The Taste of Conquest (31 page)

Looking at the pictures and reading the cookbook makes me a little suspicious of the opinions of Dutch food given by foreign visitors. How much of Abbé Pierre Sartre’s descriptions can be attributed to his Gallic blinders when he writes, “Their meat-broth is nothing more than water full of salt or nutmeg, with sweetbreads and minced meat added, having not the slightest flavor of meat”? (Admittedly, he was writing in the mid-eighteenth century, a period of Dutch decline.) Perhaps we would do better to listen to Sir William Temple, who visited the lowlands in the early sixteen hundreds. Though the Englishman has a decidedly mixed opinion of the Dutch, he does show some grudging admiration for Dutch enthusiasm at the table. “To a feast they come readily, but being set once you must have patience,” he warns, in contrast to the Frenchman. “They are longer eating meat then we preparing it. If it to be supper, you conclude timely when you get away at day-break.” He is also taken with the Dutch skill in fish preparation. Perhaps it is his English background that makes him so generous in this regard. But he is in full agreement with an Iberian contemporary who was shocked at the Netherlanders’ poor table manners. On a visit to The Hague, the Spanish ambassador came across a group of deputies to the States General ripping apart hunks of dark bread and gnawing cheese while waiting for the session to open. This was clearly a far cry from the highly formalized dining rituals of the Most Catholic King’s court, but in a way, he was impressed at the informal ways of his enemies, declaring, “Such a people is invincible!”

The Dutch did eat plenty of cheese. The Germans called their neighbors “cheese-heads,” but there was a hint of envy in the moniker. Holland not only had enough cheese to feed the nation, but it could send it abroad for hard cash.

The Dutch, almost uniquely in Europe, had plenty to eat, and this was across the population as a whole. Again, the paintings of the period open a window into the ordinary kitchens and taverns of the time. No one shows the middling classes at table and country folk eating, drinking (and falling down) better than the painter Jan Steen. His versions of keg parties are particularly true to life, no doubt because he knew the subject firsthand: he started life as a brewer. The Joe Six-Packs in his pictures do not sip Rhine wine from delicate glass tumblers and dine on spiced hare off of Italian majolica as they might have on the Herengracht. They guzzle beer and chomp down on fat slices of cheese and ham with hunks of dark bread. Wages were higher in seventeenth-century Holland than anywhere else in Europe, and the grain brought in from the Baltic was relatively cheap. Consequently, the staple black bread cost little enough that a skilled laborer could pick up a three-pound loaf for a few pennies and still have change left over to spend on vegetables, cheese, and herring.
^*43
It’s one reason he could afford the imported spices, even if his family tasted the more expensive ones only once a year in the holiday gingerbread. The famine-prone peasants of southern Europe would have stood with gaping mouths in front of the paintings of plump children in Amsterdam orphanages receiving a weekly ration of meat or fish to supplement their everyday diet of bread, beans, and beer. As a result of this relative affluence, and unlike the rest of Europe, there were barely any food riots reported in the newly minted republic in the sixteen hundreds.

The market gardens surrounding Holland’s cities kept the urban population well supplied with vegetables, and cows grew nice and fat on the green grass that grew in the incessant Dutch drizzle. However, Holland’s quality of life could hardly be sustained on local supplies alone. “This country produces little wheat and not even rye because of the low ground and wateriness,” noted an impressed Italian visitor in 1567, “yet enjoys so much plenty that it supplies other countries…. It does not make wine, and there is more wine and more of it is drunk than in any other part where it is made.” All this is to say that every aspect of Dutch cooking was dependent on imports, whether of herring from the nearby North Sea, wine from the Rhineland, rye from the Polish plains, sugar from South America, or nutmeg from halfway across the world in the Moluccas. There is a Dutch expression,
Wat men van veerst haelt, dat smaecket soetst,
which means, “The things that you bring from farthest taste the sweetest” (or, more prosaically, the best). Since most of the land wasn’t much good for anything but grazing dairy cattle, anyone with ambition had to look beyond the dikes and polders. Just like in Venice and Lisbon, the path to riches led overseas.

