A Dutch table on New Year's Day

According to the notable food historian Peter G. Rose, the seventeenth-century Dutch settlers to America transported with them not only their seeds and livestock but also their customs and traditions.

The Dutch influence is very visible in Lower Manhattan, the area first colonized by the early Dutch settlers.  There are countless vestiges of the Dutch here, but perhaps the most "concrete" are the plentiful street names reflecting their Dutch legacy or namesakes -- Cortlandt, Gansevoort, Vandam, the Bowery, and, of course, Dutch Street, to name a few.

The New Year's Day visit was another aspect of the transplanted heritage of the Dutch, and it remained an integral facet of Dutch culture and lifestyle in the New World, at least until the end of the 19th century.  While Americans currently make much ado of New Year's Eve, the early settlers saved all their energy, if not merriment, for New Year's Day.  And while we may also stage New Year's Day parties, our current celebrations are just a pale reflection of the festivities and groaning boards of a traditional Dutch New Year's Day open house.

Rose, a woman who was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and educated in both Holland and Switzerland, settled in the Hudson Valley in the early 1970s.  Born into a family of cooks, she has always loved and been fascinated by various aspects of cuisine.  But it was her move to this region that ignited her curiosity about the Dutch influence on American food; soon, her avocation turned into a vocation.  "At age forty, in 1980, I decided I wanted to be a food writer.  People thought it was an absolutely nutty idea," she laughed.  But since that decision, Rose has not put down her pen or her spatula.  She writes regularly for newspapers and magazines and lectures throughout the country, her specialty area being Dutch cuisine of the colonial era.

Matters of Taste by Donna Barnes and Peter Rose

Rose also underscores that many foods we eat today are directly linked to the Dutch, such as pretzels, doughnuts, pancakes, waffles, wafers, cookies (koekjes), and coleslaw (koolsla, a sort of cabbage salad), among numerous others.

She tells us that early settlers visited friends, relatives and neighbors on New Year's Day, when doors were open for receiving company, tables were set with the best china and silver, and food was plentiful.  The 1861 diary of John Ward, in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, tells of one New Year's Day when he went about his holiday visiting with his brother Press, who insisted on making "very few calls"--and they visited thirty-three families.  Five years later, Ward's diary reveals that he and his friend Benjamin Church called on 107 homes.  Ward had served as a captain during the Civil War, and it appears that he and Church planned their itinerary with military exactitude.  Starting at Washington Square and ending at 47^th Street, they were received at 71 homes and left calling cards at another 36 posterns.  Ward was quite the detailed diarist and even described the plum cake at one home.

Other diaries of the period point out that it was typical for the woman of the household to receive gentlemen callers; only the men went calling, as all the women stayed home to do the organizing, cooking, and serving.  Rose, who has done comprehensive research on these customs, believes that this was one way for young men and women to get to meet each other.  She says that there is a diary from Albany that describes what it was like for the women of the home:  Simply put, Rose declares, "Fatiguing."

Rose chuckles when she recounts what she read in one book.  "I picked it up at the New-York Historical Society.  It's about a woman and her daughter who hid in a back room, pretending that they were not at home, so that she didn't have to do the big buffet and prepare all the drinks."  Rose notes that to be polite, men pretty much had to eat and raise a glass at each house.  "How they managed that," she muses," is even more amazing than the amount of food the women of the house had to prepare."

"Kitchen Scene with a Still-life Arrangement of Fish, Fruit and Vegetables" by Jan Olis (1610-1676)

"I've never seen a real menu from the time, but I can envision things like sliced ham, maybe tongue, turkey, big meats, and other delicious things."  The typical Dutch molded cookies were the most famous and ubiquitous item served.  Usually they had caraway seeds; various designs were imprinted on them with a cake board, and then they were baked in the oven.  Rose says that there was a baker in Albany who carried on the custom of baking these cookies until about 1965.  "Various museums in New York City have the cake boards. The boards often portrayed a New York State seal with an eagle, or perhaps Lafayette, who was regarded as a great hero, or they held some motif of current, political topics."

These famous cookies were baked well in advance and stored, so that there would always be plenty on hand for the callers.  Rose relates that a certain Mrs. Maria Lott Lefferts, whose cookbook was discovered in 1989, appeared to be a talented baker, adding interesting ingredients like orange zest to her recipe.  Typically her recipes call for enormous quantities of ingredients; one entry called for:  "28 lb of flour 10 lb of Sugar 5 lb of Butter caraway seed and Orange peel."

And that certainly sounds like a regal and overwhelming Dutch treat.

For more information about Peter G. Rose, or to order her books, visit www.peterrose.com; for further information about the Dutch in New Netherland, visit the Holland Society at www.hollandsociety.com.

Citings from John Ward's diary:  Susan E. Lyman, "New Year's Day in 1861," New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 26 (January, 1944), pp. 21-28