Speculaasjes are good, speculaas with almond paste is better. The version bought in Dutch shops is often a little on the dry side, but maybe that is just me. The recipe on this page is enough for almost 4 pounds of very rich (=fat) stuffed speculaas. It is easy to make the half amount, however, even…
Netherlands
Speculaasjes – Traditional Dutch Cookies
Speculaas or speculoos is one of the Dutch culinary specialties. It is a spiced cookie, made with wooden forms or moulds. They are typically winterfood, and especially associated with the feast of ‘Sint Nicolaas’ or Saint Nicholas, the original Santa Claus. This feast is celebrated on 5 or 6 December. Speculaas is very old, the…
Quince jelly
In the Dutch language quinces are called quince apple or or quince pear. According to the sixteenth-century recipe for quince pie, quince apples must cooked and quince pears baked. I am not sure why, the form of a quince makes no difference in the preparation. The recipe on this page is for quince jelly from…
Sluberkens
Straight to the recipe Medieval pasties with bone marrow In 2006 I acquired the book Bones by Australian chef de cuisine Jennifer McLagan. The front cover has a splendid picture of roasted marrow bones. This led to my browsing through the editions of medieval cook books on my bookshelves to see whether anything interesting was done with marrow…
Cook’s Salmon Salad
Straight to the recipe Simply delicious A delicious recipe amalgamated from two nineteenth century cookbooks written by ‘kitchen maids’. In eighteenth century England the housewife or her housekeeper ruled the cookbooks, in The Netherlands it was the keukenmeid (litt. kitchen maid), which is not quite the same as the housekeeper but more a female cook. However, I will use that in the translations…
Red cabbage the Dutch way
Straight to the recipe A nineteenth-century recipe with apples and apple syrup Originally I had planned a completely different recipe for this month, but then I noticed this old-fashioned recipe for red cabbage in a Dutch cookery book from the middle of the nineteenth century: Betje, de goedkoope keukenmeid. (Betje, the Cheap Cook). It is the…
Peperkoek, the Dutch version of gingerbread
A delicious treat This ‘pepper cake’ is very popular in the Netherlands, and is known under several other names, like ontbijtkoek (breakfast cake) and kruidkoek (spice cake), or connected to regions like Groninger koek or Deventer koek. It is promoted by the food industry as a healthy snack, because it contains no fat. However, sweeteners like honey and sugar constitute more than 50% of…
Pickle Herring, the ‘forgotten fish’
It is time to change that! In February 2016 I organized a cookery course for the first time in nearly ten years, with members of the re-enactment group Het Woud der Verwachting (litt: ‘the forest of expectation’, after a historical novel by the Dutch author Hella Haasse). The menu was in concordance with the date of the course:…
Dutch muffins with speculaas spices
There are two kinds of muffins, English ones, and American muffins. Muffins originate from England, but are also very popular in the United States. They were first mentioned in the eighteenth century.The English muffin is made from a yeast-dough that is baked on a griddle on the stove instead of in the oven. After baking…
‘Split nuns’
Stuffed eggs from early sixteenth century The oldest extant Dutch cookbook in print dates from 1514. It is titled Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (A noble cookery book). The recipe on this page is taken from this book wich has 175 recipes in all. Stuffed eggs have allways been a popular dish. This particular recipe is called ghecloven nonnen,…
Stuffed meatballs in lettuce
Straight to the recipe And about the history of a typically Dutch snack, the ‘frikandel’ The original recipe on this page is called Om Frickedillen in Krop-salaet te maken (to make frickedillen in lettuce). According to Dutch dictionaries, a ‘ frikadel’ is obsolete for meatball, and ‘frikandel’ is vernacular and incorrect. The Frickedillen from the recipe below are indeed meatballs, prepared…
Garden Salad
Straight to the recipe The kitchen garden en vogue In the Middle Ages vegetables were impopular. They were unhealthy according to the dietetics of those days, and were held in low esteem. The poor ate greens out of economical need, but the rich and powerful preferably gorged themselve on meat and fowl (and fish if it was…
Chicken with spring vegetables
Straight to the recipe A recipe from the First Stadtholderless Period On 30 April 2013 Dutch Queen Beatrix abdicated from the throne and Willem-Alexander was inaugurated as King of the Netherlands. For the first time in 123 years the Netherlands have a king instead of a queen. As a counterweight to the excessive monarchist manifestations,…
Cucumber Salad
Straight to the recipe A familiar recipe with a twist One of the first modern recipes I published in the Dutch section of this website was a cucumber salad. That was back in 2002. In the following years I kept adding recipes to this page which eventually contained cucumber salads from all over the world. This is the first historical recipe for cucumber…
Wafers with whipped cream
Medieval Dutch wafers Straight to the recipe Wafers are delicious and easy to make. Actually they are a kind of ‘pressed pancakes’. According to The Oxford Companion to Food wafers are thin and crisp, waffles are thicker and made with yeast. The recipe on this page is for thin wafers. The miniature is from the Velislav Picture Bible, which was created…