Serves two:

• orange pumpkin of about 1.25 kg
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 chopped onion
• 250 g cleaned Brussels sprouts

 

Sauce:

• 2 heaped tablespoons fair trade peanut butter
• 1 clove garlic, pressed
• 1-2 tablespoons lemon juice
• salt
• water

 

Garnish:

• red pepper
• chopped parsley
• cornflakes

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‘American’ because of the ingredients, especially peanut butter and cornflakes. Doctor and vegetarian John Harvey Kellogg claimed that he invented peanut butter around 1890 for patients with dental problems. ‘Not at all certain’, writes Andrew F. Smith in The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (2007). And he immediately adds that people in South America, where the bean is native, and in Africa, where it was planted by slave traders as food for their merchandise, also ate it ground. Slaves in turn brought it back to North America. The Dutch word pinda for peanut was derived from Congolese via Papiamento.

Since Kellogg was an exceptionally good promoter, peanut butter became a hit among vegetarians, but not only there. Children liked it and could spread it on their own bread, which made the product so popular in 1920 that it had a profound influence on the cuisine of North America. Americans love their peanuts very much. For example Andrew Smith experiences the smell of peanut roasting  as ‘heavenly’ and sees the combination of peanuts/chocolate (peanut rocks!) as ‘a marriage made in heaven’.

Serves two:

 

• 2 green and 2 red peppers with flat bottoms
• olive oil
• 4 tbsp. chopped onion
• 100 g coarsely chopped walnuts
• 2 ripe tomatoes
• parsley
• sage leaves
• black pepper, salt
• 1 tin/jar white beans, drained weight approx. 250 g
• mint leaves
• dill greens
• paprika powder
• 4 tbsp. sauerkraut

 

Garnish:

• sprigs of:
• parsley, sage,
• mint and dill

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My version of an Eastern Orthodox fasting dish, which is popular in Lovech on the Ossum River. Devout believers are allowed to eat these Pulneny Piperky in the first half of the week before Easter. After that, they fast completely in the last three days before Easter.

How did the pepper become such a popular ingredient in the Balkans? Because of the Turkish rule. It was not for nothing that the pepper was called Heidenpfeffer in the Habsburg period. Turks were gourmets. The first snobbish Haute Cuisine of Europe can be found with the Romans, the second originated at the court of the Ottoman rulers in Istanbul with the well-known result of an enormous interest in new snacks. In Turkey, people were therefore very early in incorporating American crops. The Ottoman Empire bordered the Iberian Peninsula at the time that Columbus discovered America and so the fruits from that distant land were imported early on via the ports of Spain. And with high-ranking people spread throughout the empire.

Serves two:

 

• 2 large ripe conference pears
• 4 soft tortillas (20 cm)
• 2 spring onions, roughly chopped
• 2 tbsp. finely chopped parsley
• 150 g Blue Stilton, crumbled
• parsley leaves
• 25 g butter
• sprigs of parsley
• liquid acacia honey

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‘English’ because of the ingredients for the filling. In The Netherlands (I am Dutch) people ask for Conférence peren in a dignified French way, but that turns out to be quite ridiculous. Indeed, most pears, like roses for example, have French names because people in that country (and in what is now called Belgium) started upgrading what were until then rock-hard, stony stewing pears, which you absolutely could not eat raw. However, Thomas Francis Rivers from Herefordshire was rightly awarded a First-class certificate at the National Pear Conference in 1885 for the pear he had bred, which is now number one in the Netherlands and Belgium. So it is a ‘conference pear’.

In the past when thinking of blue cheeses, we in the Low Countries did not think of England immediately. Today you can buy Blue Stilton in most supermarkets. No wonder: this cheese is superb. Add to this the old English saying:

“Drink a pot of ale, eat a scoop of Stilton every day, you will make old bones”

And you know what is good for you. No wonder that this delicacy has now reached Japan and America, the regions where most Stilton is imported.

