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The main ingredient in old-fashioned Dutch dinners is potatoes, usually accompanied by meat and boiled vegetables. The Dutch
traditionally don't use very sharp spices and are very fond of pouring gravy on to everything.
The Dutch usually
start the day with bread and coffee or tea, eat some more bread (with cheese) in the afternoon and end the day with a hot
meal. Traditionally the hot meal is served at 18.00h. but dinnertime is shifting more towards 19.00h nowadays, a bit later
if you eat out.
***Vla: a thick, fluid, sweet pudding made mainly from milk and offered in a variety of tastes
ranging from vanilla and chocolate to strawberry. Certainly try hopjes-vla and bitterkoekjes-vla which have very typical and
also unexplainable tastes.
***Karnemelk: literally 'churned milk' (buttermilk). It has a thin substance and is
rather sour. It is supposed to be quite healthy, but admittedly you must acquire a taste for it.
***Poffertjes:
these resemble very small pancakes and are traditionally served warm with lots of powdered sugar sprinkled on top. You can
make them at home if you have a special pan, but it might be easier to go to a poffertjeskraam (kraam is literally a market
stall, but also indicates larger eating-houses) and get them ready made.
***Hagelslag: traditionally lots of chocolate-snippers
which the Dutch sprinkle on their bread. Nowadays it comes in quite a number of (chocolate-) varieties.
***Muisjes:
literally meaning 'mice', is also used as bread-spread. Although the blue & white muisjes do resemble very small mice
crawling around on your slice of bread. Traditionally the blue & white muisjes are served on beschuit (a kind of thick,
round and very crispy cracker) to celebrate the birth of a child.
***Drop: a sweet (liquorice) that comes in a
very large number of different forms and tastes, from salt and hard to soft and sweet. It is very popular among the entire
Dutch population and is claimed to have something of an addictive-effect if eaten regularly in very large quantities.
***Stamppot: a very down-to-earth meal consisting of mashed potatoes with varying ingredients like carrot (wortel stamppot)
or endive (andijvie stamppot) and usually served with rookworst, a juicy sausage.
***Patat: patat or 'french fries'
may not be an exclusively Dutch food, but the thickness of the french fry itself and the fact that it is very often eaten
with mayonaise ('patat met mayo) is french fries with mayonaise) does make some foreigners stare.but they really are SWIMING
IN MAYONIESE
***Kroket and frikandel: both are fried, roll-formed snacks containing (some kind of) meat.
***Haring: a typical Dutch delicacy is eating a raw herring (fish) with raw onions. You pick the fish up by the tail
and let it slide into your mouth gradually. The first catch of the season is called Hollandse nieuwe ('Dutch new') and is
considered a special treat.
***Vlaai: this a pastry or a sweet pie typical of the southern regions of the Netherlands
(Limburg ).
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