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| MATTERS OF TASTE |
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FOODWAYS OF THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE |
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Possessing the strongest merchant marine of any European nation during the 17th century, the Netherlands had access to foodstuffs from around the world. Wine was imported from France, Italy, and Spain, and beer from Germany. India and the Spice Islands supplied spices, while the Mediterranean made a fine source of raisins, dates, figs and nuts, and Poland and Prussia provided all-important cereal grains. The Dutch rounded out their diet with the plentiful fish, butter, cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables that were produced domestically.
In addition to providing Netherlanders with a plentiful and varied selection of foodstuffs during the Golden Age, the rich trade economy was also largely responsible for the nation’s notable prosperity during this period. While not all Golden Age Netherlanders lived the high-life of the wealthy burgerlijk and regent classes, the Dutch generally enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts throughout the rest of early modern Europe, and food historian and co-curator of the exhibition, Peter G. Rose, identifies them as “the best fed population in Europe” during this period. Moreover, as historian Simon Schama points out, those who did suffer from poverty were treated with greater dignity than they might have been. He writes:
[The Netherlands] was not a dietary democracy, much less a culinary utopia... But it was at least a society in which the "unfortunate" poor (as distinct from able-bodied vagrants) were supplied with fare meant to approximate to the diet of the more fortunate rather than stigmatize their wretchedness with a regimen of didactic meanness (Schama, 174).
In the face of such abundance, 17th-century Netherlanders generally sought moderation in their everyday eating habits. However, celebratory feasts were a phenomenon of Golden Age Dutch culture, and most Netherlanders indulged in excess at least a few times a year. For example, newborn children were often welcomed with a kindermaal celebration and its requisite round of sweet kandeel; the feast of St. Nicholas, New Year’s Day, and Twelfth Night were similarly recognized with specialty foods. Lesser events—including a child’s beginning school or apprenticeship, the purchase of a new house, or a loved one’s departure on a long journey or his return home—were also acknowledged with feasts. Many Dutch burghers even celebrated jokmaalen, a feast of inversion during which masters and mistresses waited on their servants.
Food Legislation in the Golden Age Though it is widely believed that spices were valued in early modern Europe for their ability to mask the taste of spoiled food, this was most likely not true of the Golden Age Netherlands. As scholar Peter G. Rose points out, government-enforced regulations in Amsterdam and other large cities banned the sale of rotten fruit and vegetables at market. Similar safety laws applied to bakers, who were compelled to wash their feet with hot water—but not with potentially toxic soap—before using them to knead tough rye dough. Moreover, preservation techniques such as smoking, drying and pickling were widely understood and practiced, and customers were unlikely to allow food purchases to spoil upon reaching home. Finally, recipes in De Verstandige Kok and other 17th-century Dutch cookbooks commonly call for precise amounts of spices—and presumably sought to complement, rather than to simply cover, the natural flavors of food.
Dutch Meal Patterns In earlier centuries, most Netherlanders ate only two meals per day, the first of which consisted of two dishes and was served around eleven o’clock in the morning and the second of which was served just before bedtime, around nine o’clock. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, a third meal—breakfast—became increasingly common; as resources grew especially plentiful during the prosperous Golden Age, yet a fourth meal could be added to the daily regimen.
During the 17th century, the wealthy middle and upper-middle classes had access to a surprising variety of foodstuffs. A typical day’s menu follows.
Breakfast generally consisted of bread topped with butter or finely shredded cheese; as one Englishman noted of his Dutch-origin neighbors in New Netherland, “they pretend [grating it to the consistency of coarse flour] adds to the good taste of cheese.” Beer was generally drunk at breakfast—as well as during the other meals of the day—although buttermilk and whey were popular breakfast drinks on farms.
Midday supper was the heartiest meal of the day and typically consisted of two or three dishes. The first was often a hutspot—a meat stew with vegetables—while the second was usually fish or meat cooked with currants or prunes. Fruit and cooked vegetables or koecken (cake) or pasteyen (spiced meat pie) might round out the meal.
Two to three hours after the midday meal, affluent Netherlanders enjoyed a small mid-afternoon meal of bread with butter or cheese. The final meal of the day, eaten just before retiring to bed, consisted of leftovers from the midday meal or of another serving of bread with butter or cheese.
Among the poor and working classes, meals were less plentiful. Most Netherlanders sustained themselves on only two meals per day, the first of which was eaten at noon and generally consisted of two dishes. The first of these dishes likely consisted of peas and beans, while the second would have been one of the following: salted or smoked meat, sausage with groats and raisins, bacon with carrots or cabbage, salt cod, herring, or dried cod. The evening meal was one of several varieties of porridge. Both meals were served with bread.
Bread: The Mainstay of the Dutch Diet Though northern Netherlands soil proved too wet for large-scale wheat farming, participation in the Baltic grain trade allowed the nation ample access to this staple crop. By the 17th century, the Dutch virtually controlled wheat and rye production in Poland, East Prussia, Swedish Pomerania and Livonia (Schama 168).
Silos in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Middelburg stored large grain surpluses, thereby safeguarding against price fluctuation and bread shortage. As a result of these and other government-enforced measures, the Dutch enjoyed greater food stability than their counterparts throughout much of 17th-century Europe.
At least two meals per day in a typical Dutch household included sliced bread, usually topped with butter or cheese. The more affluent enjoyed herenbrood—“white” bread made from wheat flour—on a regular basis, while the less prosperous typically depended on semelbrood, “black,” rye-kernel bread, for their daily starch. During times of extreme food scarcity, some peasants turned to bread made from ground chestnut meal.
