Fashion or Necessity

There are always things crossing my path that strike my curiosity.

‘Who and how’, ‘when and where’ are basic questions that are often easily answered with a quick search on the internet.

This time I am afraid I must be satisfied with half an answer. Unless this blog will open doors into the public memory that have not been eternalised on the world wide web.

After almost twenty years in Canada, I have adapted my cooking and baking recipes to what is available in the local grocery stores. I guess in the daily operations of our household I will always lean to Dutch flavours/seasoning. Sometimes I find very handy shortcuts using Canadian products. For example, it can be time consuming to make a good mocha icing cream. It was a very helpful discovery that you can easily make one in 5 minutes from whipping cream, butterscotch Jello and instant coffee powder. Other items that I was used to buy all prepared I must make from scratch for the simple reason they are not available in bulk.

Memory in smell and flavour is a real thing. It transports you back in time or to certain people. It simply can give the feeling of ‘home’. I can do without certain foods for a long period and then all the sudden there is the need to try and recreate a dish or baking from the past. Sometimes we find the perfect recipe.

Our oldest girl has these food memories as well; one of them is ‘ontbijtkoek’ or ‘breakfast cake’ loosely translated. You can find a variety of ‘ontbijtkoek’ on the shelf in any supermarket of your choosing in the Netherlands. It is considered a sort of healthy snack on the side for our much-needed coffee breaks and as a school snack.

She did find a perfect recipe as well for ontbijtkoek and of course shared it with me. She even made one for me while she was visiting us from Saskatchewan. The smells that filled the room while it was baking in the oven took me right back to good, old fashioned ontbijtkoek. The spice blend is very specific with lots of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, coriander and ground cloves. According to our noses that’s a very homey aroma.

With the cold weather this month and our family visit fresh in my memory my baking brain remembered the shared recipe. Our daughter even left half a cup of spice blend for me to make it an easy first time. So, I did make it. I mixed all the flour and sweetness and spices together and it all turned out to a delicious loaf of ontbijtkoek. Sunday evening I brought it as a small treat to our church meeting. Food is always an interesting topic over coffee. To my surprise the ladies commented on my Dutch baking as War Cake. They had not seen it for a long time, but it sounded like everybody’s grandmother had a recipe of War Cake in her cookbook. How interesting! Now I have so many questions. Why had I not heard of it in the last twenty years? Why is it called War Cake? Why is nobody making it on this side of the pond? Why is it so popular in the Netherlands and forgotten in Canada, or is it a Maritime thing? From where does the recipe originate? Do people here still like the flavour? Is it true that it is a snack in soldiers rations? Do both nations know that this recipe is the same and have forgotten?

The internet gives some answers. War Cake appears as a recipe early in the 1900’s. It was good comfort food that you could make without white sugar and butter – ingredients that were rationed or scarce at times. The combination of spices and alternative sweeteners made it still a tasty treat. You can find War Cake recipes in cookbooks all over Canada. Because it did not contain butter it did not expire so fast. War cake was even sent overseas and soldiers received them in the field to enjoy.

The history of Dutch ontbijtkoek is rooted in recipes developed from Medieval times. Before that there are stories of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans making similar cakes with the ingredients they had then available. Since the 1500’s spice cakes were mainly baked in monasteries as a luxury good because of the expensive spice blend. When international trade to the West & East  Indies boomed in Holland and spices became more readily available bakers all over the country tweaked the recipe to regional taste. This showed in a variety of amounts in raisins, spices, or sweeteners like honey or molasses. Sort of similar to all the recipe variants in the cookbooks of ladies’ societies in Canada. In 1883 a Dutch baker Harry Peijnenburg started to bake ontbijtkoek and marketed it professionally; people liked it so much that an ontbijtkoek factory was build and nowadays you can purchase a variety of ontbijtkoek loafs in every grocery store in the country.

So far, some answers to my questions.

Why it is such a popular thing in the Netherlands and almost an obscure treat in Canada – I do not know. Is it the name, or does it need a good marketeer?  

I ponder the thought of how a recipe or name becomes popular.

Good stuff can become obscure if nobody uses/eats it.

Or maybe it will be like fashion, and it will have a come back and everybody on both sides of the ocean will eat War Cake – I pray in peace!