Stroopwafel Period COrigin theory CVerified

The stroopwafel is a baked treat born in the old Dutch city of Gouda. A thinly baked waffle is split horizontally into two disks while still hot, and a sweet caramel-like syrup (stroop) is pressed between them. Set one over a hot drink and the steam softens the syrup just enough for it to seep into the waffle.

Gouda gained a syrup factory in 1837. The local historian J.A. de Korte, in his 2012 history of Gouda's syrup-waffle bakers, holds that the treat could not be baked without a gas stove. The town's first gasworks began operating in 1853, and de Korte places the first syrup waffles a few years after that.

In the Dutch newspapers digitized by the National Library of the Netherlands, the earliest use of the name that can be traced is an advertisement printed in an Arnhem paper in May 1891. In it, the firm of Daam in Velp, Gelderland, listed its goods, and "Siroopwafels" appears right after "Goudsche Sprits" (Gouda spritz biscuits). The treat is thought to have taken its familiar form in Gouda in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The stroopwafel comes with a widely repeated invention tale: the Gouda baker Kamphuisen, it is said, came up with it in 1810. It is a tidy story, complete with the inventor's name and the year of its birth.

But as Gouda's local historians followed the story back, seams began to show. The year 1810 and the inventor's name, Gerard Kamphuisen, come from information supplied by the local tourist office, and they have not been found in other Gouda sources. The Kamphuisen company itself says that Pieter Willem Kamphuisen opened his shop in 1829, so neither the name nor the year holds steady, and when that shop began baking syrup waffles is not known. If de Korte is right that a gas stove was needed, the town's gasworks opened only in 1853, which does not square with an invention in 1810. Writing in 1988, A. Scheygrond passed on, as an account from the craftsman Kielliger, that the first person in Gouda to use a syrup-waffle iron was Adriaan de Groot, in 1864. By Scheygrond's account, Gerard Kamphuisen, the man named as the inventor, joined the family bakery only around 1890.

Another explanation has also circulated: that in the nineteenth century the treat was a cheap sweet of cake scraps and leftover dough held together with syrup, and so was sometimes called armenkoeken, "poor people's cakes." De Korte doubts this reading; he has found no old recipe that adds cake scraps.

Writing in Gouda's local newspaper, Schrijvers gave three reasons the record is so thin. The guilds that had registered products had been abolished, and the bakers were small independent businesses whose trade left no records of lawsuits. On top of that, Gouda at the time had no local newspaper in which to advertise. Scheygrond, for his part, does not rule out that the Kamphuisen shop was already making syrup waffles before 1863. Even so, the invention cannot be pinned on a single person. The familiar 1810 tale is left as a legend with no independent record behind it, and the true beginning remains in the fog.