192 pages; 174x246mm;
b&w photos; paperback

Published May 2002

ISBN 1 903018 18 8 £14.99

List of Recipes
A Guide to Dutch Pronunciation 
Foreword 
Maps 
Chapter One: The Dutch Baker 
Chapter Two: Bread 
Chapter Three: Rusks 
Chapter Four: Spice Cakes 
Chapter Five: Cakes 
Chapter Six: Flans 
Chapter Seven: Biscuits 
Chapter Eight: Pancakes 
Chapter Nine: Waffles and Wafers
Chapter Ten: Seasonal Baking 
Bibliography 
Notes and References 
Index 

The feeling of travelling deep into another culture emerges even more strongly from reading 'Windmills in my Oven', which is more a social history of The Netherlands than a conventional baking book, and all the better for it.
 Here the recipes  - for spicy spekulaas (butter shortcake), brown sugar coils, cherry pancakes, nutmeggy waffles, washed down with coffee and advocaat - good as they are, play second fiddle to the engaging sense of scholarship and lively interest in regional custom.

 This is the book for you if you want to know more about medieval Dutch apple tarts or ancient ceremonies where townsfolk hit spice cakes (koeken) with baseball bats to break them into pieces.

 Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra's book has the attention to quirky detail and acute interest in accuracy common to all Prospect Books, an excellent publisher specialising in historical food books. Like a mini-break in a Dutch kitchen, it gives you insights you'd never get as a visitor.
 

Coarse Rye Bread 37
Round Buttermilk Rye Loaf 41
Multigrain Bread 43
Spiced Bread from Zeeland 45
Sugar Bread 46
Currant Bread with Almond Paste 47
Moulded Yeast Ring 48
Round Fruit Loaf from Zuidlaren 51
Brown Sugar Coils 53
Basic Bolus Recipe 54
Ginger Coils 55
Almond-paste Coils 56
Brabant-style Sausage Rolls 56
Breakfast Spice Cake 76
Frisian Spice Cake 77
Spice ‘Crusts’ from Amsterdam 78
Apple Tart 88
Butter Shortcake 91
Chocolate-Flecked Cake 94
Advocaat Cream Cake 95
Basic Flan Dough 103
Pudding 103

The Dutch word wafel, from which the English word waffle is derived, covers both the thick raised waffles of the English-speaking world as well as thin and delicate wafers, with a range of textures between these two extremes. Wafers and waffles have been made in Holland for several centuries. The oldest existing wafer iron on display in Holland is the sixteenth-century one taken by Anna van Buren to the household of her husband Prince Willem I,1 but even before that, a description of wafer-making in the kitchen of the Duchess of Guelders in the fifteenth century had been committed to paper.2 Several seventeenth-century Dutch paintings depicting convivial-looking celebrations, often Twelfth Night, give prominent place to waffles. Much as groups went carolling in Britain, Star singers, dressed as the three Wise Men, with a retinue would follow their paper star to houses where they might beg a share of the evening’s waffles and pancakes.3 Twelfth Night was one of the most popular celebrations by the late fifteenth century4and reached its peak in the Golden Age5  before fading away almost altogether by the latter part of the twentieth century. But paintings give little clue as to the delicious diversity of flavour and texture: crisp, soft or even deliberately limp, spiced, oozing with butter and cream. Wafers can be crisply thin and delicate or have a definite bite, and the queen of them all, the toffee-filled wafer, defies categorization. Most waffles and wafers are a home-made tradition, but travelling Dutch waffle-makers were made welcome at feasts and festivities all over Europe in previous centuries. A set of waffle or wafer irons, and a pot for the batter, was all the equipment they needed to produce a range of mouthwatering delicacies. Even so, it must have cost some effort to travel around with them as the irons were extremely heavy. The deep waffle irons were almost invariably rectangular with square indentations; wafer irons, by contrast, were often intricately decorated.

Irons were not the exclusive preserve of the affluent. Even those in average circumstances could afford to make their own waffles and wafers, and the poor could always rely on the charity of those better situated than themselves. It was quite usual for a household to make 1000 to 1500 wafers at New Year, most of which would be given away. Not only were there the servants, labourers and their families, as well as the local clergyman and other notables, the poor too got their share. It was customary for children and poor people to go from house to house at the New Year or Twelfth Night, chanting nonsensical begging songs in various dialects, to be rewarded with wafers or waffles, depending on what part of the country they lived in. In eastern Holland they sang:

In past centuries local blacksmiths were usually charged with the task of fashioning a custom-made wafer iron, popularly given as a bridal gift by the family. All kinds of patterns were engraved, often a queer mixture of pagan and Christian symbols. Religious motifs were a constant reminder of the ecclesiastic origins claimed for the wafer as consecrated communion bread. Depictions associated with Easter were particularly common, tangible evidence of the muddle which long surrounded New Year. Although 1 January had officially marked the beginning of the year since the first century ad, clerics later started agitating for it to start on 25 December. In much of medieval Europe however, the calendar (although not necessarily the popular) year ended and began in March, or at Eastertide, and the lands of the Duke of Brabant and the Counts of Flanders and Holland fell in with this convention. An official end to some of this confusion was reached by a royal decree of 16 June 1575 which fixed New Year at 1 January.12 Which New Year, you might ask, would be celebrated by the decorations on the wafer irons themselves: the old or the new? An iron from 1648 is engraved with a cross, initials and the date as well as a pelican feeding two young ones with its blood. Another from 1791 shows a farm waggon.13 One from 1735 shows among other objects, a heart cut into a cross, surrounded by instruments of torture associated with the Passion, capped with the text INRI. The cross is flanked by dice and fifteen rounds, presumably representing the silver pieces. A cock roosts on a ladder, and trees of life and the slightly mangled inscription Si Deus pro nobis Quis contra nos are also prominent.14 Pious texts like this were popular, varying from the concise Geen beter lot, dan vrede met God (No better lot than peace with God)15 to the more admonitory:

