Serves four:

• 1500 ml water
• 400 g brisket (rib of beef)
• salt
• 400 g green runner beans, cut into squares
• 400 g peeled celeriac in cubes
• 200 g waxy potatoes, peeled and cubed
• 2 leeks in thick slices
• a pot of white beans, drained weight approx. 400 g
• chopped parsley

Serve with:

• buttered slices of white bread
• thin slices of Naegelholt or smoke-dried beef

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‘Humkes’ is a Low Saxon word for the ‘squares’ in which the beans are cut. This soup is a regional dish in the Dutch provinces Guelderland and Overijssel. It is old-fashioned kettle fare – in the past potagie, a one-pan dish cooked over an open fire, cooked with what was available. This is also the case with our soup. There are many variations, with spare ribs, fresh sausage and smoked bacon. But this is a deluxe version with beef.

White beans and runner beans are ripe just at the time of the grain harvest and during that period the soup was served in a festive manner with the, at the time, also very luxurious white bread, spread with butter and wafer-thin slices of Naegelholt, a dried piece of beef from the so-called muis (silverside), seasoned with nutmeg or cloves.

This beef was dried in the wieme, a slatted cage that sat between the ceiling beams in the living room. It also held sausages and sides of bacon. Naegelholt is still sold by some butchers in the Achterhoek, Twente, Veluwe, Salland and Drenthe and has rightly been included in the Ark of the Taste of Slow Food. Go and taste it on the spot. But you can also opt for smoke-dried beef, as on the picture.

For two:

• 200 g minced lean beef or lamb
• 75 g bulgur
• 50 g chopped red onion
• 25 g chopped  red bell pepper
• 2 tbsp chopped flat leaf parsley
• 2 tbsp chopped basil
• pepper, salt
• cayenne to taste
• 2 full tbsp double concentrated tomato purée
• 300 ml water
• 1 aubergine (300 g)

Garnish:

• 2 tbsp pine nuts
• basil and parsley leaves

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Aubergine is a most popular vegetable in the Middle East and Caucasus. Arabs came across this plant which has its origins in India during their conquest of Persia in the ninth century. They transformed the Persian name batingaan  into al-bādhinjān, which became aubergine  f.i. in French, English, Danish, Swedish and Dutch and berenjena in Spanish. From there they spread the vegetable over their immense realm as far as Spain. But not immediately.

Charles Perry cites a statement from a Bedouin in the eleventh century in Medieval Arab Cookery (2001, p. 243) : ‘Even if Maryam the mother of Jesus split it, and Sarah the wife of Abraham cooked it, and Fatima the daughter of the Prophet served it, I would have no taste for it.’

That kind of remarks I have heard in my nearest environment. But they changed their mind because of dishes like this one,  Missov Simpoogi Dolma. It stems from the rich Armenian cooking tradition. Dolma is Turkish for ‘filled’, but the taste is purely Armenian

Serves two:

• 200 g lean ground beef
• 2 tbsp breadcrumbs
• 1 tbsp finely chopped chives
• pepper and salt
• 2 tbsp butter
• 200 g unpeeled small potatoes
• 300 g cleaned Brussels sprouts
• 100 g cranberries
• liquid honey

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Is your birthday party getting a bit boring? Throw a sprout into the group. Literally or figuratively, it doesn’t matter. Success guaranteed, because Brussels sprouts loosen tongues: you get the craziest stories, both from those who love them and from those who hate them.

And yet we have long disposed the unpleasant smell which according to the Dutch writer Brandt Corstius rose from so many Dutch novels. The solution: we no longer cook them gray.

Yet the resistance among some is understandable: they used to be forced on children. The rule in the Netherlands was that a child had to eat at least the number of Brussels sprouts as his or her years of age. Time and again.

Brussels sprouts and other varieties of hardy cabbage were compulsory autumn and winter fare. However, children taste bitterness much more strongly than adults. It protects them from eating potentially dangerous herbs and vegetables. Researchers of the chemical senses have established this. A friend of mine reported that his parents left him hanging over his plate of Brussels sprouts for hours. When they finally left the room for a moment, he jumped up and buried the contents of his plate in the garden. His offspring no longer needs to take such risks. That exciting bitterness, the taste of danger, has been removed by cultivation. A pity in my opinion! This recipe brings it back with the cranberries and smoothes it a bit with honey. A recipe for children of all ages.

Serves 4:

• 500g lean boneless beef flank
• 1kg potatoes, sliced
• 800g carrots, diced
• 500g onions, finely chopped

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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. 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.

See also And Furthermore about this dish.

Serves four:

• 500 g lean minced beef
• 1 large egg
• 30 g crushed rusks or dry breadcrumbs
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• flour
• 40 g butter
• 400 ml water
• pinch of burned sugar
• salt
• 8 or more waxy potatoes
• 1 kg fresh endive, butter
• 8 g cornflour
• freshly ground nutmeg

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Always with meat balls.  Our dear gehaktbal, in former times king of pubs and sandwich bars, is still the most eaten meat preparation in the country today. Some champions accomplish to make 10 big balls out of 500 g! Every Wednesday is mince day at the butchers in the Netherlands. Even undergraduate students, usually culinary adventurers, treat their occasional bouts of homesickness with this traditional dish.

Right they are! At the beginning of our era Latin authors wrote enthusiastically about intibum: helps against a weak stomach, heart palpitation, podagra and eyesores. A bit overdone, but surely the bitter leaves, due to inulin, are very good for your digestion.

Serves 4

Soup:

• 2,5 litre water
• 1 kg boned and rolled meat
• 250 g lean minced beef
• 1 rusk
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon ground mace
• 2 washed onions (not peeled!)
• 1 bouquet garni: parsley, sage, bay leaf
• 500 g white asparagus, peeled
• 100 g vermicelli
• 1 bunch celery leaves
• salt to taste

Garnish:

• lamb’s lettuce
• cocktail onions
• gherkins
• lemon segments
• mustard
• Dutch brandy
• buttered wholemeal bread

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This well-filled traditional soup was only prepared for special occasions, such as the yearly fun fairs to which the southern provinces looked forward eagerly. Experts on the Brabant cuisine tell us that alongside the rolled meat and meatballs a huge shin of beef used to be added. Fat yellow vermicelli and coarsely cut celery leaves are normal ingredients too. However, there were other possibilities. The Burger Keukenboek (‘A Citizen’s Kitchen Book’, Rotterdam 1833) advises sorrel, spinach, salad, parsley root and even asparagus to enlighten a soup. I have opted for Brabant asparagus.

Serves four:

• 4 braising steaks
• pepper, salt
• 50 g butter
• 1 leek
• 1 bay leaf
• pinch of ground cloves
• 200 ml water
• cornflour
• potatoes to taste
• 500 g French beans
• butter, grated nutmeg

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Lapjes van Moeke. At the beginning of last century a Dutch country girl, who always had to eat mash,  sighed:  ‘If I were a queen I would eat  French beans with potatoes and sauce every day’. And I know families who did! With cauliflower the fat green bean is the most eaten vegetable in the Netherlands. Combined with braising steak it is a Sunday dish. A good Dutch house wife has to know how to stew the meat until it is soft as butter.

Dutch beef is traditionally very lean. Not out of modern fat anxiety – Mum always braised her steaks in pounds of good butter –  but because it is milk cattle.