when it was there, and to the memory of it when it was gone. She played it over and over in her head. 

It then hit her: if love was something given to you, you would expect it to cease to exist when you were no longer receiving it. But that was furthest from the truth: her fondest memories of Giacomo, of their love, were from their time apart. Her love blossomed, not because she was beloved, but because she loved.

This is the message to her child: we are unhappy because we think we need to receive love. But in order to be saved, a sailor needs to surrender to the waves. We need to give away what we desire most. She says her 'gebrek' taught her that, and therefor I argue it translates as 'lack', rather than 'flaw' since it was only in the absence of receiving love that she realised this.

De Zoet(ste) Pannekoeken

© Fiep Westendorp

I believe that no matter where Dutch people go, whether on holiday or on a more permanent basis, we will always have pancakes. They are so simple, have been around for centuries and are ingrained in our lives. First they are made for us, by parents and camp directors and Kapitein Koek (a brand of readymade, store bought pancakes). Then we learn how to make them ourselves. My parents taught me the basics, but I'm not kidding when I say we actually learn this in school as well. A household management class teaches us how to pay taxes, budget our income, plan parenthood, and prepare one meal: pancakes. I'm currently in the phase where I bake them to my own personal taste (I like to call this perfection) almost every other week.

These are the ones I made this week.

And maybe someday, there will be a time when I teach my children and grandchildren how to make them, and the cycle starts anew.

Having moved away from home, I understand that feeling of wanting to hold on to something familiar. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, this is exactly what happens. Only the year is 1799, the country Japan, and the right ingredients hard to come by, apparently. On the breakfast menu are "improvised pancakes." That, and "gritty bread," "rancid butter," sauerkraut, "a well-traveled round of Edam" (yes, we love our cheese so much, we'd bring it on a journey halfway across the world), "sour apples," and coffee. All of this is consumed by a crowd of well-traveled, gritty, rancid, sour crewman from Ireland, Prussia, and various areas in what is now known as The Netherlands. They all seem to be represented in this odd pot-luck breakfast. And I believe food is used to represent character throughout.

This comes from a book set in a time and place where food is of great importance. Granted, the 'Golden Age' for the VOC (Dutch East Indies Trading Company) was long gone, but sugar and spices were still being shipped halfway across the world. Jacob de Zoet, the novel's protagonist and a young clerk, is tasked with piecing together "the factory accounts" in search of fraud and embezzlement. 

Every chapter opens with a Roman numeral, a location, and the time and date. Mitchell often uses meals to indicate the time of day with things like "before breakfast" and "after lunch". He clearly understands food to be the basis of our days, of our lives. And interestingly enough, he doesn't shy away from any other physical themes and bodily functions either. 

When his characters discuss the turbulent political situation in the Netherlands of the time, De Zoet remarks: "most care more about food in their bellies and peace in the land." I think this is true for most of us.

My Jam

© Fiep Westendorp

What is it about blackberries that temporarily throws adults back to childhood? Annie M.G. Schmidt explores this brilliantly in Pluk van de Petteflat, in which these 'hasselbramen' make anyone who eats them want to play, run, and giggle together like children. They were 'thinly disguised' drugs, basically.

Granted, in the real world blackberries don't have quite this strong of an effect. But picking a bunch and returning home with the loot just seems to set something off in adults. I have seen my father hold up a little bowl with a total of four blackberries from the shrub in our garden. I swear, he was so proud; like it was his greatest accomplishment; like these tiny, sour berries were a huge trophy he'd just won.

My mother has similar memories of my grandmother. Whenever her family would happen upon wild blackberry shrubs while driving through the country, they'd stop to pick them bare. She remembers my grandmother's fanaticism. The abundance of thorns could never stop her from getting to the perfect ones buried deep within the bramble, untouched by birds. The really thick and juicy ones wouldn't even make it home. Our word for snacking is 'snoepen'. There is something mischievous about the word, though, as if it's sneakily done. So when I asked my grandmother for her side of the story, and she used this word to say she'd eat the thick blackberries straight from the shrub, her face and tone were that of a child caught stealing a cookie from the jar.

Whatever did make it home, sometimes entire buckets or baskets full, would be made into jam. With arms covered in scratches, my grandmother would set about making jars upon jars of deliciously sweet fruit confiture. "It's quite easy actually," she assured me. All you need is fruit, jelly sugar, maybe some lemon juice and a big saucepan on the hob. Most sugar would do, really, but jelly sugar has got pectin in, a natural gelling agent. Because of this it only has to be on the heat for 4 minutes, instead of at least 45.

This sugar is great!

In the summer season, fresh produce is easy for her to come by. Family and friends all grow fruit and give my grandmother whatever they can spare. If there's too much, and often there's kilos, she freezes it. This way, she can even make jam in the winter. She mixes and matches all kinds of ingredients. Sometimes the labels are too small to fit all the types of berries on. It always tastes great though. Whenever we see her, she always makes sure to send us home with a tutti-frutti cake, and if we're lucky, one of her jars of jam.

Though in all her years of jam-making, I believe my grandmother never mistook blackberries for hallucinogenic ones that made her blubber like a baby, unlike Mrs Helderder below, who unfortunately wasn't aware of the power of the 'hasselbramen'.

This is what I imagine my grandmother's kitchen looks like whenever she makes jam.
© Fiep Westendorp

Potato eaters

Vincent van Gogh's The Potato Eaters.

We sure do love our potatoes. We have ever since people recognised their nutritional value and stopped feeding them solely to the pigs. The fact that the plant and fruits (yes, they produce small, tomato like fruits) are toxic, was the main cause of their initial rejection.

