For obvious reasons people attributed erotic qualities to the asparagus. Max de Roche claims in The foods of love (1990): “the asparagus undoubtedly awakens Venus”. He passes on a tried and tested recipe from one Sheik Umar Ibn Mohammed Al Nefzawi. To get the full benefit, prepare them with egg yolk, camel milk, and honey baked in mutton fat. I prefer to keep it a bit more relaxed in the Dutch way with traditional butter sauce, boiled egg and ham.

Whatever may be true of those stories about the stimulating effect of asparagus, there is no question that they have a strong influence on the urinary tract. And then the way in which they should be eaten for a long time: by hand, as if they wanted to touch the pale member lewdly before biting off the cup. The fork should at most serve to support the limp stem. In the Netherlands posh people once had a gilded ‘beak’ to attack the asparagus at the tip. That nonsense is over. Nowadays you can eat well cooked asparagus (there are special high pans) with a knife and fork.

We do not know much about the origin of the asparagus. But this “Queen of Vegetables” with her mysterious taste has appealed to the imagination. It would have occurred in ancient Egypt. Unfortunately, a bunch of papyrus reed was mistaken for asparagus ¹.

The strange name is Greek and comes from ‘a-sparagos’ (unsprouted). The verb ‘spargao’ means ‘to be full to bursting’. They loved it, the ancient Greeks. But it is unlikely that they meant asparagus by that word, because it could represent all kinds of sprouts ². In any case, they grew in the wild, as is still the case throughout the whole of southern Europe, where seeking them is a sport. These are the above-ground green species, which are also cultivated nowadays

The Romans – but then we are a bit further in history – did grow the vegetable ³. Perhaps they had learned that from the Carthaginians, because the fact is that large cultivated asparagus was reported in North Africa at the time. Moreover, Emperor Augustus (again according to tradition!) apparently knew how to prepare them best. He is credited with the expression: “faster than you cook asparagus” (but that is not certain either, even though the standing expression is attested).

 

1) William J. Darby et al., Food the gift of Osiris, London / New York / San Francisco, 1977 pp. 668-669: no hieroglyph for the word. Proof that asparagus only grew there after Christ.

2) Liddell-Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford, 1968 sv. spargao ‘To be full to bursting, swell, be ripe’, also for plants. sv. asparagos / asfaragos “1. stone sperage, asparagus acutifolius; the edible shoots thereof. 2. the shoots of other plants. Perhaps of Persian origin? Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, London / New York, 2003 p .31 sv Asparagos “there is no evidence that asparagus was cultivated in classical Greece. Galenus (129-210): De Alimentorum fac. 11, 58.

3) Andrew Dalby o.c.: The earliest description of how asparagus was grown is found in an appendix to Cato’s textbook On farming (ca 200 BC). See also: J. André, L’Alimentation et la Cuisine à Rome, Paris, 1981 p. 22-23 and Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford 1999 p. 37/38.

The Netherlands are famous for their vegetable growing all over Europe. And they started very early: from 1500 on they were an example for their neighbors during at least three centuries.  England – no less! – imported their vegetables from here and Catharina of Aragón, England’s queen, had her salad sent from Holland by special sailing speedboat. A hundred years later a rich landlord in Zeeuws Vlaanderen (in the South-West of this country) who owned a not too bad vegetable garden boasted: ‘All of Europe is too small to come and stay in my garden’. You can see the result on the brilliant paintings of our old masters.

 

But let me tell you a secret. The fact is that this cold, wet and foggy country (before the climate changed) was not at all suitable for growing vegetables. So we had to help nature a little. By warming everything up. We do a lot of hothouse-growing here. As you can see in this exposition of the Greenery, our biggest organization of vegetable-traders. We even have a district so full of hothouses that it is called the ‘Glass City’. Thousands of square miles of greenhouse. And so we grow what cannot be had easily in the rest of Europe, especially not in winter.

