The Taste of Conquest (30 page)

Everyone needs
speculaas
for the winter holiday. My favorite version of this medieval cake wraps gingerbread spiced by the sweet heat of cinnamon and the gentle glow of ginger and nutmeg around a core of moist, sweet marzipan. But
speculaas
takes many forms. I was first introduced to this particular Dutch obsession by the food historian Peter Rose.
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Peter (in Dutch, it is a woman’s name) can list more varieties than a born-again preacher can count up sins. She has documented at least forty-seven different kinds of the gingerbread. She has even shared her recipe for
speculaas
with
Gourmet
magazine. That is more than most Dutch manufacturers will do. In Holland, the spices that go into gingerbread are something akin to a state secret. Without a doubt, the Dutch have a thing about
speculaas.
Typically, though, they buy their gingerbread ready-made. The supersecret
speculaas
spice mixture, however, can also be purchased, to be added to innumerable other recipes. Any supermarket will sell you a package of this sweet masala, which is likely to include cinnamon, mace, aniseed, cardamom, nutmeg, and cloves, as well as ginger.

This Dutch fondness for spice cakes—or
peperkoek,
as these sweets are generically known (whether they contain pepper or not)—is well documented as far back as the Middle Ages. You can look it up in a 1417 council decree from the eastern Dutch city of Deventer that prescribes just what could go into their compact honey and spice loaf. Anyone who made a
Deventer koek
that didn’t conform was faced with an astronomical fine of 666 guilders. It turns out the fine burghers of Deventer knew they had a good thing going, for by the end of the sixteen hundreds, the city was exporting 715,000 cakes a year (and this from a city of a mere seven thousand souls!). More recently, gingerbread has been used as a morale booster for the troops: Dutch soldiers have been issued spice cake rations in much the same way as American GIs receive Hershey’s bars.

In Amsterdam, the city’s heritage of spice isn’t just evident in December’s
speculaas
and
pepernoten.
You can also see it on grand buildings by the old waterfront emblazoned with the logo of the Dutch East India Company. You can smell it in the old warehouses. Construction workers sometimes report the sweet smell of nutmeg and cloves seeping out from the beams when they tear apart former spice depots to renovate them into trendy lofts. Of course, spice scents Dutch kitchens, too, often in ways that would make other Europeans cringe. But that’s because, in other places, tastes have changed. The penchant for spice cakes used to be shared well beyond Holland’s borders; those Deventer cakes were intended as much for export as for the local sweet tooth. As the last of the great spice-trading nations in Europe, Netherlanders never gave up their love of spices in the way most other Europeans did with the waning of renaissance fashions. This is most obvious in the traditional sweets that accompany holidays, in treats like
Amsterdamse korstjes,
spice crusts from Amsterdam; in
Oudewijven,
a tangy, light-colored loaf flavored with aniseed; in the now rare
Kruukplaetje,
old-fashioned spiced griddle biscuits made in South Holland. But spices, especially the sweet spices so favored by sixteenth-century Italian cooks like Scappi and Messisbugo, show up not only in cakes but even in sausages and stews. Per capita spice consumption here is comparable to Morocco and easily double the American average. The Dutch, of course, who don’t think much of, or about, their own food, are blissfully unaware of any of this as they shop at their local Albert Hein supermarket to buy a custom spice mixture for their evening chicken. In Holland, you find nutmeg sprinkled on asparagus, red cabbage scented with cloves, sausage rolls flavored with mace, and even eel topped with cinnamon. A visit to a butcher shop in a suburban shopping complex can unearth a treasure trove of Dutch culinary peculiarity. Hidden away among the preprepared schnitzel, Italian salami, and gloppy mayonnaise-dressed salads are blood sausages scented with pepper and mace, and a scrapplelike
balkenbrij
containing so much cloves it burns the tongue.

Even the cheese for which Holland is justly famous can be flavored with astonishing quantities of spice. If you need proof, walk west a few hundred yards from Dam Square to the
westelijke grachtengordel
(western canal belt), a district built to accommodate the mansions of spice and timber merchants in Amsterdam’s golden age. Here, on a little strip of quaint shops, hidden behind one of the plain shop façades, is one of Amsterdam’s cathedrals of cheese. Not that the Kaaskamer looks much like a high temple even when you’ve opened the front door. The modest space is more like a giant closet (
kaas kamer
means “cheese chamber”). Still, for Dutch cheese lovers, it is a place of devotion. Everywhere you look, the walls are lined with numberless wheels of cheese separated by plain pine planks. On the bottom layer are fat, yellow rounds of four-year-old
boerenkaas
(farm cheese), brittle and caramel-sweet with age. On the shelves near the ceiling are tubby, little red balls of creamy young Gouda. And in the middle are cheeses crammed with spice. Pepper, mild paprika, and hot chili season some of the
boerenkaas.
Cumin gives an almost Moroccan tang to cheeses both young and old. And perhaps most unexpected is the
nagelkaas,
packed with whole cloves, perhaps three or four in every bite. Oddly, the assertive presence of the cloves is tamed by the buttery cheese and the generally sweet undertone so characteristic of most Dutch cheeses. Admittedly, anyone who didn’t grow up with wooden footwear would most likely think it weird, but I rather like it. What’s more, a hunk of
nagelkaas
puts neatly to rest any skepticism historians of food might have about the amount of spice that Europeans could ingest, now or four hundred years ago.
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D
INING IN THE
G
OLDEN
A
GE

Whereas the side streets of the
westelijke grachtengordel
are lined with modest brick shops topped with plain stepped gables, the canals that give the district its name reflect a procession of imposing limestone-clad mansions embossed with baroque curlicues. When the neighborhood was conceived in the first flush of Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century golden age, it was specifically designed for the city’s wealthiest merchant class, who were awash with money from the trade in spices and other foreign goods. Appropriately, the inner canal, the one intended for the most splendid palazzi, was named the Herengracht, for the
Heren XVII,
the enormously powerful directors of the Dutch East India Company, which had wrenched the spice trade from the Portuguese.