As they say in the real estate business, location is everything, and the Low Countries occupied a plump spot. This is where wine and coal sent up the Rhine were repacked from river barges to seagoing ships, where the Portuguese delivered their oil and salt for the German market, where Genoan and Venetian galleys made their last stop before turning home. Early on, it was the southern Netherlands (today’s Belgium) that got to cream the profits from the passing trade. In the Middle Ages, the great Flemish metropolis of Bruges was the place to be if you wanted to swap English wool for Persian silks and Swedish furs for pepper from Malabar. In later years, when the torch of the spice trade was wrenched from Venice, and Lisbon ruled the waves, the action moved to Antwerp and then finally to Amsterdam in the late fifteen hundreds as a result of the war with Spain. But real wealth, the kind of money that could build the mansions on the Herengracht and make it possible for craftsmen to eat like gentlemen, only came later, in the seventeenth century, when—as a result of war, luck, and a generous pinch of savvy—Amsterdam became the spice capital of the world.

A D
AM ON THE
A
MSTEL

If, like most people, you arrive at the city’s Centraal Station, take a moment to look north from platform 15 at the panorama just across the narrow neck of water. Not so long ago, everything that you see here—the high-rises and trees, the housing developments and children’s playgrounds, the parks and factories—all used to be swamp and sea. In order for the city to exist, Amsterdamers have never stopped digging ditches and canals, and draining boggy soil. Even the Victorian railway station was built on pilings right in the middle of what used to be the city’s great harbor. Seventeenth-century engravings show scores of ships anchored where the station now stands with a grand watery boulevard leading to the heart of the city at the Dam. No wonder the Dutch have a reputation for being tough and ornery. Can you blame them after all those centuries fighting the sea? Still, this watery cradle had its advantages. As one English visitor noted, “[They] all are seamen born and like frogs can live both on land and water.” This would come in handy as they transformed Lisbon’s Indian Ocean empire into a Dutch pond.

Compared to Lisbon, and even Venice, Amsterdam made rather a late arrival on the European stage. At a time when the cries of muezzin echoed through the alleys of the Alfama, and the Rialto rustled with gossip about the fork-wielding princess from Constantinople, the interior of what the Romans had called Batavia was a sparsely populated wetland crisscrossed by meandering rivers. Then, sometime in the twelfth century, a series of enormous floods turned the Netherlands into a giant water-filled bowl with an enormous bay, the Zuiderzee, at its center. At the southern edge of this inland sea, a small community dammed up the Amstel, a little river that connected to the mighty Rhine. Accordingly, people called the place Amstelredamme (Amstel Dam), later shortened to Amsterdam. The open area near the dam, today presided over by the Royal Palace and Madame Tussaud’s, started its life as a market, which eventually turned into the city’s main square. It is still called the Dam, even though the Amstel has long since been rechanneled and paved over.

Soon enough, the locals started to travel for business. We know this because some, at least, got into trouble along the way. Apparently, a ship from “Amstelland” was confiscated in the Baltic town of Lübeck as early as 1248. Those first traders brought back all sorts of goods—from leather and furs to grain and honey—but they would soon specialize in one critical commodity: beer. Especially German beer. Around 1365, an impressive twenty-five hundred tons, or about a third of Hamburg’s total beer export, was shipped into Amsterdam each month. And despite the Dutch talent for drinking, this was considerably more than the city’s three thousand inhabitants could consume. They sold what they could not imbibe.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Amsterdam merchants branched out from beer to herring to grain. In need of ships to carry all these commodities, Scandinavian timber was imported, too, and sawed into planks for a booming shipping industry. (You can still make out the crossed arms of the last of the old city’s wind-driven sawmills when you look east from the Centraal Station.) The little city grew by inscribing a series of semicircular canals in the surrounding bog, all centered on the Dam. All the same, a map from 1482 shows a town that would fit handily into one of Venice’s smaller neighborhoods.

Even as late as the 1560s, most of the world didn’t give much thought to Amsterdam—or, for that matter, any of the Dutch. Well, almost. There was one obsessive-compulsive personality who had become fixated with the Netherlands or, more to the point, with all the Hollanders who had signed up with the schismatic cults of the Reformation. In the early sixteenth century, the territories of what are Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had come under Spanish rule, and the ultraorthodox Philip II had no intention of allowing heresy to breed in his backyard. And he had the resources of five continents to prove it. The Dutch, for their part, were none too fond of “the Most Catholic King” either. The absentee monarch not only insisted on imposing Catholic orthodoxy on the population of newly minted Lutherans, Sacramentarians, Anabaptists, and above all, Calvinists, but he tried to pay for it by taxing the same people he was trying to reconvert. Naturally, the stubborn Dutch, especially the prosperous (and largely Protestant) towns of the province of Holland, would have none of it. In 1568, Philip decided to solve the problem by sending in a small fragment of his enormous army. What began as a police action turned into a vicious war that wouldn’t officially end for eighty years. The Spanish soldiers arrived like crazed crusaders, massacring whole towns and executing thousands. Yet while initially successful, their torch-and-burn strategy became literally bogged down in Flanders. Finally, the last Spanish incursion was crushed in 1574, when the citizens of Leiden broke open their dikes and drowned the Catholic army.

