Wannee – Cook and Drink

Herring Salad

21 September 2023

In 1910 Mrs. Wannée published her Amsterdams Kookboek. A book dedicated to nutritious, easy to prepare and inexpensive food. She was teacher and director of the Amsterdam Huishoudschool, which was a school for domestic skills, aimed at training future maids and housewives. The book is currently in its 32^nd edition and has sold over one million copies. It continues to be a popular cookbook because every new edition reflects the current culinary trends. We own a copy of the 14^th edition (published around 1955?) and it clearly reflects the post second world war Dutch cuisine: very limited use of spices and herbs combined with cooking vegetables and meat for hours. We prepared Leek à la Wannée and decided it was perhaps edible in 1955 but certainly not today.

Recently we were reading the 7^th edition of the book, published around 1935. The recipes are interesting and showcase a very different Dutch cuisine. We decided to prepare a Herring Salad inspired by the 1935 recipe of Mrs. Wannée.

Wine Pairing

A nice cold beer will be great with the salad. You could also go for a white wine from the Alsace or Mosel region. Nice acidity, perhaps a touch sweet, floral and aromatic.

What You Need

1 Dutch Herring
½ Apple
½ Cooked Beetroot
1 Boiled Egg
Small Pickled Onions
Cornichons
(Olive) Oil
Vinegar
Mayonnaise
Chives
Black Pepper
Corn Salad (Lamb Lettuce, Mâche)

What You Do

Peel the apple and the beet root. Chop herring, apple, beetroot, onions, cornichons and a generous amount of chives. Chop the white of the egg, crumble the yolk. Quickly combine the ingredients, add a teaspoon of mayonnaise, black pepper, small tablespoon of vinegar and the same quantity of olive oil, mix and serve immediately on top of the lettuce. Decorate with chives.

PS

Being Dutch we love our herring. Sometimes Dutch herring is called ‘raw’ because it’s not cooked. Actually, it’s placed in lightly salted brine for 5 days so it’s fermented and not raw at all. Herring is not to be compared with sashimi.

Wannée-kookboek_7e_druk © Erik Wannee - public domain

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 32^nd 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 14^th 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 19^th and 20^th 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!)