Stroopwafels are shit
Time to break the silence
As a tour guide, and particularly as a tour guide for North Americans, you need to know a lot about cakes. You need to be able to toss out a recommendation for ‘You have to try (insert local sweet treat) for every place where you visit, ranging from the established titans (Vienna’s transcendent Sachertorte) to the cynical confected upstarts (Rothenberg ob der Taube’s confected and frankly unpalatable ‘snowball’ pastry). When it comes to sweeties, you need to know your onions.
Then there are the cakes you barely consider before recommending. Passing through the Netherlands, what else would you suggest to try but the stroopwafel, ‘syrup waffle’, that baked and circular caramel syrup cookie which enjoys such a ubiquitous cultural presence across Holland.
They’re good, you think, and the Dutch seem so proud of them; they place them over hot beverages to soften them up while also guarding the heat of the drink. Anyway, it’s difficult to get 40 Americans interested in other Dutch specialties such as photorealistic interior painting and dredging, so you take the win and pitch the cookies. Perhaps you even take a packet to enjoy at home, in a way which is not life-changing but absolutely up-to-snuff within the wider constellation of European baked goods.
And then one day it hits you: Stroopwafels aren’t actually very nice. They’re a bit dry.
And that changes everything.
It’s not just the dryness – the size of the stroopwafel places it in an awkward limbo between cookie and cake. The supermarket packages of them, while usually pretty good value, also seem excessive in provision; you don’t really need fifteen or even twenty of these biscuits at a time, acknowledging that they do last quite well. Even within said supermarket, vastly superior snacks wink out from across the shelves, such as Jules Destrooper’s almond thins, biscuits so good, so deliciously superior, they almost make up for the rest of the country. And don’t even get me started on Bonne Maman chocolate caramel tartelettes.
Yet the years go by and the relentless stroopwafelpropaganda continues, the whole Benelux region and beyond pretending this is actually a nice or even exceptional cake.
Who will be brave enough to speak out?
I can understand that for a Dutch person the social penalties of doing so are likely to be immense. Sort of like the way even the most radical Amsterdammer goes off someone bad mouths Princess Beatrix. When famous people visit Holland, they’re always asked about what they like or miss about the country, the NPO interviewer back in the day asking, say, Eddie Van Halen what he remembers about his years in Holland and Eddie saying something like ‘Oh, Oma de lekkere stroopwafels gebakken heeft’ and all present laughing at the simple goodness of the stroopwafel.
Lies.
To take on the stroopwafel within Holland you’d need one of those old-school Dutch cultural iconoclasts, like Gerard Reve or the late filmmaker Theo von Gogh. Perhaps this could even be Paul Verhoeven’s last artistic assignment, a bold stripping away of the layers of falsehoods around this sweet ‘treat’ via a blizzard of scatological and sexual imagery. A nun cumming on a stroopwafel, you know, the sort of thing the Dutch do so well.
You can imagine the way the controversy would play out; I can picture Verhoeven, for some reason wearing a pair of blue workman’s overalls, being interviewed in front of a panel of contemporaries on a late night talk show as both a retired adult film actor and the Bishop of Leiden accuse him of treason. And Verhoeven riding it out and vaping and talking about ‘de waarheid’, tho even he wouldn’t get to make another film after taking on big stroopwafel.
Plus imagine if Geert Wilders gets wind of it. He’ll be waving a cookie around in the Dutch Parliament and blaming the Muslims for defaming ‘Nederlands cultuurgoed’. For my part I fully expected to be banned from the Netherlands for writing this article; I’ll have to stay safely sequestered on the Belgian side of border. As for the reaction in my adopted home, well, the Flemish would show solidarity but perhaps remark in passing on the superiority of antwerpse handjes and the Wallonian contribution to the extent there would be one would be in pronouncing the word ‘stroopwafel’ to rhyme with ‘coop babble’.
It all almost makes you welcome the re-election of President Trump. He’ll tell it like it is, come out with ‘Dry – little – cake. Overrated. Sad!’ Mind you, I doubt the newly-relected demagogue has any concept of where or even what Holland is. As for Kamala Harris, we all know she’d have taken a decorous little bite and told the Dutch Prime Minister they were wonderful and then off camera spat the desiccated hunk into a tissue for her intern to bin. I’m not saying that’s why she lost.
Good cake comes in unexpected places. Once many years ago, my girlfriend J and I arrived in Saint Petersburg in the early hours of the morning. We had taken the sleeper train from Moscow. At the station, there was a selection of small cakes, of an impressive range, available at a reasonable price. We ate them for breakfast and they were delicious, each one fruity and compact and deft.
There was none of the central over-reliance on butter you find in, say, Germany and cream had been richly given its due. J said that day that she wanted to write a book called ‘Let Her Eat Cake’ in which she travelled all over Europe and tried cakes from all the different countries. Well, I did it J, I lived your dream, I made it mine as I travelled Europe so long that my shoes wore out and I ate so much cake. So. Much. Cake.
And that’s why I’m here to tell you today that stroopwafels are shit. Long live good cakes – life’s too short to pretend.
Very good. And you are right. They are.