Pre-potato stamppot (boerenkool mash, proto-layer) Period COrigin theory BVerified

The stamppot that stands for the Dutch winter table has a layer that predates the entry of potato. What is treated here is that older form: a mash of curly kale (boerenkool in Dutch) simmered together with sausage, containing no potato. Known in Dutch as boerenkool met worst, this dish is the forerunner of the modern stamppot.

The leading ingredient, curly kale, is a leaf vegetable long rooted in this land. A cool-season green split off from wild cabbage, it had been grown in the Low Countries since Roman times and appears in a cookbook by 1661 at the latest. Sweetening after the first frost, this green was one of the few winter vegetables at hand, present in the kitchens of farmers and common folk from early on. To it were added sausage, in which meat was worked partly for keeping, and root vegetables. It was a plain household stew to warm the body on a cold winter day.

This older form can be confirmed in the written record in the cookbook of 1756, De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd (The Perfect Cook of Guelders). The recipe for boerenkool met worst set down there has no potato in it. That this description exists means a potato-free kale mash was present by 1756 at the latest. The dish itself is thought to be older still.

Potato joined this bowl only much later. A potato hotchpotch (hutspot) appears in a Dutch cookbook in 1797, and a record combining kale with potato comes down to 1828. Even that 1828 account is not yet pounded, and the stamppot style of mashing and mixing the ingredients settled only in the twentieth century. All of that belongs to the side of the modern stamppot that formed after this old layer. What we are looking at here is the winter mash that stood on local kale and sausage alone, before any of those changes came.

Stamppot as a dish tends to be spoken of as a potato dish. But a winter mash built on native curly kale existed before potato became a staple of this land. Its older form is set down not by later conjecture but plainly by a contemporary cookbook.

The clue is the 1756 De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd. The recipe for boerenkool met worst in this cookbook holds no potato and is recorded as a mash of curly kale and sausage; the full text can be followed in a Google Books scan. From this it can be said that by 1756 at the latest a potato-free kale mash was in the kitchen. That year is the floor of the surviving record, not the year the dish was born. The real beginning is taken to reach back further.

Following the sequence of dates, one can see the dish's centre of gravity shift. In 1756 there is a potato-free kale mash; in 1797 a potato hutspot appears in a cookbook; in 1828 kale and potato are joined in one bowl. Yet the 1828 account is not yet pounded, and the mashed-and-mixed stamppot style takes hold only after the turn of the twentieth century. This old layer sits at the very front of that sequence of change.

A patriotic legend surrounding the 1574 Siege of Leiden is also often told as the origin of stamppot. But that anecdote attaches to the modern dish that uses potato, not to this old layer of a native kale mash. What is certain here is that before potato took root on the Dutch table, a winter mash of curly kale and sausage was already being made.