Dutch sandwiches

LOTS of sandwiches!

Dear reader,

I heard a story once that may or may not be true. An expat working in a company here in the Netherlands was tired of the sameness of Dutch lunches. He decided to cook himself a Spanish omelet in the office kitchen.

Setting the pan in the middle of the table, he offered it to his colleagues as they all sat down with their lunches brought from home.

They responded very enthusiastically: “Oh, isn’t that nice!” “Thank  you, it looks delicious!”

Taking their sandwiches out of their lunch boxes, they set to work. First they removed the fillings from their sandwiches. Then they cut themselves a slice of the omelet, laid it between the two pieces of buttered bread, and made themselves an omelet sandwich.

Dutch people pretty much always have sandwiches for lunch. And no expat coming in and cooking for them is going to change that.

Dutch breakfast

The same goes for breakfast in the Netherlands: it is made up of, generally speaking, two or more boterhammen. The word boterham literally translates as “butter ham.” What it means is “sandwich,” or, from an American point of view, half a sandwich. Most people just call them broodjes: “little breads.”

Each broodje is one single slice of bread. First, it is buttered, either with butter or margarine, then cut in half, and then something else is added. That might be cheese – just called kaas here, which means “cheese,” but which Americans would call Gouda – or peanut butter or cold cuts or jam or whatever. Then it is either folded into a closed sandwich or eaten open faced.

These half-sandwiches are very meager: a scant layer of butter and a single layer of cheese, sliced using a cheese slicer. Or a single thin slice of parma ham, for example, never doubled-up.

This is why two broodjes is usually not enough; there’s not much to them. Most people, I’d guess, would eat at least four per meal, probably more.

The bread can be anything from quite bland white bread to very heavily seeded whole wheat breads of various sorts.

The Dutch put a range of things on bread, some of them quite odd to an American eye:

Salad

Sometimes Dutch people will spread a sort of salad on their bread. It can be one of the types of salads Americans might be familiar with: tuna or egg or chicken salad. But it might also be a “farmer’s salad”, which is, essentially, a version of cole slaw.

Hagelslag

Hagelslag (literal translation: hailstorm) is chocolate sprinkles, the kind that Americans use on ice cream – only better, because it’s real chocolate, either milk or dark. Dutch people eat this for breakfast, sprinkled on top of their thin layer of butter or margarine.

Chocopasta

Chocopasta is a smooth, spreadable paste made from chocolate and, usually, hazelnuts. Nutella, made in Italy, is one brand, but there are others. It tastes much like cake frosting, but it also gets eaten for breakfast. Again, Dutch people will spread it very thinly on top of the butter.

Peanut butter

Dutch people never combine peanut butter and jelly. The reaction you’ll get if you even suggest it is usually “Wat vies!” which basically means “Disgusting!” They’ll eat jam, thinly spread with butter, or they’ll eat peanut butter, also thinly spread with butter, but both at once? No way!

Muisjes

Muisjes (which translates as little mice) are anise seeds covered in a sugar coating. They’re usually either pastel blue, pastel pink or white. Muisjes are generally not an everyday sandwich filling, though they are stocked in the supermarket in the same section as the other breakfast items, so someone must eat them.

Everyone eats muisjes, though, when a baby is born (hence, the blue and pink). When visitors come to see the newborn baby, they are served biscuit met muisjes – a round toasted rusk, spread with a thin layer of butter and sprinkled with muisjes.

Dutch lunch

Lunch for a Dutch person looks just like breakfast: sandwiches, spread thinly with butter and one other item each. At lunch there is a greater chance that thin meat slices will be involved, and the number of sandwiches might be higher, but that’s about it.

No matter what their station in life – the janitor to the CEO – most Dutch people make their sandwiches in the morning and take them to work with them in a little box. They might add a piece of fruit. A popular drink to go with lunch, if you’re not drinking coffee or tea, is a glass of orange juice or milk or buttermilk.

Eating out

People do sometimes eat out for lunch, or buy their sandwiches rather than making them. For some reason, when they eat out, it’s common to add more than one item in a sandwich, but not when they make their sandwiches at home. One of the most common combinations is broodje gezond (literal translation: healthy sandwich), which has lettuce, ham, cheese, tomato, cucumber and egg, all together on a buttered roll. There are lots of other possible combinations, much like in the US.

Another possible lunch item is a tosti, which is still a sandwich: a pressed grilled cheese sandwich with ham and sometimes other fillings like egg or chicken as well.

An uitsmijter is yet another kind of sandwich, but it’s warm: fried egg with cheese and/or ham on an open-faced sandwich.

(I can’t figure out a literal translation of uitsmijter, by the way, but it has two other meanings: a grand finale or a bouncer. I have no idea how it got attached to an open-faced egg sandwich!)

For a splurge, the Dutch might order soup to go with the sandwich. In the winter it’s likely to be split pea soup or, in the region where I live, mustard soup, though there are lots of other possibilities. Generally, though, it would be considered a bit odd to have hot lunch on a regular basis. Hot food is reserved for dinner.

All of this sandwich-eating is why schools here don’t have cafeterias. Secondary schools might have a snack bar of some sort, where students can buy drinks or sweets or whatever, but there is no hot meal service at schools. Children are simply expected to bring a lunch along.

Is this better or worse than the American system? It’s probably healthier, just because of the scrubby bread that many people eat and the lack of a dessert. It also probably doesn’t lead to such a deep post-lunch dip as in the US.

On the other hand, it’s boring! I don’t want to eat thin little sandwiches for two-thirds of my meals. And I love peanut butter and jam – spread lavishly, without butter – as much as when I was a kid. If I am going to have cold cuts, I want a lot: some salami, some parma ham, some slices of cheese, plus lettuce and mayonnaise or mustard. That’s what I call a sandwich! And occasionally a good, old-fashioned cooked breakfast really hits the spot: eggs, bacon, and toast. Is that too much to ask?

I’ll talk about Dutch dinner cuisine in a separate letter sometime, I promise! In the meantime, have a good week!

Met vriendelijke groeten,

Rachel

P.S. I write about independent travel at Rachel’s Ruminations. Please join me there!