Archive for November, 2010
Proposing with Windmill Cookies
Friday, November 19th, 2010
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
Last Saturday, Saint Nicholas came to our town. The kids were all excited because this means three weeks of eager anticipation counting down to December 5. The highlights during these weeks are the nights that they are allowed to put their shoe, so Saint Nicholas’ magical helpers —known as “Zwarte Pieten”— can fill them with candy and a small toys.
The candy that goes into the shoe is not just any candy, but special Saint Nicholas candy that can usually only be bought in November and early December. There are “schuimpjes” –a sort of meringues– in the shape of carrots, horses and Saint Nicholas, chocolate coins, “pepernoten” – a sort of spicy mini cookies–, and of course “speculaas” which is also known as windmill cookies.
Last year, we dedicated an article to “pepernoten”. This year I want to tell you about some peculiarities of “speculaas”.
“Speculaas” is made of flour, dark brown sugar, butter and a special spice mix made of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamon, and white pepper. The dough is then either rolled out and cut into rectangular pieces or it is formed into cookies with a mold. Nowadays, most molds for the export have the image of a windmill, however. Traditionally, the image can be anything. Long ago, the image of a man or woman was popular for a very specific reason: they were used to propose to a girl!
The feast of Saint Nicholas follows the traditional fall fair that used to be held in most villages at the end of October. The most famous being that of Tiel. At the fair the so-called fair cake was sold, made of the new harvest of rye and honey. The fair was the place to meet teenage boys and girls from other towns and hence popular to flirt and find a suitable future spouse. To reveal his feelings for a girl, a boy would buy her a fair cake. If she offered him a slice that meant she was willing to become his wife.
“Speculaas” dolls had the same function. If a young man wanted to propose to a girl, he would give her a “speculaas” doll, called a “vrijer” (meaning “lover”). Accepting the doll meant accepting the marriage proposal. Today, the tradition has virtually died out. But who knows, maybe your great-grandfather still proposed to your great-grandmother with a “vrijer” instead of a ring…
Want to try baking some windmill cookies yourself? Just take the dough from the “pepernoten” recipe mentioned above, and form it into cookies instead of little balls.
Want to know more about the Saint Nicholas tradition? Read our article on the origin of Saint Nicholas and Santa Claus.
Enjoy!
How much did you say? Converting Dutch Historic Currencies
Friday, November 12th, 2010
Old Dutch daalder minted 1686.
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
Whenever you venture into the research of your ancestor’s possessions, you typically hit this question pretty soon: How much was that in current-day money? What does it mean that your great-great-grandfather bought a house for 300 guilders? Go to our Historic Dutch Currency Calculator to quickly convert old Dutch guilders to modern-day major currencies. Keep on reading to find out what’s a guilder, how it evolved over the centuries and how you can calculate the conversion by hand.
Ever since the Middle Ages the Netherlands used a coin named “guilder”. The name refers to a golden (gilded) Florentine coin. The Florentine origin of the guilder remained visible in the symbol for the guilder, which is an “f” or “fl”, and the old word “florijn”. That the coin had the same name for centuries can lead to the false impression that its value and the way it used to be split up in smaller coins was the same for centuries as well. This, however, is not the case.
In the 1600s, every one of the seven provinces of the young Dutch Republic would have its own mint and produce their own guilders. In that time, a silver or gold coin was worth as much as its weight. There was no standard weight for a coin and some mints would mix the gold and silver with other, less valuable metals, hence devaluating the coins. To add to the general confusion, criminals had soon found out that you could easily scrape some metal off existing coins to make illegal new ones. In short, you never new how much your guilder was worth. Therefore, a new occupation arose, that of coin weigher. Coin weighers would travel around to weigh the coins to make fair trade possible. If a forger was caught, he or she would be sentenced to death.