Butter and Cheese: Celebrated Products of the Netherlands Though unsuitable for wheat farming, northern Netherlands soil lent itself to cattle grazing, and the nation would eventually become famous for its dairy products. Butter and cheese appeared frequently in the Dutch diet, especially as dressing for sliced bread (For additional information about milk in the Dutch diet, see “Beer: the common beverage” below).
Cooking with butter—rather than with lard—was another significant symbol of affluence. When the Reformation swept through Europe during the sixteenth century, the use of butter acquired religious implications as well. Rose writes:
The Catholic obligation to fast [which, during the sixteenth century, consisted of avoiding meat, dairy, and eggs during about 150 days of each year] was difficult and expensive, causing some medievalists to believe this could be one of the reasons for the success of the Reformation. It is worth noting that most olive-oil producing countries remained Catholic and most butter-producing countries became Protestant (Rose 19, Rose 16).
Cheese, by contrast, acted as “the great leveler, the universal enjoyment of which dissolved rank within national community” (163). The Netherlands had begun to produce several varieties of cheese, made from both cows’ and sheep’s milk, by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Edam and Gouda, named for the towns in which they originated, are still popular varieties of cheese today.
Fruit and Vegetables: Local, Exotic—and Newly Invented Orchards located in close proximity to towns produced apples, pears, plums, and nuts, allowing Dutch burghers easy access to seasonal fresh fruit. Dried fruit—especially raisins, prunes, and figs—were even more common to the Dutch diet than their fresh counterparts. Used to flavor meat dishes as well as pies and cakes, fruit of one sort or another was a necessary ingredient of such standard Dutch recipes as pea and prune soup—and of such delicacies as minced ox tongue with green applesauce.
Despite its strong ties to Dutch culinary tradition, fruit carried some negative cultural associations during the 17th century. In 1655, for example, blue plums and black cherries were blamed for a particularly severe outbreak of the plague—presumably because of their close resemblance to buboes—and were temporarily banned from sale in Holland. Though it had been successfully cultivated in the gardens of at least two Dutch noblemen, pineapple retained its dangerously exotic associations, and was also procribed: at least one doctor warned of its tendency to cause "gastric ailments from the Orient."
By the sixteenth century, the Netherlands had become known throughout Europe for its vegetable production, and vegetables appeared in the Dutch diet perhaps even more frequently than fruit. Golden Age horticultural innovations led to the introduction of cauliflower and the variety of short, orange Horn carrot commonly enjoyed in the United States today, while improvements in cultivation methods brought about increased yields of these and other vegetables.
In light of these facts, it is unsurprising that one 17th-century traveler referred to the Netherlands as a “nation of salad eaters.” As early as 1556, Geeraert Vorselman published Een Nyeuwen Coock Boeck, the first known Dutch-language cookbook to include salad and vegetable recipes. Served at the beginning of meals, salads were typically dressed with oil and vinegar or melted butter and vinegar. Kool slaa, the forerunner of present-day coleslaw, was commonly enjoyed.
Pancakes and Olie-koecken: Favorite Confections of a Sweet-Toothed Culture The Dutch incorporated honey cake, gingerbread, marzipan, cinnamon bark, and other confections into their daily eating patterns, while treats such as waffles, pancakes, and olie-koecken (deep fried balls of dough) were generally reserved for celebrations.
By the 1640s, over fifty sugar refineries operated in Amsterdam, and as Brazilian sugar arrived in the Netherlands in large enough quantities that families of even middling wealth could afford it, the traditional Dutch taste for sweets could be further indulged with caramelized sauces and sugar dustings added to waffles and pancakes.
Excess of any kind was frowned upon by religious leaders, and one minister expressed particular concern about the popularity of sweets:
Sweetness and excess is today grown so great that were they not ashamed to do so, men would found an Academy to which they would send all cooks and pasty bakers [pastry cooks] to teach them how to excel in the preparation of sauces, spices, cakes and confections, so that they should taste delicious.
Beer: The Common Beverage Recommended for children and adults alike, beer was the most popular beverage among members of 17th-century Dutch society. Since beer was boiled during preparation, it was safer to drink than plain water—which only the “common sort” deigned to sip from the notoriously polluted Amsterdam canal and other potentially tainted waterways. As early as the fourteenth century, breweries were thriving in Haarlem and Amersfoort, and most Netherlanders engaged in additional brewing at home.
In the countryside, buttermilk and whey were acceptable alternatives to beer, especially at breakfast, but whole milk was largely distrusted; one Dutch physician of the period recommended that a drink of milk be followed with a rinse of wine or honey in order to prevent tooth decay. Among those who could afford them, sweet wines from the Mediterranean countries were also popular, and young white wines from France and Germany—mixed with honey and spices to counteract their natural tartness—made a fine end to a large meal.
Tea: A Drink to Cure All Ills Though “teatime” would eventually become a convention of the Netherlands, tea was initially too expensive for all but the wealthiest members of Dutch society to drink. Gradually introduced to the Netherlands by way of travelers and colonists returning from the East, the beverage was not available in significant quantities until the 1660s—at which time its price per pound dropped from a steep 100 guilders to less than ten guilders.
Though many foodstuffs met criticism from moralist physicians of the period, tea was touted as wholly healthful. Dr. Johannes van Helmont prescribed tea to restore body fluids lost to sweating while a Dr. Tulp endorsed it as a remedy for cramps and sluggishness. A particularly enthusiastic supporter of the beverage recommended eight to ten cups per day in order to maintain minimum health—and fifty to two hundred cups for increased benefits (Schama, 172). Towards the end of the 17th century, the third meal of the day became associated with the tea ritual and was shifted to late afternoon. Though women's coffee houses had begun to operate by the beginning of the eighteenth century, most 17th-century Netherlanders associated the tea ritual with women, while coffee—generally purchased and consumed in public coffeehouses—held masculine connotations.
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