Chinese Pindakoekjes

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the cry “Pinda! Pinda! Lekka, lekka!” (peanut, peanut, tasty, tasty) echoed through Dutch streets: the call of the Chinese peanut brittle vendors. 

Most of these vendors were seamen from southern China who had originally worked as stokers and coal trimmers on ships of the Dutch merchant marine, such as the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland. When shipping jobs became scarce (especially after World War I) many of these men were stranded in port cities such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Without stable employment, and facing language barriers and discrimination, they resorted to selling Chinese peanut brittle for 5 cents a piece from metal boxes hanging from straps around their necks. 

So familiar was the sight of these peanut brittle vendors that their peanut cry made its way into popular song, most notably in the version performed by Willy Derby. The song exaggerates the character for the stage, as cabaret often did, but behind the humor stood a real figure in Dutch street life - a man making a living, five cents at a time. 

Fotocollectie Spaarnestad 

The somewhat romantic image in the song ("ik heb bij de mooiste meisjes sjans") however hides a harsher reality. Selling pindakoekjes or pinda platen, was not a romantic enterprise but a means of survival in a country where steady employment was uncertain and social acceptance limited. Many of these Chinese migrants became stateless after losing their jobs. They often lived in overcrowded boarding houses, while anti-Chinese sentiment and restrictive labor practices limited other opportunities. Police sometimes also purposely regulated street vending, especially after complaints from local business owners. 

Yet these vendors also represent the very first visible Chinese community in the Netherlands. The first Chinese restaurant surfaced in Rotterdam in 1920, initially to cater to the Chinese community, but eventually gaining interest and appreciation from Dutch customers. The later rise of Chinese-Indonesian restaurants after WWII grew partly from these early networks. 

Fotocollectie Spaarnestad 

The pinda platen vendors eventually ventured outside of the bigger cities.  Many in the older generations can recall stories about their city's "pindachinees”, the local Chinese peanut vendor. I remember my grandfather often speaking of a gentleman known as “Pinda Willem,” or Peanut Bill (real name Tsen Koa Pai), who lived in Venlo from 1937 to 1963 and became a familiar figure by supplying locals with peanut treats, especially the kids. As the stories go, he often carried “something for the weekend” at the bottom of his bag for the local men as well.

The koekjes themselves were practical: made with a mixture of sugar, peanuts, and a touch of vinegar, they required no oven, just heat. The warm brittle was cut into bars, which hardened as they cooled and could be snapped off and sold individually. For many Dutch people, the first taste of something “foreign” came from a paper-wrapped peanut cookie bought from a man whose story they never knew. And perhaps that is why these peanut cookies matter. They are evidence of adaptation, resilience, and the quiet ways migrants become part of everyday life.

These peanut brittles (in Mandarin Hua Sheng Tang, in Indonesian known as teng teng, a name echoed playfully in Willy Derby's refrain) remain popular in China today and are often enjoyed during Chinese New Year celebrations. Even though they never became a staple in Dutch cuisine, they sort of helped spark the emergence of Chinese-Indonesian restaurants, now firmly woven into our everyday food culture. 

These brittle bars are quick to make. Feel free to experiment with flavors: add sesame seeds, or replace the peanuts with a mix of other nuts you might like better. You could also add a little vanilla, but don't omit the vinegar. The flavor does not affect the cookies, but the vinegar will help keep the sugar from setting too quickly. If you chop the peanuts, you can roll this brittle very thin, which results in a crispy, snappy kind of treat, and much more in style of what they're used to look like. Spreading the mix out on a large baking sheet will be the best choice. I left the peanuts whole which resulted in a thicker, chewier kind of treat.

Chinese Pindakoekjes

2 cups (250 grams) roasted peanuts
1 heaping cup (250 grams) regular, white sugar
1 Tablespoon (15 grams) butter, and a bit extra for greasing the paper
2 Tablespoons white vinegar
1 Tablespoon water

Line a baking sheet or square baking pan (mine is a 9 inch/22 cm) with parchment paper, and grease both top and bottom of the paper.* 

Chop the peanuts into small pieces, or leave whole like I did. In a heavy bottomed pan, cook the sugar, butter, vinegar and water into a golden caramel, until it reaches a temperature of 300F/148C. Quickly fold in the peanuts until they are well coated, and immediately pour the mixture on the parchment paper. With a sturdy spatula or the back of a solid spoon, quickly spread out the mixture so that it has even thickness. With a knife, or the metal edge of a bench scraper, mark out the lines of the bars. As the brittle cools, you may have to do that once or twice, to make sure the indentations stay. 

Let the brittle cool fully before you snap it into bars. 

* Greasing both the top and the bottom will secure the paper in place when you are working hard on getting the peanut brittle spread out. Alternatively, if you are not using a baking pan with raised edges like mine, you can roll the brittle out thin with a rolling pin once it has started to set.  

