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 ten 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; schuimpjes and spekkies, the foam-and-marshmallow tradition; kaneelstokken, the cinnamon candy sticks; the Haagsche hopje, the coffee candy of The Hague; and pepermunt, the sober white mint of the Frisian houses.
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, a bread topping rather than candy, eaten by adults as well as children. Its 1908 origin, the legal chocolate minimum, and how long it keeps.
3 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. Beschuit met muisjes, the colour code, and De Ruijter of Baarn, maker since 1860.
2 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 sold around the world.
2 min read→ № 04Toverbal
toverbal — magic ball
The colour-changing jawbreaker of the Dutch schoolyard. Thin coloured sugar layers that dissolve one by one — the Dutch gobstopper.
2 min read→ № 05Zuurtjes
zuurtjes — sour drops
The everyday Dutch boiled sweet: sugar boiled with a little acid, in citroen, framboos, anijs and other flavours — plus their German and Belgian cousins.
2 min read→ № 06Schuimpjes
schuimpjes — foam sweets
Soft, airy sugar-and-gelatine foam sweets in pastel shapes, made by Schuttelaar since 1918 — and not to be confused with the meringue of the same name.
2 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.
2 min read→ № 08Kaneelstokken
kaneelstok — cinnamon stick (candy)
Cinnamon sugar sticks dusted with ground cinnamon, long associated with Oosterhout — the Dutch answer to the candy cane.
2 min read→ № 09Hopjes
hopje — Haags coffee candy
The hard coffee-caramel of The Hague, named after Baron Hendrik Hop and arguably the oldest branded sweet in the Netherlands. Coffee, sugar, butter and cream — and the 2024 end of Rademaker production.
2 min read→ № 10Pepermunt
pepermunt — peppermint
The sober counterweight to drop: the white mint of Friesland, KING of Sneek and Wilhelmina of Dokkum, passed along church pews and offered across meeting tables without comment.
2 min read→