 

What did the Dutch eat before they discovered the greenhouse in the seventeenth century? Obviously the climate confined them to vegetables which to some extent were able to resist the severe winters. Such as cabbage, beetroots and carrots. This here you will get aquainted with our national dish ‘hutspot’: nowadays a stew of potatoes, carrots, onions, with a piece of thin flank of oxen. Its name is a gift to the English language where ‘hotchpotch’ has got the meaning of ‘mishmash’, ‘medly’. A heartbreaking story is connected with the emergence of this dish:

 

During the siege by the Spaniards in 1574, the majority of the population of the city of Leiden got so hungry that they even ate rats. They urged the mayor to surrender whereupon he replied : ‘No my friends, rather eat me’. The inhabitants of Leyden were so impressed by this answer that they held out until they were freed by the ‘Watergeuzen’, a kind of Dutch resistance force, on the 3rd of October. As a reward they were treated to herring and whitebread by their liberators. And ever since, until this very age, Leyden eats herring and whitebread on the 3rd of October.. And hutspot. History and cookery – they cannot be separated …

According to oral tradition the fleeing Spaniards left something behind: a cooking pot with a remainder of hutspot in it. The ravenous Leyden people discovered it and ever since have propagated this dish as something too delicious to describe.

 

At that time all food was cooked in one pot. This dish was called hutspot because it was shaken by the cook to mix all the ingredients, in Dutch: hutsen – ‘to shake’. In reality the dish can have been everything except what you will taste today, because at that time potatoes were still unknown in Holland and even the orange carrots were not yet grown here …

Yet, soon after, in our Golden Age, ‘hutspot’ became the national dish of the Netherlands. Although still not as we know it now. Simon Schama compares it in his book The Embarrasment of Riches (1987) to England’s roastbeef: ‘Roastbeef was the man of action’s heroic dish, commingling muscle and blood, energy and power. The great stews of the Netherlands were more to the taste of ruminative humanism: patiently assembled, eclectic in content, moderately spiced, slowly cooked and even more deliberately eaten’.

 

An old recipe: Take some mutton or beef; wash it clean and chop it fine. Add thereto some greenstuff or parsnips or some stuffed prunes and the juice of lemons or oranges or citron … Mix these together, set the pot on slow fire.. Add some ginger and melted butter and you shall have a fine ‘hutsepot’.

 

How come that today ‘hutspot’ is a mere mishmash of potatoes, carrots and onions with some cheap cooked beef? The poverty in the 18th and 19th century may explain this. Wheat had become too expensive because of several bad harvests. So the potato became our staple food. And hutspot was much better than potatoes “with bare feet’, i.e. unadorned potatoes. So hutspot with a few threads of cheap meat in it was considered a luxury. A smart way to disguise that you ate more potatoes than meat.

During carnival the music bands in Brabant, the Southern middle province of the Netherlands, still wear the ‘stamper’ (masher) proudly around their necks as if it were a royal decoration. At every house they are treated to another ‘stamppot’, as is the generic name of a dish with mashed potatoes as its main substance. But meanwhile ‘hutspot’, where ever you come in the Netherlands, has evolved into a mash with carrots and onions. Cooking and tradition, they cannot be separated …

 

As I have told you, in the old Hutspot recipe there was no mention of carrots, but of parsnips only. Recently it has been claimed that the orange carrot was brought to our regions by the Moors from the Near East. A scholar at the Dutch Agricultural University of Wageningen studied 17^th century paintings and concluded that on a work of Gerard Dou the first orange carrots of Europe are to be seen. That was in 1650, and they were, he says, an original product of Dutch hot bed cultivation.

 

Serves 4:

500g lean boneless beef flank

1 tsp salt

1kg potatoes, sliced

800g carrots, diced

500g onions, finely chopped

 

• Put the beef in a pan, add the salt and pour in 300ml/1⁄2 pint/11⁄4 cups water. Bringto the boil, then lower the heat, cover and simmer for 2 hours, until tender.

• Remove the beef from the pan. Add the potatoes, carrots and onions to the pan and place the beef on top. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

• Pour off the cooking liquid and reserve. Remove the beef and cut into slices. Mash the vegetables and potatoes, adding a little of the cooking liquid. Season with salt to taste and pile on to plates. Top with the meat and serve immediately.