I mean, they don't seem very appetising to me either.

These days, we couldn't imagine a world without potatoes. I grew up eating plain boiled ones for dinner at least four times a week, every week (though we'd mash them together with some gravy on our plates, to add a bit more flavour). Every day at 4pm, my dad would give me and my sister an apple and some crisps as a snack. He'd put them in the same bowl, which turned the crisps at the bottom slightly soggy, something I do not recommend. 

Then there were the rarer occasions of mash (homemade or instant), gnocchi, or 'stamppot'. This last one is arguably the most Dutch dish we have. The literal translation would be 'mash pot', and in its plainest form is nothing more than a highly unimaginative mashing together of vegetables and potatoes, sometimes dressed with crispy bacon cubes, smoked sausage, onions, and/or pickles, depending on individual taste and the chosen vegetable. 

 This is the ideal: an appetising dish that actually looks inviting.

But more often than not, it just turns out like this: a goo, drowning in gravy...

The most popular stamppot vegetables include sauerkraut, carrots, endive and kale, or 'boerenkool' in Dutch. This translates to 'farmer's cabbage', which is also the name of the stamppot dish itself when prepared with kale. My family eats this version quite a lot, and I always wondered whether that's because my mother is a farmer's daughter. (We have a folklore tale along the lines of a stork delivering babies, only this version has children being discovered in cabbages and I have therefore always associated cabbage with offspring. Farmer's daughter and farmer's cabbage have always been oddly linked in my mind.)

My grandfather did actually grow potatoes on his farm. Officially these were for flour purposes (to make instant mash etc.), but my mother's family always kept a huge amount to eat for themselves, enough to last them until the next harvest. When I asked my mum about it, she shared some memories with me: 

"As a little girl, I helped with selecting the potatoes. Standing in our barn, at a table and conveyor belt, I had to pick out the rotten ones. Part of the young potatoes we kept in a cool, isolated space, to sow the next season. All the other potatoes went to the flour factory up north. They were picked up in giant trucks. Sometimes even at night. In the harvest period, people worked 24/7 to transport the entire harvest of the north of the country to the factory. We ate them boiled, mashed and fried."

"In the end, I always want potatoes." Though for her the ultimate indulgence is mash and I usually crave them fried, Nora Ephron does hit the nail on the head when she talks about potatoes in her book Heartburn. For me, they are the ultimate comfort food, fighting for the top spot with chocolate. They are even more comforting when you don't have to prepare them yourself. In Pluk van de Petteflet, one of my favourite and earliest children's books, the 'Stampertjes' get to eat a giant bowl of fries whenever they're ill. Which, curiously enough, is every other chapter. They instantly feel better. The comfort probably doesn't come from the greasy, salty mountain of carbs, but more from the fact that their caring, food loving father prepares it just for them. Nora Ephron has a theory on this too: "when you're feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make [them] for you, but let's face it: the reason you're blue is that there isn't anyone to make them for you." I would like to add that any attempt to recreate your parents' perfect potatoes never tastes as good, or not as good as you remember it to taste anyway. 

The 'Stampertjes' were a lucky bunch.
© Fiep Westendorp

We have many different types of fried potatoes in the Netherlands: wedges, slices, chips, fries, 'krieltjes', etc. These last ones are tiny potato balls, cut out of bigger potatoes with a 'scooper spoon'. Though these days we buy them ready-made in the supermarket, an old cookbook of ours shows how to do it yourself:

These are my favourites still. 

Lastly, I'd like to talk about condiments. No one eats fried potatoes in any form without a sauce of some kind. At every 'snackbar' (small shops where you can buy everything deep fried) you can order a 'patat met' (or 'fries with') and they'll top your chips with a giant dollop of mayonnaise (or 'frietsaus', a sweeter version with less fat). Of course you can also ask for ketchup. Though we've never heard of salt and vinegar, we do have a whole range of other sauces: saté (peanut sauce), 'oorlog' (meaning 'war': peanut sauce, mayonnaise and raw onions), speciaal (meaning 'special'; ketchup, mayonnaise and raw onions), curry ketchup, garlic sauce, Joppie sauce and many more.

And now I've gone and made myself very hungry, so if you'll excuse me, I've got some potatoes to fry.

Here we go!

© Fiep Westendorp

Hello and welcome!

This blog will be an experiment in many ways. Growing up with Dutch books, I never realised how much they discuss food. Or rather, include food. Through a combined history of farming traditions and a blooming spice trade, the Dutch think of food in a very practical, but very flavourful way. It is regarded as sustenance, as fuel, the basis of life, but is acknowledged as being an indulgence at times as well. An abundance of salt, sugar and spices is key in Dutch cuisine. This is reflected in our literature, where food is often a foundation for scenes, if not entire novels.

Children's books in particular include the mention, consumption, and experience of food. This is why, besides cookbooks and novels, I would like to focus on the books I used to read, or have had read to me as a child.
I have always found that looking back on one's childhood can be confusing, and I have often felt betrayed by my own memories. Part of me hopes that looking back with food as a specific focus will help, but part of me also worries that the fond memories might crumble under the analytic way I will need to look at these books. The remaining part of me is just really excited to be able to devote an entire blog to some of the things I love most: Dutch food, children's books, and the way foreigners perceive Dutch culture. Let's say these parts are divided 30/30/40.

When looking through everything, I will be keeping these questions in mind:

- How is the subject of food treated in Dutch children's books?
- How is it treated in Dutch literary work?
- What difference is there between food aimed at children and adults?
- How is Dutch food portrayed in foreign literature, if at all?