Carnavalssoep

I was tempted to give this post a subtitle: The Curious Case of the Carnaval Soup, and here's why. For the last several years, online recipes for a dish called carnavalssoep (a rich tomato based soup with peppers, leeks, white beans, ground beef and smoked sausage) have been appearing with increasing frequency. Depending on where you look, it may also be called truujensoep, oudewijvensoep, or aldewievensoep. 

I first encountered it while researching oudewijvenkoek, and was immediately intrigued. I am a Limburgse at heart and grew up immersed in local carnaval traditions, from the festivities beginning on November 11 through Ash Wednesday, yet I had never heard of this soup before.

Unlike many Dutch dishes whose origins can be traced through old cookbooks, regional archives, or family notebooks, carnavalssoep seems to appear quite suddenly. There are no clear references in older culinary literature, no mentions in early twentieth-century household manuals, and no obvious regional variations passed down through generations. Instead, the soup enters the internet already presented as something familiar and traditional from the start. 

Dutch food culture has always been receptive to new influences and make them its own. What begins as a personal preference, a local joke, or a practical solution can, within a generation, be remembered as always having been this way. A well-known example is the kapsalon, now a staple in snack bars across the Netherlands. Yet the dish did not exist before 2003, when a Rotterdam hairdresser asked his local shoarma shop to combine fries, meat, cheese, and salad into one tray. Other customers began ordering “the kapsalon,” and within a few years it had spread nationwide: a modern invention that already feels deeply rooted in Dutch food culture. 

Something similar may be happening as we speak, on a more local level. This year, the Frisian village of Grou announces the return of Sint Pitersop, Saint Peter's soup. The soup is served during the celebration of Sint Piter on Februari 21st, an event similar to Sinterklaas that has always been unique to Grou. The festivities committee's website states that they are "reviving an old tradition: the St. Piter soup". But research into old cookbooks, online archives, and reams and reams of regional publications has not revealed any tradition regarding soup during St. Piter. 

But back to the carnaval soup. The earliest version of the carnavalssoep recipe I have been able to find dates from 2009. Many online descriptions of this soup repeat the same claims almost word for word: that it is traditional, that it was made by (and for) older women, and that it follows a familiar set of ingredients. Rather than pointing to a shared family history, this may simply reflect a recipe copied and repeated online. Over time, repetition can create the impression of age and authenticity: a gentle reminder that repetition alone does not make something historically accurate.

Carnavalssoep, like St. Pitersop, may therefore not be an old tradition at all. Perhaps it is something more interesting: a new tradition in the making, one that is just as worth documenting. If future generations continue to prepare the soup during carnaval, a tradition will truly have come into being!

The recipe can be adjusted to your liking. I rolled the beef into small balls and simmered them in the soup. If you don't have access to beans in tomato sauce, use regular white beans and two tablespoons of tomato paste, or use a can of pork and beans. 

Carnavalssoep

1 Tablespoon (15 grams) butter

1 lb (500 grams) ground beef

1 large onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

3 bell peppers, diced (one red, one green, one yellow)*

1 large leek, cut in half moons

1 can (15.5 oz/ 440 grams) beans in tomato sauce 

3 cups (0.75 liter) tomato sauce

3 cups (0.75) water

1 smoked sausage, sliced

3 bouillon cubes

2 bay leaves

1 Tablespoon brown sugar

1 Tablespoon sambal or hot sauce

Salt to taste

Melt the butter and fry the ground beef until no longer pink, then add the onion, garlic, peppers, and leeks. Fry the vegetables until they have a little bit of a char and the onion is no longer raw. Add the can of beans, stir everything well and then transfer the content to a crockpot, slow cooker, or stockpot. 

Add in the tomato sauce and the water, the bay leaves, the smoked sausage and the bouillon cubes. Bring it back up to temperature and let it simmer for a good fifteen to twenty minutes, then taste and adjust the salt level. Stir in the brown sugar and the sambal or hot sauce, and you're ready to party! 

* these are the traditional Limburg carnaval colors!

Vrijerskoek

Long before text messages, before flowers delivered with printed cards, and long before dropping on one knee in front of clicking cameras, young men relied on baked goods to express intent. One of those baked goods was the hylikmaker (literally a “marriage maker”) also known as vrijerskoek, a suitor’s cake. 

The young man would purchase this cake at the kermis, the funfair, or at the bakery, when he was ready to declare his love for someone. Often, the cake was rectangular and decorated with almonds or sweet words in piped icing, other times it was in the shape of a person, like the ones in the larger wooden speculaas molds. 

