An illustrated encyclopedia of Dutch and Belgian confectionery.

Drop is not a flavour but a category. To the Dutch it ranges from zoete drop, given to children and soft as a syrup gum, through to dubbelzoute lozenges so saline they can produce a chemical headache in someone who has not grown up with them. Between those poles sits a working vocabulary of perhaps thirty named varieties, distinguished by shape, salt content, sweetener, glycyrrhiza grade, and the presence or absence of ammonium chloride. This entry maps the terrain.

The two are not the same, despite a century of conflation by supermarkets and a recent decade of conflation by English-language food media. Pepernoten are spiced, chewy, irregular in shape, built on a rye-and-anise dough that goes back to the seventeenth century. Kruidnoten are crisp, round, uniform, built on a speculaaskoek dough and industrialised in the twentieth. The confusion is recent enough to be traceable, and worth correcting.

The cuberdon is the most fragile commercial candy in continental Europe: a cone of raspberry-flavoured gum arabic with a liquid heart, a shelf life of roughly three weeks, and a near-impossibility of export. It is sold from competing carts on the Groentenmarkt in Ghent — the famous cuberdonoorlog, or "nose-candy war," ran for nearly a decade — and almost nowhere else. This entry covers the candy, the rivalry, and the recipe insofar as it is known.