Dutch cuisine


Dutch cuisine is formed from the cooking traditions and practices of the Netherlands. The country's cuisine is shaped by its location on the fertile Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta at the North Sea, giving rise to fishing, farming, and overseas trade. Due to the availability of water and flat grassland, the Dutch diet contains many dairy products such as butter and cheese. The court of the Burgundian Netherlands enriched the cuisine of the elite in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century, a process continued in the 17th and 18th centuries thanks to colonial trade. At this time, the Dutch ruled the spice trade, played a pivotal role in the global spread of coffee, and started the modern era of chocolate by developing the Dutch process of first removing fat from cocoa beans using a hydraulic press, creating cocoa powder, and then alkalizing it to make it less acidic and more palatable.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Dutch food and food production was designed to be more efficient, an effort so successful that the country became the world's second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. It gave the Dutch the reputation of being the feeders of the world, but Dutch food, such as stamppot, of having a bland taste. However, influenced by the eating culture of its colonies, and later by globalization, there is a renewed focus on taste, which is also reflected in the 119 Michelin-starred restaurants in the country.
Dutch cuisine can traditionally be divided in three regions. The northeast of the country is known for its meats and sausages and heavy rye bread, the west for fish, spirits and dairy-based products, and the south for stews, fruit products and pastry. A peculiar characteristic for Dutch breakfast and lunch is the sweet bread toppings such as hagelslag, vlokken, and muisjes, and the Dutch are the highest consumers of liquorice in the world.

History

14th–16th centuries

Early cookbooks for the elite picture a homogeneous food culture across Europe. Differences were in the use of what was locally available; milk and butter—from the low-lying grasslands of Holland and Friesland—were used in the Netherlands, in comparison to bacon fat used in German countries and England, and oil in Southern Europe. Dutch butter and cheese continued to be famous products for centuries. The common people ate half-liquid brij or porridge, potage and soppe. Beer flavoured with gruit was the common drink as water was of poor quality, and was produced until the 14th century at the monasteries. The replacement of gruit for hop, a German innovation, extended shelf life, turning the Low Countries into a major beer exporter. It still is the largest beer exporter of Europe. Brand, established in 1349, is the country's oldest beer brand.
In the 14th century gibbing was invented by Willem Beukelszoon, extending the shelf life of herring, making it possible to sail further and catch more. It created a booming export industry for and a monopoly in soused herring, and sat the foundation for the later seafaring and colonial Dutch Empire. The Dutch still celebrate Vlaggetjesdag each spring, when fishermen go out to sea to capture the annual herring catch: Hollandse Nieuwe.
Vegetable Gardens were used by monasteries and later by castles for their own kitchens. Keukenhof is such an example. Orchards for pears and apples connected to castles were later used for export and set off a Dutch horticulture tradition that remains to this day. In the castles, which have hunting grounds as well, haute cuisine began to emerge, and in 1510, the first Dutch-language cook book, aimed at the upper class, was printed in Brussels, called Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen. It offers recipes for festivities, such as sauces, game, jellies, fish, meat, pies, eggs, dairy products, candied quinces and ginger, and contains one of the world's oldest known recipes for appeltaerten, apple pie. The recipes come from various sources, such as the French recipe book Le Viandier, reflecting the close ties between Dutch cuisine and the northern French cuisine, as the whole region was part of the Burgundian Netherlands, with a glamorous court life and lavish feasts. Traditional Dutch restaurants from the south are still referred to as Bourgondisch, alluding to the luxurious meals of yesteryear.

17th century

As the Dutch Republic entered its Golden Age, lavish dishes became available to the wealthy middle class as well. The Dutch East India Company monopolised the trade in nutmeg, clove, mace and cinnamon, provided in 1661 more than half of the refined sugar consumed in Europe, and was the first to import coffee on a large scale to Europe, popularising the concept of coffee houses for the masses. Apart from coffee, tea became a daily commodity, which was served with candy, marzipan and cookies. The availability of cheaper spices resulted in a tradition of spiced cookies, called speculaas.
Initially spices were used to indicate social status, but this disappeared with the influx of spices in Dutch market, and it was the elite who were the first to ban the frequent use of spices. The cookbook De Verstandige Kok, published in 1667, reflects this, and further more shows that meal started with green salads and cold or warm cooked vegetables with dressing, butter, herbs or edible flowers, and continued with numerous fish and meat dishes, including exotic ingredients such as dates, rice, cinnamon, ginger and saffron. Savoury tarts and pastries followed, and the meal ended with jellies, cheese, nuts and sweet pastries, washed down with hippocras, a sweet spiced wine. But in the Golden Age, the everyday meal of the ordinary Dutchman was still a humble affair of grain or legume pottage served with rye.

18th–21st centuries

In the early 19th century, the staples for the working population, most of whom suffered from some form of malnutrition, were bread and potato. A working-class family at this time may have also eaten pancakes, occasionally herring and other fish, fruit, vegetables, and little meat. They drank water of poor quality, watery coffee, or tea. In some areas hot chocolate was consumed, but the most popular drinks were beer and jenever, of which the consumption was twice that of the equivalent consumption of distilled spirits in neighbouring countries.
File:Van-willem-vincent-gogh-die-kartoffelesser-03850.jpg|thumb|Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters : peasants from his home village Nuenen having dinner
In the 20th century, the availability of mass education meant that girls could be sent to the Huishoudschool to be taught to cook cheap and simple meals, leading to an increasingly uniform and plain Dutch diet. However, initially influenced by the eating culture of its colonies, and later by globalization, the diet changed significantly, and became cosmopolitan. Most international cuisines are represented in the major cities and there is a renewed interest in taste, which is reflected in the 119 Michelin-starred restaurants in the country.

