Dutch Foodways

“What’s for dinner? Food preparation and food consumption practices in Early Modern Delft based on new insights from archaeobotanical and historical data”
Merit Hondelink (Groningen University)

In the course of the Early Modern period, the population of the Netherlands gradually increased. In addition to population growth, the Netherlands also experienced strong urbanisation. In order to enable, sustain and feed a growing urban population, both the rural and urban landscape, economy and society underwent massive changes. The food choice and alimentary practices of the population also changed markedly in this period. Although historical and archaeological studies pay more and more attention to past food economies, our understanding of the food and alimentary practices of the common Dutch burgher is still far from complete. This paper presents my PhD research in which I aimed to fill this lacuna by investigating what the common burghers of Early Modern Dutch cities ate, how they prepared their daily meal and how this changed over time. Suitable evidence for the research of food and alimentary practices of the common Dutch burgher comes from 1) bio-archaeological samples, 2) historical documents and 3) (experimental) cooking. Each source has its individual merits, biases and limitations. By combining them into a singular interdisciplinary study, I reduced biases and limitations. The usage of data from all three disciplines complimentarily contributed greatly towards consolidating the knowledge on the preparation of the daily meal by common burghers in Early Modern Dutch cities.


The Dutch and their love for liquorice: a post-WWII tale of food technology and identity building
Marieke M.A. Hendriksen (NL Lab, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)

The Dutch eat more liquorice confectionary than anyone else. It is even associated with Dutch national identity in both government reports and marketing campaigns. Yet the liquorice plant is not indigenous, and liquorice confectionary is consumed in many other countries too. When and why did liquorice become so popular in the Netherlands? Before WWII, liquorice confectionary was not consumed in larger amounts in the Netherlands than elsewhere in northwestern Europe, nor was there a strong connection to national identity. This changed dramatically in the two decades after WWII, and surprisingly, one man, a biochemist - played a pivotal role in this process, helped by various socio-economic circumstances. 

This paper demonstrates that tracing how a specific foodstuff becomes part of and shapes the collective identity of a nation state can give us new insights in the complex factors at play in such political, economic, and emotional processes, as well as in the role of science. In this paper, the history of liquorice from medicine and pharmacy to iconic candy in the twentieth-century Low Countries is explored through a combination of archival research and reworking historical liquorice recipes. It is argued that the Dutch love of liquorice is a typical example of heritaging and the identification of certain foodstuffs as “typical” for a nation or region, often by commercial parties with the intent to sell more of their product, without factual historical grounds that support the claim.