When the gun smoke had cleared and the dikes had been repaired, what emerged after 1587 were two de facto states. In the south, the so-called Spanish Netherlands (essentially, today’s Belgium) retained an overwhelmingly Catholic population, while in the north, the United Provinces of the Netherlands (or more commonly, the “Dutch Republic”) were a mix of Catholic and Protestant—though in the economically dominant provinces of Holland and Utrecht, the Calvinists ruled the roost.

The war was a stroke of supreme luck for Amsterdam, which, after 1575, had little personal experience of Philip’s shock troops. The city would certainly not have become involved in the East India spice trade as early if it hadn’t been for the Most Catholic Majesty’s jihad. After all, before the Spanish annexation of their neighbor’s empire in 1580, the Batavians had been free to sail down to Lisbon, where they would pick up all the spices they could carry. In those days, the spices were then distributed mostly through the southern Netherlands city of Antwerp. Why risk going all the way to India, even if the profits from dealing between Lisbon and Antwerp weren’t quite as plump? But all this changed with the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. The Dutch were cut out of the Lisbon market, and with the arrival of Philip’s battalions, Antwerp’s economy crashed and the city burned. The result was a huge windfall for Amsterdam as the bankers, merchants, painters, and doctors who had once flocked to Antwerp now fled north. In the booming city on the Amstel, they joined the crowds of recently arrived Protestant refugees from France and Germany, as well as Jews escaping autos-da-fé in Lisbon and Seville.

The ongoing war resulted in rivers of bad blood on both sides. Dutch captains felt completely justified in attacking any and all Spanish vessels, piling atrocity upon atrocity. In a typical move, when Dutch ships intercepted Spanish troop transports in the English Channel in 1605, the Dutch admiral, rather than take prisoners, had them all thrown overboard, tied back-to-back. All the same, while every one of Philip’s ships was considered a legitimate target, the Dutch privateers seemed especially diligent in carrying out their patriotic duty by hijacking galleons loaded down with American bullion. Not that they would turn up their noses at a lesser prize. Portuguese
naus
laden with pepper and cinnamon became almost as enticing after 1580, when Portugal came under Spanish rule. Now all of Portugal’s Indian spice empire was considered fair game—the entire Estado da Índia no more than one really big, fat prize for the privateer republic to seize from the iniquitous Papist tyrant. Amsterdam prospered as doubloons destined for Philip’s army were instead used to pay tavern bills on the Dam and cargoes of pilfered pepper scented warehouses once reeking with herring.

Yet even before the first Dutch prow was moistened by an Indian Ocean wave, the ambitious city was prospering. As early as 1596, Amsterdam could boast that the volume of trade and shipping controlled by the United Provinces was far greater than that of England and France combined! Customs documents show that the number of Dutch ships entering the Zuiderzee in the last hundred years had gone up 400 percent, and a good number of those were docking where the Centraal Station’s steeples now rise. So the motivations for getting into the spice trade had to be different here than they once were for the Venetians or the
Lisboetas.
In 1600, Amsterdam’s prosperous merchants, who had mostly made their money on decidedly unglamorous commodities like timber and herring, certainly had no illusions that the spice trade could be the mother’s milk of prosperity as it had been in Venice. No doubt the way Lisbon’s treasury depended on the pepper
naus
would have struck these practical Hollanders as preposterous. The profit margins were certainly tempting. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the gross profit on grain was some 30 to 40 percent, while on spices, it would be more like 300 percent (admittedly, with higher expenses). Yet in the early days, at least, these hard-bitten venture capitalists were surely also drawn a little by the whiff of glamour that had long been associated with the Orient’s smelly little berries, buds, and bark. And with the war, there was now a window of opportunity to muscle in on the enormous profits that the Portuguese were supposedly making. The trouble was, the Dutch financiers didn’t really know much about the business.