 

 

 

Pancakes are an enormously popular meal in the Netherlands, not only for children, but for all who feel young at heart. The easy to make pancake was and is an ideal main dish for parties at home. It is one of the first recipes Dutch children learn to make for themselves. From a culinary point of view making pancakes may seem all too ordinary. You can make them with the left hand, so to say. But as the piano concertos for the left hand by Ravel and Prokofiew  have demonstrated, outstanding work for the left hand requires a lot of virtuosity …

Pancakes are not merely a festive meal at home in the Netherlands. At present there are about 110 specialized pancake-restaurants in the country which means that you may find at least one of them in even the smallest town. Most are decorated in a cosy, unpretentious way and offer a wide choice of pancakes at relatively moderate prices. A special guide is issued biannually to enable the true devotees to pick a fine pancake-restaurant wherever they happen to be.

Yet all the enhancements that have been thought up through the ages are not essential to make a pancake unforgettable. Allow me to illustrate this with a moving story my husband told me.  He was nine years old during the winter of starvation which as a result of World War II hit the western part of our country in 1944-45. To alleviate the extreme shortages, the Allied Forces started the first food droppings in close proximity to built-up areas on 29 April 1945.

We all ducked away from the windows when we heard several Allied bombers flying in so low and close. Suddenly we saw sacks instead of bombs raining down in a nearby meadow and when nothing more happened we all ran out to fetch them. I was lucky enough to get hold of a large bale which I protected with my body when immediately after a host of adults came storming on and tried to snatch my prize from me. I could not prevent them from opening the sack which appeared to contain flour. Fortunately an authoritative voice cut in, “No fellows, this sack belongs to that boy. Let his family distribute whatever they can spare among the neighbours. They will know where it is needed most.”

            Soon after my mother arrived with a (tyreless) bike and the sack was transported home. My parents invited some people to take their share of this gift from heaven. That night we huddled in the twilight around a small emergency stove (“Mayo-kacheltje”). It was fed with splinters of an inside door which we had started sacrificing long ago.  Its smoke went up directly into the room. We had no gas, no coals, no logs, no electricity. We had no butter or vegetable oil. No milk or sugar. No yeast or baking powder. Only water. How he managed it is still a mystery to me, but ‘Daan’ – a young man in hiding with us – baked an enormous,  very thick pancake of the flour. It was so delicious! I can still recall its rather dry and smoky taste. It was the best pancake I ever ate. We and our neighbours feasted on such pancakes for more than a week. We called them affectionately “our bath mats”.

My husband’s late mother has kept the sack. It was originally meant for Portland Cement.  She embroidered part of it to commemorate the Allied food dropping which no doubt has saved the lives of some of my dearest.

 

Across the world and throughout history baking has always been a festive occasion. Bread and pastry were luxuries compared to cooked cereals.  It required finer flour, oil or butter, milk and honey. Moreover it needed more heat, forms or even ovens. In the Ancient Middle East ovens have been excavated which date from at least 6000 years ago and in the oldest written documents professional bakers are mentioned. Ancient Egyptian pictures and scale models of specialised bakeries have been found, showing that they often also served as breweries.

By baking early humankind managed to transform the basic food available, in this case a primitive kind of grain, into something totally new. Bread and pastries were considered evidence of an advanced culture in many ancient civilizations. A Sumerian proverb from one of the oldest collections of sayings in the world, written on clay tablets about 4000 year ago, runs as follows,

 

(A cake) was made of  gunida-wheat instead of honey.

The Nomand ate it and did’t recognize what was in it

(A barbarian does not know what refined pastry is).

B.Alster, Proverbs of ancient Sumer, Bethesda, Maryland: CDL Press, 1997, 103, 390

 

Most cookery books are devoted to what you can serve with traditional foodstuffs. In this website I want to concentrate on the basic types of bread, cake and biscuits people all over the world are baking from flour. The main types of flour are ground from the seeds of wheat, barley, rye, spelt, millet, buckwheat, oat, chickpea, maize, rice, amaranth and quinoa. Also cassave, chestnuts and potatoes are used. The products are baked in a flat pan made of earthenware or metal, in an oven built of stones or forged from iron, and sometimes they use special metal tools to bake waffles and wafers.

