Speculaas Period COrigin theory BVerified

Speculaas is a thin, spiced biscuit stamped with a pattern from a carved wooden mould, baked in the Netherlands and Belgium for the feast of St Nicholas (Sinterklaas). It carries a strong scent of cinnamon and cloves, and its dough is made with sugar and wheat flour.

Wheat had long been grown in the Low Countries, and the spices did not first arrive in the seventeenth century. Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen, the first cookbook printed in Dutch (Brussels, around 1514), mentions cinnamon some sixty times—roasted fish laid in a Lenten almond sauce, for instance, is finished with a sprinkling of cinnamon or white sugar. Its editors place its readers among wealthy burghers, urban patricians and senior clergy. Further north, a cookbook printed in Dordrecht in 1593 likewise tells the cook to strew sugar and cinnamon over a dish of cherries. Cinnamon was already in well-off Low Country kitchens before the Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602.

Speculaas is often said to have taken shape in seventeenth-century Flanders, but no study supporting that claim has been found. Lancelot de Casteau's L'Ouverture de cuisine, printed in Liège in 1604, gives a recipe for monstachole, a sweet with an Italian name made from almonds worked with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, pressed into hollow moulds and baked. The word speculaas does not appear; a cultural magazine of the University of Liège suggests it was probably an ancestor of speculaas. As the name of a baked confection, speculatie turns up in a text of 1749, so all that can be said of the biscuit's birth is that it came before then. Baked as a festive sweet in homes and confectioners' shops, it became bound up with the feast of St Nicholas and took hold in the region.

Several appealing stories have been handed down about where the name speculaas comes from. One traces it to the Latin speculum, "mirror"—because the mould casts a mirror-image of its pattern into the dough. Another links it to species or specerij, "spice." A third points to the Latin speculator, "the one who sees all," meaning Nicholas the bishop. Each chimes nicely with the shape of the biscuit and with the feast, and each sounds convincing.

Yet all of them were read back afterward from the look of the spelling. In his 1985 study "Hoe is 'speculaas' ontstaan?", the Dutch linguist F. de Tollenaere set aside speculum, speculator, species, along with spek+klaas ("Nicholas's bacon") and the notion of a boy bishop's inspection tour, dismissing them one by one as vernuftspelletjes—clever little word-games. The etymological reference etymologiebank likewise calls the speculum reading "highly unlikely" and finds the spek+klaas reading unsupported.

So what is the real source? A plainer but firmer answer remains. Speculaas goes back to the older form speculatie, which belongs with Middle Dutch speculatie ("contemplation," and later "amusement, fancy")—a word in the line of Latin speculatio. In the sense of a baked confection, speculatie appears in a text of 1749. The form speculaas itself is a newer spelling that arose in Holland at the end of the nineteenth century, when a dialect ending was mistaken for a diminutive and dropped. Not a mirror, not a bishop, but a word meaning "amusement" lies at the heart of this festive sweet's name. The dates 1749 and the late nineteenth century mark the first appearances of the word, not the birth of the biscuit.