Tag: kookboek

Leek à la Wannée

4 August 2022

Leek is such a tasty vegetable: essential when making stock, delicious when prepared in butter and served with a cheese sauce (Sauce Mornay) or when stir fried. Extravagant when served with a dressing (jus de truffe, lemon, mustard) and lots of summer truffle. A popular, tasty, aromatic and very affordable vegetable.

This was also the case in 1910 when Mrs. Wannée published her cookbook. A book dedicated to nutritious and inexpensive food. Or should we say cheap? She was teacher and director of the Amsterdam Huishoudschool, a school for domestic skills, aimed at training future maids and housewives. The book is currently in its 32nd edition and has sold over one million copies. It continues to be a popular cookbook because every new edition reflects the current views on food and nutrition.

We have a copy of the 14th edition (published around 1955?). It is beautifully illustrated (full colour pictures and drawings) and contains 1038 recipes. It probably very much reflects the 1910 style of preparing food. We followed recipe 451 for stewed leek with a corn starch-based sauce. Well, eh, honestly don’t do this at home. The texture of the leek was nice and soft, the taste gone and the sauce bland and gluey. Interesting as experiment but not worth repeating.

The recipe does not mention the use of pepper and/or nutmeg (both fairly obvious choices) which is part of a bigger problem. Another standard Dutch cookbook (Het Haagse Kookboek, first published in 1934) is also known for the very limited use of spices and herbs. Probably it is a reflection of the sober, Calvinist nature of the Dutch in the 19th and 20th century. Price over taste, quantity over quality.

This dominated Dutch cooking for many years. And in some cases it still does. As if Dutch food is over-cooked and under-seasoned.

Nonsense. When you read books by Carolus Battus or Mrs. Marselis you know that Dutch cuisine is absolutely about tasty and interesting food, using various herbs and spices.

What You Don’t Do

Wash and clean the leek. Slice it in 4 – 5 cm chunks. Cook these in salted water for 30 minutes. Drain. Use the liquid and corn starch to make a sauce. Add some butter to make the sauce richer. Transfer the leek back to the sauce and leave for 15 minutes.

We served the leek with organic pork loin in a creamy mustard sauce (yummy!)

Leek à la Wannée ©cadwu
Wannée example mushrooms
Wannée example dishes
Wannée kookboek

Recipes from 1790

11 July 2022

Het Receptenboek van mevrouw Marselis (The Recipe Book of Mrs. Marselis) published in 1790 gives a wonderful insight in the household and kitchen of an upper middle-class family in the 18th century. Mrs. Marselis (the lady of the house) wrote down instructions for her cook. Mrs. Marselis enjoyed dinners and lunches when she was visiting friends and family, she read cookbooks and collected recipes. Back home she explained to her cook how to prepare the food that she wanted to be served to her family and guests. Unfortunately she doesn’t include menus, so it’s not clear how her meals looked. She probably served various dishes at once (Service à la Française) as was custom until the mid-19th century.

The cook and her staff (perhaps 4 people) worked many hours in the kitchen downstairs to prepare cakes, beef, fish, chicken, pies, cookies, veal, soups, ragouts etcetera. You won’t find many recipes for vegetables because these were considered to be phlegmatic (slimy, cold, wet) and perhaps even more important, vegetables were eaten by the lower classes.

500 Recipes

She does include a recipe for snow peas: these are cooked in butter and water. Adding chopped onion is optional. When the peas are soft, the cook adds some sweet cream and one or two beaten eggs. And one for spinach: it is cooked until really well done, then chopped and stewed with butter, nutmeg and stock.

Some of the recipes are intriguing, for instance: shrimps are cooked in water with vinegar, anchovies, peppers and mace. When done, the shrimps are combined with cold butter to be served with salmon. Others are very tempting, for instance ravioli with a filing made of veal, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, mace, Parmesan cheese and butter. Sounds yummy!

Mushrooms are also on the menu, so we decided to follow Mrs. Marselis instruction and prepare mushrooms cooked in cream. It’s a rich, tasty sauce that enveloped the pasta very nicely. The combination of mushrooms and nutmeg works remarkably well. One to prepare more often! Recipe this week on Thursday, July 14th.
The pasta was our own idea; Mrs. Marselis doesn’t mention what the sauce is supposed to accompany.

Het Receptenboek van mevrouw Marselis, in Dutch only, is out of print. A second-hand copy will cost approximately € 15,00.

Recipes from 1790 - Mevrouw Marselis
Mushrooms in a Sauce from 1790 ©cadwu