Origins

Dutch agriculture roughly consists of five sectors: greenhouse-based, tillage-based, fruit agriculture, animal husbandry and fishery.
Many food origins can be traced back to one of the three general regional forms of Dutch cuisine. Some agricultural products and foodstuffs from these regions are protected by EU law as Protected designation of origin, like jenever, Noord-Hollandse Gouda, and kanterkaas, Traditional speciality guaranteed, like boerenkaas and Hollandse nieuwe, and the less strict variant of Protected geographical indication, like Edam Holland and Limburgse vlaai.

Western cuisine

Western Dutch cuisine is found in the provinces of North Holland, South Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht and the Gelderlandic region of Betuwe. Due to the abundance of flat grassland and accessible freshwater sources, this region is ideal for raising cattle and is known for its many dairy products. Historically, the direct access to the sea made fish readily available, as well as spices, coffee, chocolate and sugar shipped from the overseas colonies.
The butter produced by Zeeland and South Holland contains a larger amount of milkfat than most other European varieties, resulting in a regional cuisine with a wide variety of rich, buttery flavoured pastry. Cookies of all sorts are produced in great number and tend to contain much butter and sugar. The stroopwafel is well known, as are cookies with a filling of some kind, mostly almond, like gevulde koek. Pastries in this area also tend to be quite doughy and to contain large amounts of sugar, either caramelised, powdered or crystallised. The oliebol and Zeeuwse bolus are good examples. Duivekater is a moist doughy white bread from the Zaanstreek in North Holland which is eaten with butter; the recipe goes back hundreds of years.
A by-product of the butter-making process, buttermilk is typically used in this region's cuisine. Leyden cheese, spiced with cumin and traditionally produced with skimmed milk, can also be considered a by-product in the same way. Traditional farm-made Leyden cheese from this region has been given a protected designation of origin.
For centuries this region has provided prominent Dutch cheeses, named after the cities where each cheese was sold. Recorded history of Gouda cheese arguably starts in 1184, making it one of the oldest cheeses that is still in production using its original recipe. Edam cheese, traditionally produced in small waxed spheres, has been made since the 14th century. These cheeses are made with full-fat milk, and thus they are not by-products of butter production; the young varieties have a milky flavour.
Cheeses sold as Gouda or Edam are now produced everywhere in the world.However, the European Commission has designated the specific names "Gouda Holland" and "Edam Holland" as protected geographical indications. Cheese that are certified with these protected names must be produced in Holland using traditional methods with milk from Dutch cows and must undergo a natural aging process. Trademarked cheeses such as Leerdammer, Beemster and Rotterdamsche Oude also originate in this region.
Seafood such as soused herring, mussels, eels, oysters and shrimp are widely available and typical for the region. Kibbeling, small chunks of battered white fish, is a local snack that has grown in popularity to become a national fast food.
Indirectly a product of the sea due to its imported spices, Ossenworst is a raw beef sausage which used to be made of ox meat. This specialty has its origins in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, when oxen were imported large-scale from Denmark and Germany. The spices in the sausage, such as pepper, cloves, mace and nutmeg, came overseas from the Dutch East Indies. Aged beef was used for this sausage, which was smoked at such a low temperature that the meat remained raw. Present-day Amsterdam ossenworst is made with lean beef, and the sausage is now often neither smoked nor aged. It is often eaten with Amsterdamse uitjes, a kind of pickled onion. The tradition of pickling onions and augurk or zure bom is a contribution of Amsterdam's Jewish community. Traditionally, soused herring is only eaten in Amsterdam with pickled cucumber.
The region harbours the largest cocoa cluster in the world, making the Netherlands one of the leading exporters of chocolate. The chocolate industry is located in this region both because of its colonial past and because Amsterdam was the site of an important innovation in chocolate production. In 1828 Coenraad van Houten developed a new process that allowed chocolate — which until then had been consumed as a liquid — to be manufactured in solid form. Van Houten produced chocolate first in Amsterdam and later in Leiden and Weesp, while Droste began in Haarlem. Chocomel originated in Zoetermeer; this trademarked chocolate-flavoured milk is a very popular type of Koek-en-zopie. Zaandam is home to Verkade and also the headquarters of a relatively new Dutch fair trade chocolate brand, Tony's Chocoloney. De Zaanstreek is also noted for its mayonnaise and its whole-grain mustards .
Kroket is usually eaten with mustard as well. Besides industrial production, high quality kalfsvleeskroket, were produced by bakeries from the big cities in the 20th century. FEBO, Van Dobben, Kwekkeboom and Holtkamp all started off as pastry bakeries and are now well known producers of quality kalfsvleeskroket, that has a ragout of rough chopped tender veal as filling.
The traditional alcoholic beverages of this region are beer and jenever, a high proof juniper-flavored spirit that came to be known in England as gin. The region is home to the majority of the jeneversteden, or 'jenever cities'. Lucas Bols in Amsterdam and Nolet in Schiedam are the oldest and third-oldest distilleries of the world respectively. Delft is also known for its jenever. The Bols family established a liquor distillery in Amsterdam in 1575 that started worldwide distribution of its products at the turn of the 18th century, with 300 liquor recipes. It has since introduced many other flavours, such as Blue Curaçao and Pisang Ambon. The Nolet Distillery in Schiedam was founded in 1691, and has remained in the Nolet family ever since. A notable exception to the traditional types of Dutch alcoholic beverages is also native to this region: advocaat'', a rich and creamy liqueur made from eggs, sugar and brandy.