When the wealthy timber merchant Jacob Cromhout went looking for a place to build a new house around 1660, he naturally chose the Herengracht. The East India trade had been good to many people, but especially to those selling lumber to the thriving shipbuilding industry. Cromhout had done well for himself and wanted to let the world know it. He hired a fine architect who designed a gracious double-gabled town house some four stories high. The building gives the impression of a harmonious pair of Siamese-twin grandfather clocks faced in genteel limestone. In recent years, the mansion has been turned into a museum, so anyone can go and see how Amsterdam’s other half used to live—and cook. Remarkably, the kitchens have been left unchanged since the seventeenth century. And what kitchens they are! If this was the McMansion of its day, these were most definitely trophy kitchens. The larger of the two has some fifteen running feet of marble counters, a marble floor, two wall ovens, a stovetop range, as well as a fireplace, and everywhere, tasteful blue and white delft tiles. The sink even has running water! Yet despite the kitchen’s high-tech appurtenances, there is every indication that the Cromhouts ate in a distinctly old-fashioned style.

To get an idea of what was served in the next-door dining room, it’s worth leafing through Peter Rose’s translation of
De verstandige kock
(The Sensible Cook), a popular cookery manual that saw at least ten editions between 1668 and 1711. Peter will be the first to insist that most people ate rather well in seventeenth-century Holland. She rapidly turns the pages of the cookbook pointing to recipes featuring veal, venison, suckling pig, turkey, partridge, heron, herring, turbot, sturgeon, endive, asparagus, and artichokes to prove her point about what you could get in Amsterdam in the 1600s. Not that this was the kind of food you’d find in the local beer hall. Like all cookbooks of its time, it was intended for the affluent, a point made obvious by the recipes’ abundant use of spices. The recipes are reminiscent of Italian cooking of about a century earlier, with a predilection for sweet-and-sour flavorings that use verjuice to provide the tang and plenty of sugar to sweeten the pot. Some combination of nutmeg, pepper, mace, cloves, and cinnamon appears in just about every meat preparation, though less often with fish and vegetables. Peter insists that the amount of spice was moderate, certainly compared to medieval standards. But if I’m right and medieval food was less spicy than commonly thought, it’s likely that Dutch food was actually
more
highly seasoned than its predecessors. What’s more, having tasted that
nagelkaas,
I have no illusions about Netherlanders’ appetite for spice. Admittedly, like most cookbooks of the time, it’s seldom clear how much cloves or nutmeg the cook is supposed to add. Nevertheless, in the few recipes where quantities are given, they are prodigious. A recipe for
hase-saus
(hare sauce) uses a sweet-and-sour base of about a cup of verjuice combined with a dozen sugar cookies, an indeterminate quantity of “whole cloves, pieces of cinnamon, a few blades of mace,” and a scant tablespoon of powdered cinnamon. To sweeten it further, the author instructs you to add a handful of sugar. In another recipe, for
venesoen-pastey
(a kind of meat pie), where quantities are specified, three pounds of beef are seasoned with almost two tablespoons of pepper, four of ginger, two and a half of nutmeg, and a half tablespoon of cloves before being baked in pastry. The fourteenth-century
Ménagier de Paris
could never compete with this!

Whether Jacob and his wife, Margaretha, ate like this every day or whether this sort of preparation was mainly meant for company is unclear. The Dutch population as a whole certainly consumed way more spices than the average European, but then many more Netherlanders could afford the exotic aromatics. By the late sixteen hundreds, pepper and ginger could hardly be considered luxuries, though cloves, nutmeg, and mace, if anything, increased a little in price.
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But then most people would buy the spices in small quantities, a half ounce package or even less. Paintings from the period occasionally feature little paper cornets (apparently, these were recycled from newspapers or almanacs) filled with a few pennies’ worth of ground pepper.

You can learn a lot about the taste in food of Jacob Cromhout’s generation from the thousands of still lifes that were produced to decorate all those houses built to accommodate Amsterdam’s booming population. The Dutch bourgeoisie was mad for pictures, all sorts of pictures: landscapes, genre scenes, portraits, and still lifes. And food was a hugely popular subject. The paintings glitter with imported Chinese porcelain, sparkling Rhenish glass, and even the occasional polished brass mortar for grinding spices. Art historians who specialize in these glory days of the still life argue endlessly about how true to life they really were. Were these moral lessons disguised as luscious food displays? Were they vehicles to show off an artist’s virtuosity and therefore collected by connoisseurs of the finest brushstroke? No matter what the artists’ intentions, the results are undeniably sensuous, even prurient. The hams are spread out just waiting to be sliced into translucent rosy slivers, the ripe fruit oozes tantalizing juices, the oysters glisten with their briny liquor, so realistic you can feel them slipping down your throat. You can’t convince me that the pleasure of eating wasn’t foremost in the mind of the painter or the patron. That is not to say that what you saw on the canvas was exactly what people were eating. The relationship was probably no greater then than it is now between the picture-perfect recipes in food magazines and what actually lands on our tables. But some relationship surely existed, just as it must have between the instructions in
De verstandige kock
and the dishes assembled on the Croumhouts’ marble counters.

In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, even middling craftsmen could afford a few grams of pepper, sold freshly ground and packaged in recycled almanacs.