Janny de Moor produced this book jointly with Nico de Rooij and Albert Tielemans. It is the English translation of the original Dutch edition Het kookboek van de eeuw: De beste Nederlandse recepten which appeared in 1999. Dispel the feeling of tedium shrouding the all too serious 20th century by a glimpse into the hitherto jealously guarded secrets of one hundred years of exuberant cookery in the frugal Netherlands. This book will teach you more about true Dutch mentality than a lot of guides and handbooks. You will get the feeling of meeting them in person at their own table.
The book is composed of 10 chapters, each of them covering a decade and containing 10 recipes that may be regarded as representative of that particular period. There are sufficient options to compose a full-fledged period menu, even vegetarian. The dishes, presented on crockery fashionable at the time, are magnificently photographed. Reproductions of old menu’s, restaurants, people eating and working, combined with pictures of statesmen and important happenings like royal weddings and popular musicals evoke the historical settings. Moreover you will find essays on various subjects, like vegetarianism, cheese, fish, Indonesian cuisine, Dutch porcelain, cutlery and glass ware and a list of culinary museums in the country. With this book you are all set for the discovery of modern Dutch cuisine.
Charming stories accompany every recipe and from the introduction to each chapter you can reconstruct the situation in which the dishes were created. You even get the source from which they were taken, so that – if need be – you can pursue strict authenticity. Today, after so much change, ranging from hygiene to household appliances and dietetics, absolute literalness in following prescriptions from the first half of the century was undesirable of course. Respecting originality, the authors have felt free to modernise recipes a little where this was deemed necessary.