It is amazing how much inventiveness has been invested in the art of baking. Unfortunately I had to make a selection, but I have tried to cover every continent and as many countries as I could visit personally or for which I found reliable informants. Since baking is more luxurious than cooking there are regions where people cannot afford to bake in an oven. Mostly they have to confine themselves to pancakes or flatbread. However, even at this basic level there is much more variation than is commonly realized. And festive it remains to enjoy pancakes, as everyone who has kept in touch with their inner child knows.

Recipes have toured the whole world. Jewish recipes, for example, have been adopted in many countries where Diaspora Jews settled. If I was unable to establish where it started I had to cut the knot sometimes, and in this case I chose Israel.

Obviously countries in which an age-long baking culture could develop are somewhat overrepresented here. Therefrom I have tried to select regional classics. Whenever that seemed necessary I have taken the liberty to modernize the recipes without impairing their key caracteristics. I have aimed to include a wide variety of preparation modes and types of flour, indicating where the more exotic types can be obtained. All recipes rely on normal kitchenware, so one will look in vain for a custom-built brick oven, but a French baguette from your own cooker is definitely within the range of possibilities.

 

Caption:

Old Egyptian bakery (c. 3300 year ago). Top left: two servants knead the dough with their feet. Top middle: water-carriers. Top right and below: bakers forming bread: round, triangular, but also more fanciful shapes, e.g. small cows. Bottom right: a man carries flatbread dough to the charcoal ovens in which the slices are pressed against the hot inner sides. Such ovens are still in use, in Damascus for example. Bottom left: probably deep-frying in a metal pan. Picture after Darby, Ghalioungi and Grivetti, Food: The Gift of Osiris, vol. 2, London: Academic Press, 1977, 523.

It is generally agreed that the words wafer and waffle (Dutch wafel) must be derived from the Germanic verb weben ‘to weave’. The biscuits owe their name to their appearance as a coarse type of weave resembling a honey-comb (German Wabe). The idea for a wafer/waffle iron probably arose when somebody concluded that a pancake could be made quicker when baked on both sides at the same time. And then discovered that the result was quite something else. Cast-iron was chosen to retain the heat longer and the honeycombed pattern kept the wafer in place.

In France and the Netherlands thin wafers were called oblie, after Latin oblatum ‘that what is sacrificed’, a name for the not yet consecrated host. This host was made by monks in a wafer iron at the time. In Prague a bible dating from 1340 is kept (the Welislav bible), in which

Saint Wencelas (c. 905-929) is depicted baking his own hosts. It is a large iron and so he was baking for himself. The large hosts with biblical drawings were for the priest, the small ones for the communion of the congregation. Except on the Thursday before Easter, by then still New Years Day. Then the numerous poor got large blessed hosts in a festive sweet version. A real treat, because normally poor people only ate rye bread.

Around 1300 laymen were allowed to bake the wafers because clergymen were no longer able to produce large enough quantities of hosts needed. Those oublieurs brought their wafers to church, but also sold them in the streets. Probably they rolled them up to prevent breaking as the wafers were very brittle. Such wafers are still called oublies.

When Pope Gregory XIII changed the calendar the distribution on White Thursday stopped and the wafer became a secular pastry. The distribution moved from Easter to January and from church to private individuals. Oublies were reserved for New Year’s day and flat wafers were baked all year long. A self-respecting Dutch family possessed an own wafer iron. Often with biblical drawings but also of the profession of the owner: a mill, a plow or even a sour poem as was written on an iron from Twente (1754):

 

Segt Niemand u geheim

Nog u geheime gedachte

Die heden is U friend

Sal morgen u verachten.