Baking tool:

• a (fluted) loose-based baking tin,
• top 28 cm /underside 26 cm /rim 2,5 cm,
• greased with butter

 

Batter (makes one round loaf):

• 175 g barley meal (health food shop)
• 150 g quick cooking pearl barley
• 500 ml buttermilk
• 1 ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 4 g salt

On top:

• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

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Our culture is still quite young, and Finland has not been affluent. In wintertime outdoor temperature can be  minus 40 degrees Celsius. So you can imagine that the first thing earlier generations were interested in was how to survive! How the food tasted was a secondary issue. Nowadays we Fins can afford a youthful enthusiasm for our own traditional dishes and local specialties. We got an eye for our clean and pure environment and are proud to present our landscape to foreign visitors.

 

This was what famous chef Sami Hiltunen wrote to me when I asked him to describe the cuisine of his country. That those traditional dishes are absolutely worth while is proven by this flat barley bread Ohrarieska. According to the Fins a meal without bread is no meal. ‘Better bread than gold’ as the phrase goes. And so they developed original loaves from cold-resitant grains such as rye and barley. When these were not available they baked for ‘a rosy complexion’ even bread from pine meal (white inner bark of pine trees). The extremely healthy rye bread – Sami called it the Finnish insurance against hard times – had a hole in the middle and was hanged on the ceiling  of the kitchen to dry, where it became pretty hard. His sisters and he lost their milk teeth while eating it. The barley bead Ohrarieska from a region near the polar circle is somewhat softer. Sometimes the batter is spread on cabbage leaves before baking or small pieces of smoked  bacon or ham are added. The warm brown clour is due to the reaction of bicarbonate of soda with buttermilk, an invention in itself.

• 500 g parsnips
• pepper, salt
• wheat flour
• quite a bit of breadcrumbs
• 2 tbsp. butter 1
• 100 g sliced ​​bacon
• watercress (or lamb’s lettuce)
• lemon wedges

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Parsnip cakes from Ireland. In the mid-19th century, Irish and English Quakers (The Society of Friends) organised food aid in the form of soup kitchens after the failed potato harvests – the only food for a third of the Irish population. They also ensured that parsnips, carrots, turnips and cabbage were sown to protect the country from hunger in the future. A number of them made such an effort to achieve this that they had to pay for it with an early death. But because of their efforts, the ‘cottage gardens’ were full of a variety of crops by the end of the century. Here a culinary tribute to those Quakers.

Traditionally the Irish have been fond of what you can pick in the wild, such as watercress. “Though mead and princely malt may be desirable for the infirm, dry bread and watercress are the food becoming the wise” is an old Celtic saying. But apparently not all Irish wanted to be that wise, as this traditional combination shows.

Serves two:

 

Vegetable garnish:

• 400 g celery stalks
• (weight: cleaned and peeled)
• 150 g peeled onion
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• salt
• coriander leaves

 

Potatoes:

• 350 g scrubbed small potatoes
• 4 tbsp. olive oil
• pepper, salt
• 100 ml red country wine**

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Shall we once in a while go back in time for a ‘greener’ menu? After all, for a long time it was completely normal to have no meat on the table. Not only because of the costs, but also because of the periodic prohibitions of some churches. A tradition that made people inventive. Here a Cypriot dish Patates antinachtes Kyprou, which I found in a cookbook by Marigoula Kokkinou and Georgia S. Kofinas: The Festive Feast, Greek meatless cooking in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition (1993). Meant for the weekly fasting days Wednesday and Friday and during the fasting before Easter. Not intended for Good Friday, then you really don’t eat anything. ‘Today wine and oil’ mentions a Dutch Orthodox calender on certain fasting days, on others also fish is allowed, but no meat or dairy.

Kokkinou and Kofinas quote encouraging statements such as this one by Abbot Hyperechios:

“It is better to eat meat and drink wine rather than to eat the flesh of one’s brother by gossiping about him“. So there is always a way out …