We can see an image of such a vrijerskoek in the Feast of Saint Nicholas painting, by Jan Steen, ca. 1665–1668. In the lower left part of the painting, we observe a basket with baked goods, traditional for this time of year: waffles, rolls, ontbijtkoek, and right underneath it, a long elongated flat cake: the hylickmaker. It is not surprising to see this cake in a painting about Sinterklaas. His moniker, goedheiligman, is said to stem from "goed hylick man", good marriage maker, probably referencing the story that Saint Nicholas provided gold coins for three young women so that they would have a good dowry and not have to go into servanthood. 

In another painting by Jan Steen, De Koekvrijer, (The Cake Suitor, ca. 1663 -1665), we see a young man lifting his hat towards a young woman who is seated. In his other hand, he holds a large hylickmaker. The woman does not immediately take it. Instead, she looks straight at us, slightly amused. We can read a lot into the details in the painting (the woman is sewing, the bed behind her has opened curtains, the door is open to the outside, the way he is holding the cake...but I'll leave that to your imagination!). 

Presenting the cake was one part. Accepting the cake meant more than enjoying something sweet; it meant acknowledging the possibility of a future together. If the girl was partial to the young man, she would break the head of the cake and gave it back to him. If instead she handed him the feet, well....then he better get walking! In the case of the rectangular cake, the young man would be invited to have coffee at the house. If the cake appeared on the table, uncut, the proposal was declined. If the cake appeared on the table, and the young man was offered a piece of that cake and a cup of coffee, his proposal was accepted! 

Recipes for hylickmakers appeared in cookbooks as early as 1746, but they unfortunately are no longer part of the proposal tradition. The Volmaakte Hollandsche Keukenmeid lists as ingredients for the "hylikmaker": flour, brown sugar, honey, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves, a pinch of potash, and candied citron and orange peel. She then casually mentions: "Neemt dan de rolstok en maakt het deeg daar mede plat" (Take a rolling pin and make the dough flat"). 

Now....I have tried this recipe, and our keukenmeiden (kitchen maids) back in the day must have been as strong as an ox, because the moment the honey with the sugar cools down, this dough is tougher to roll than concrete! Annie van 't Veer warns us about this in her "Oud-Hollands Kookboek", explaining that bakers back in the day used to knead this dough by pushing down on it with an iron bar, a so-called breaker bar. I could have used one of those! 

These were not everyday treats. They were baked with purpose and offered as part of a quiet negotiation between families, intentions, and futures. The citron, orange peel, and warm spices signal luxury and intention. Because the dough was so hard to roll, the second time I baked these cakes I decided to add a little bit of additional luxury, and added butter and an egg. I still rolled it out thin, like both Annie and the Keukenmeid suggest, but it was a bit easier to do! I rolled the dough out between two plastic sheets to make it easier to lift from the table.

For this recipe, I included both candied citron and candied orange. If you don't have any left over from your Christmas baking, don't worry. I don't know that the citron added that much special flavor to the cake, and the candied orange can easily be substituted with orange zest. 

This recipe baked 3 nine inch (23 cm) gingerbread men and a rectangular 11 x 7 inch (28 x 17.5 cm) cake, as can be seen in the picture. Since not many of us have those large speculaas molds, I chose a large gingerbread cookie cutter instead. You can also use heart shaped cookie cutters, or any other Valentine Day cutters! These cookies crisp up when they cool. If you prefer a breadier, thicker cake, don't roll it too thin. 

Vrijerskoek

3/4 cup (150 grams) brown sugar

1/4 cup (90 grams) honey

1 1/2 cups (250 grams) all-purpose flour 

1 teaspoon (5 grams) baking powder 

1 1/2 teaspoon (3 grams) cinnamon

1 teaspoon (2 grams) nutmeg

1 teaspoon (2 grams) ground cloves

1/4 cup (30 grams) candied citron (optional)

1/4 cup (30 grams) candied orange peel (substitute with 1 Tablespoon orange zest)

1 stick (115 grams) butter, cold and diced

2 eggs

For decoration: almonds, edible glitter, heart shaped candy, etc. 

Carefully warm the sugar with the honey on the stove, until the sugar is melted. Mix the dry ingredients
in a bowl, and when the sugar honey mix has cooled enough to handle to the touch, pour it in the bowl and mix. Then add in 1 egg, the cold butter, and continue to mix until all the ingredients have blended.  If you are using citron and orange peel or zest, mix it in now. 

Roll out the dough thin, and cut into shapes. Beat the second egg, and brush the cookies with egg wash. If you make gingerbread men, remember to poke a hole in the head (I used the lid of a pen) so you can tie a ribbon through it. 

Bake on a parchment lined baking sheet at 350F/175C for about 15 minutes, middle rack. Keep an eye out for those last several minutes, as the amount of sugar causes the cookies to go from golden to burnt in no time. 

Let cool. Store in a cookie jar, or hand it to your intended on Valentine's Day. Let's revive a centuries old tradition!