 

Tell nobody your secret

Nor your secret thought

Who is your friend today

Will despise you tomorrow

 

But the wafers that came out of it were meant to make friends. With the electric wafer/waffle -irons it has become very easy to build up a cheerful circle of friends.

I do not keep my recipes under cover for you!

 

See for more information: Janny de Moor, The wafer and its roots in: H. Walker (ed.), Look and Feel: Studies in Texture, Appearance and Incidental Characteristics of Food: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1993, Prospect Books: Totnes 1994, 119-12. ISBN 0 907325 56 4 (also on internet).

A beautiful painting by the Dutch painter Jan Steen is exposed in the Fabre museum in Montpellier, France. Its title is the well-known proverb: “As the Old sang, so shall the Young peep” (Soo D’Oude Songen, Soo Pypen De Jonge). A laughing young woman leans back comfortably while she has her glass filled, apparently not for the first time, by a boy teasingly holding the pitcher high, so that it is quite an effort for her to catch the thin stream of wine. The woman has already kicked out her slipper. High from the chimney, Amor looks down on her, as if to indicate that the wine will probably lead this cheerful woman astray. A bearded man sits behind her, his black hat low over his forehead. He looks satisfied and is apparently a long way off. Grandmother reads aloud roguish rhymes, a bagpipe whistles right through it, and on the table it’s an incredible mess of all kinds of food scraps.

In between the whole scene, the children. A baby sleeps through all the noise on the arm of her singing nurse. A toddler is sucking on the spout of a wine jug. Another child is whining to be the first to get hold of a completely unnecessary new dish that is still being carried in. A kid of about eight years old doesn’t even ask anymore – he gets a jug of wine from the cooler all by himself.

As often, Jan Steen (1625/26-1679) is moralizing here against excessive eating and drinking. The theme apparently interested him so much that a painting of the same name by him can be seen in the Mauritshuis in The Hague as well as in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. And his other paintings often go too against excesses at table. On the other hand, those same paintings radiate so much joy that you wonder if he really meant to be so critical.

What makes me doubt most of all is the way that woman holds her wine glass: the flat part of the foot between thumb and forefinger, as it should be according to the etiquette. You can already see it in medieval drawings and paintings. And that’s how serious wine tasters still do! Not by the stem, let alone the whole glass in your greasy claw. No, subtly at the foot. Actually a very difficult way of holding which definitely requires concentration if you are a bit tipsy. However, that cheerful drinker brings it off fabulously well. Did Jan Steen mean to say that you do have to teach the children how to drink wine properly? And that it is difficult to draw the limit between ‘in moderation’ and immoderate? What is proper? – you learn that through “good” upbringing. From times immemorial books have been written about it, because it is so difficult, all those rules of etiquette.

But don’t the Old pass on all kinds of totally outdated traditions to the Young in this field? Just to keep it to the wine: you have those fixed combinations with dishes. White wine with fish, for example. Once I gave the advice to drink a rosé with a certain fish dish. Just because it tasted better. But how I deplored to have done it! One reviewer after another scornfully stated that I didn’t know the rules. But while in Montélimar I have even seen French connoisseurs drink red Côtes du Rhône with their fish. And in a classy Parisian bistro, they poured the rest of the red wine right over their dessert of strawberries with sugar. Yes, what is proper?

At the time, I always watched in horror when a dear friend of ours removed the lead from a wine bottle with a sensual gesture of his corkscrew. That was not the way to do it! Had he never seen how elegantly a good waiter always only cuts off the top? But that friend was ahead of his time. Nowadays, in France, you can only put your wine bottles in the bottle bank if you have the neck completely uncovered. Why then there is still lead (or aluminum or even plastic) around it? Simply because it is a habit from the time when wine bottles were still sealed with lacquer. Hence still the red. And that stupid cork, although wine professors have established already a long time ago that a screw cap is just as good and does not produce corked bottles.

Anyone who wants something new must dare to explore new paths. Otherwise this world will perish from conservatism. Children especially should not believe everything adults claim to be true. All innovation starts with revolutionary behaviour, also at or under the table. That is what makes life so exciting.