Wafer and waffle recipes have remained basically unchanged since the Middle Ages. Thick waffles were made from fine wheat flour (sometimes mixed with buckwheat or rye), sugar, eggs, yeast and copious amounts of butter. Beer was the fluid of choice. The batter was left to rise before being cooked and the waffles were eaten with melted butter and sugar.19 Wafers were generally made from a rich dough mixed with beer or cream, with flavourings like lemon zest and cinnamon. They did not always use a raising agent.20

The toffee-filled wafers from Gouda, Goudse stroopwafels (illustrated at the beginning of this chapter), have been made for more than three centuries. Although now usually bought from professionals, they were originally home-made.21  Bakery lore suggests that they were concocted to make use of a sugar refinery by-product. They are a buttery yeast wafer which is then split and filled with an irresistible mixture of molasses, sugar, butter and spices simmered to a toffee consistency. It is the filling that is particular to Gouda; similar wafers were made in the Middle Ages, but split and eaten with melted butter.22 The stroopwafel was exclusive to Gouda for a very long time, made at first only within the city, then by itinerant Gouda wafer-makers who travelled to fairs and markets around the country. In the last few decades there has been a surge of stroopwafel stalls, not all of which may carry the desired predicate ‘Goudse’, and almost every weekly market boasts one. Your nose – or your family – will lead you in the right direction. They are made fresh as you wait, the wafer-baker splitting the hot, delicate wafer into two perfect halves with a careless expertise born of long practice, smearing one with toffee and replacing the other in exactly the right spot. Few things are more delicious than a warm stroopwafel with the filling still gooey, such a far cry from its production-line supermarket counterpart. Vendors do a nice sideline in cylindrical tins and Delft Blue jars designed to hold the wafers. 

Though many families still own heirloom irons as well as the stove-top versions which were popular up to the middle of the twentieth century, understandably, most people prefer to use a modern electric waffle- and wafer-maker with interchangeable plates. It takes a lot of the hard slog out of the whole process, a sobering thought when a surge of nostalgia threatens to rear its head too high. Plunging the wafer iron into the heart of a roaring fire had the benefit of drastically shortening the cooking time to mere seconds instead of the minutes needed by modern electric irons. Certainly the wafers must have had a marvellous texture. But think of the intense heat and the back-breaking work, not to mention the hit and miss affair it might be to start with, depending solely on the cook’s ability to gauge the force of the fire. How much simpler, if less picturesque, modern life is.

In Zeeland the traditional New Year wafers were crisp unrolled sugar biscuits, accompanied by a glass of stroopjannever, gin steeped with spices and molasses.23  Most other New Year wafers are rolled. Although the accepted Dutch word is oublie (from the Latin oblatum, the offering or the Eucharist) names vary and refer in dialect form to the various stages of preparation: kniepertjes, kniepkoukskes (pinched or clamped cookies, knijpen = to pinch), rollechies (little rolls, rol = roll), ies’nkoek’n (iron cookies, ijzer = iron) and fluitjes (fluit = flute) to list a few. They are most popular in the northern and eastern provinces where many people still make them in large quantities at home to share with friends and family. The whole process of making seemed to derive from a mixture of pagan symbolism and superstition. It was important to make them at home to propitiate the gods and demons oneself; the consistency of the batter presaged all kinds of things about the year to come. But today, the only symbolism remains the shape of the wafer, rolled up like the new year yet to unfold. 

Making the wafers in the quantities deemed necessary used to be a task to tax the whole family. The kitchen fireplace might be large enough or a pit would be dug in an outhouse and a vigorous fire set to burn. Everyone had his or her own job in a surprisingly rigid hierarchy. The batter or dough would be made by the mistress helped by her elder daughters, then passed to the male head of the household, the father or eldest son or, failing them, a trusted manservant. It really was a man’s job as it required great physical strength. The iron had handles more than a metre long to keep the holder a safe distance from the fire. It would be smeared with a piece of fatty bacon or a cloth dipped in rendered fat and tied to a stick. It was heated, the dough or batter poured in, clamped between the two blades, and thrust once more into the fire. It was usually the job of the smaller children to roll the wafers quickly and deftly around a dowel to form the traditional roll shape.24 

In the recipe which follows, I have worked on the assumption that you will be using an electric waffle-maker.

The fleer is a New Year’s treat from Staphorst, a town in the north of the country, beyond Zwolle. The warm waffles are put into an airtight container to keep them limp. Left to cool on a rack they get very tough. This wafle has a flavour and texture peculiarly its own and, to be quite honest, I think it’s a bit of an acquired taste. The full pungency hits you when you open the tin after a few hours to sample one. Although I refer to the fleer as a waffle, it is actually hard to put an exact name to it in English. It is made in a wafer iron but the finished product is not quite as thin as a wafer nor is it as thick as a waffle. Spekkendikken, ‘bacon fatties’, are made from the same batter, the difference being that bacon is cooked into the waffles. This was often eaten as a treat by the waffle-makers, made with the last bit of batter.

These waffles from Zeeland used to be especially in evidence at Martinmas (11 November), at the farewell meal for farm labourers hired on an annual basis. Local custom dictated that the labouring year ended at Martinmas if one served a Protestant master, or twenty days later on the feast day of St Aloysius in Catholic circles. The mistress would treat the labourers to freshly made heart-shaped waffles topped with melted butter, honey or sugar, or curd cheese made on the farm.25  The rest of the year, it was more usual to spread the waffles with butter and sprinkle on a thick layer of brown sugar, as is still done.