Breakfast and Lunch
Breakfast and lunch differ little in Dutch cuisine and both consist of
bread with a wide variety of cold cuts, cheeses and sweet toppings; such as hagelslag, vlokken and muisjes. Chocolate spread, treacle (a thick, dark brown sugar syrup called stroop), peanut butter and confiture are popular too.
The Dutch are famous for their dairy products and especially for their
cheeses. The vast majority of Dutch cheeses are semi-hard or hard cheeses.
Famous Dutch cheeses include Gouda, Edam, and Leyden. A typically Dutch way of making cheese is to blend in herbs or spices
during the first stages of the production process. Famous examples are
cheeses with cloves (usually the Frisian nagelkaas), cumin (most famously Leyden cheese), or nettles.
Dutch bread tends to be very airy, as it is made from yeast dough. From
the 1970s onward Dutch bread became predominantly whole grain, with additional seeds such as sunflower or pumpkin seeds often mixed
with the dough for taste. Rye bread is one of the few dense breads of the Netherlands. White bread used to be the luxury bread, often made with milk as well as water. A
Frisian luxury version of white bread is suikerbrood, white bread with large lumps of sugar mixed with the dough. Kerststol is a traditional Dutch Christmas bread made of bread dough with sugar,
dried fruits, raisins and currants and lemon and orange zest, eaten sliced,
spread with butter.
Those who do not want to have breakfast but need something in their
stomach in the morning often eat the famous Dutch ontbijtkoek. It is usually served as a small slice, possibly with
butter.
Coffee time
Dutch people invite friends over for koffietijd (coffee time),
which consists of coffee and cake or a biscuit, served between 10 and 11 a. m.
(before lunch) and/or between 7 and 8 p. m. (after dinner). The Dutch drink
coffee and tea throughout the day, often served with a single biscuit. Dutch thrift
led to the famous standard rule of only one cookie with each cup of coffee. It
has been suggested that the reasons for this can be found in the Protestant
mentality and upbringing in the northern Netherlands. The traditionally Roman
Catholic south does not share this tradition as for instance in Limburg, where
serving a large vlaai (sweet pie or pastry with filling), cut into eight
pieces, is tradition when visitors are expected.
Café au lait is also very common. It is called koffie verkeerd (literally
"wrong coffee") and consists of equal parts black coffee and hot milk. The Dutch
drink tea without milk and the tea is quite a lot weaker than the typical
English types of tea which are taken with milk. Other hot drinks used to include
warm lemonade, called kwast (hot water with lemon juice), and anijsmelk (hot milk with aniseed). In the autumn and winter the very popular hot chocolate or chocolate milk is drunk. Both anijsmelk and kwast are hardly drunk
anymore and have lost their popularity.
Dinner
Dinner, traditionally served early by international standards, starts at
about 18:00 in the evening. The old-fashioned Dutch dinner consists of one
simple course: beans or potatoes, meat and vegetables. Traditionally potatoes
with a large portion of vegetables and a small portion of meat with gravy, or a
potato and vegetable stew. A typical traditional Dutch dinner would include
stamppot (Dutch mashed potato mixed with other mashed vegetables) and pea soup. Vegetable stews served as side dishes are for example rodekool met
appeltjes (red cabbage with apples), or rode bieten (beetroot). Regular spices used in stews of this kind may be bay leaves, juniper berries, cloves, and vinegar, although strong spices are generally used sparingly.
Stews are often served with mixed pickles, including zure zult or stewed pears. Due to the influx of other
countries traditional meals have lost some popularity. Stamppot is
traditionally eaten in winter.
If there is a starter, it is usually soup. The final course is a sweet dessert, traditionally
yogurt with some sugar or vla, thin milk pudding (cooked milk with custard).
Another dish served at the dinner table is a very thick pea soup, called
snert and it can be served either as a main dish or as an appetizer and
is traditionally eaten during the winter. Snert has a very thick consistency and often includes pieces of pork and
rookworst - smoked sausage - and is almost a stew rather than a soup. It
is customarily served with roggebrood (rye bread) spread with butter and topped with katenspek, a variety of
bacon which is first cooked and then smoked. The meat from the soup may also be
put on the rye bread and eaten with mustard.
Meat dishes include gehaktballen meatballs, slavink, minced meat wrapped in bacon, balkenbrij, a type of liverwurst and meatloaf. The butter based gravy (boterjus), in which the meat has been fried and/or cooked, is
also served. A variant of this, eaten around the IJsselmeer (a lake in the central Netherlands), is butter en eek,
where vinegar is added to the gravy.
Another Dutch dinner dish is pannenkoeken (pancakes are named after pannenkoeken), which come in several varieties
including poffertjes (miniature pancakes) and spekdik (a Northern variant with
bacon). Wentelteefjes (French toast) are made similarly. Broeder, a type of cake, is also eaten for dinner,
mainly in West Friesland.
Desserts
Desserts often include vla (vanilla custard) or yogurt. Regional variants include broodpap, a bread porridge made from
old bread, milk, butter and sugar.
Other puddings and porridges are griesmeelpudding, grutjespap, Haagse bluf, hangop, Jan in de
zak, karnemelksepap, rijstebrij (rice pudding), krentjebrij (also called watergruwel).
International food
Indonesian and Indo dishes became popular. While popular in Holland, Rijsttafel is now rare
in Indonesia itself.
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