The Canon.
Sweets of the everyday Dutch household
The Canon is the smaller of the two halves of the Dutch sweet inheritance. Where drop is the assertive, regional, often confrontational side of the tradition, the Canon is the quiet, domestic side — the sweets that arrive on weekday breakfast bread, in the schoolyard, at the bedside of a new mother, or in the deep pocket of a winter coat. None of them is a confection one travels to taste. All of them are the kind of food a Dutch person can describe with an offhand precision that startles outsiders, because they have been eating them since they could chew.
The eight entries collected here treat the staples of the everyday repertoire: hagelslag, the chocolate sprinkles eaten on buttered bread for breakfast; muisjes, the pink and blue aniseed comfits given out at a birth; stroopwafels, the syrup waffles of Gouda; the toverbal jawbreaker; the hard-candy zuurtjes of Dordrecht; schuimpjes and spekkies, the foam-and-marshmallow tradition; and kaneelstokken, the cinnamon hard candies of the late autumn.
What the entries share is that none of these sweets is the kind of object a culinary historian would single out for monograph treatment. They are too ordinary, too cheap, too obvious. The aim of the Canon is precisely to give them the careful description their ubiquity has so far denied them.
Hagelslag
chocolade hagelslag — chocolate sprinkles
The Dutch breakfast convention of chocolate sprinkles on buttered bread, codified in 1936 by Venz, regulated by minimum cocoa content, and consumed by adults without irony. The most exported and least understood of all Dutch sweets.
15 min read→ № 02Muisjes
muisjes — aniseed comfits
The pink-and-white or blue-and-white sugar-coated aniseed eaten on rusks at the birth of a child. De Ruijter, 1860, and a colour convention so durable that the Dutch royal family observes it for births.
10 min read→ № 03Stroopwafels
stroopwafel — syrup waffle
The Gouda invention of the early nineteenth century, two thin wafers bound by a layer of caramel syrup, balanced on a hot cup to soften before eating. Now the most successful Dutch confectionery export.
14 min read→ № 04Toverbal
toverbal — magic ball
The colour-changing jawbreaker of the Dutch schoolyard. Layered fruit flavours laid down in concentric shells, eaten over forty minutes, the changing tongue an indicator of progress.
9 min read→ № 05Zuurtjes
zuurtjes — sour drops
The traditional sour boiled candies of citroen, framboos, and anijs, made by Fortuin in Dordrecht since the eighteenth century — the oldest continuously operating confectioner in the Netherlands.
11 min read→ № 06Schuimpjes
schuimpjes — foam sweets
Egg-white-and-sugar foam sweets in their familiar dragonfly and animal forms. The Dutch cousins of meringue and the parents of the spek and schuimkussen lines that followed.
10 min read→ № 07Spekkies
spekkies — Dutch marshmallows
The softer, less-sweet, less-springy Dutch counterpart to the American marshmallow. Pink, white, in cubes or twists, sold by the bag and almost never toasted.
9 min read→ № 08Kaneelstokken
kaneelstok — cinnamon stick (candy)
The pink-and-white striped cinnamon hard-candy sticks of the Sinterklaas season and the late autumn — both confection and informal pacifier, with regional production in the south.
9 min read→