Stewed curly kale (before potato stamppot) Period COrigin theory BVerified

Stamppot, the dish that stands for winter at the Dutch table, has a layer older than its potatoes. This is that older form: curly kale (boerenkool in Dutch) stewed until done, with no potato at all. It is the forerunner of today's stamppot, and farmers and ordinary households made it at home in winter.

Curly kale, the heart of the dish, is a leafy green grown in the gardens of the Low Countries. The Cruydt-Boeck, a herbal (a book describing plants and their uses) published in Antwerp in 1644, lists "crinkled cabbage" (Gekronckelde Koole) among the cabbages sown in gardens, and says it was common and could be found almost everywhere in the region. By the middle of the seventeenth century at the latest, curly kale was an ordinary vegetable in the Low Countries.

The dish itself can be seen in a cookbook of 1756, De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd (The Perfect Gelderland Kitchen Maid). It has an entry headed "Bruyne of Boeren Kool te stoven" (to stew curly kale), followed by three ways of cooking the kale. In one of them the kale is cut, boiled in water, then stewed with butter, salt and nutmeg, and the cook is told that a sausage or some salt pork may also go in. None of the three uses potato, and none has the kale pounded. So by 1756 at the latest, a dish of kale stewed without potato was being cooked in Dutch kitchens.

Potato came into this dish later. A 2015 essay tracing five centuries of hutspot (a stew of finely chopped ingredients) says that hutspot with potato first appears in a cookbook in De Nieuwe Vaderlandse kookkunst of 1797, and, citing the 1803 edition of the cookbook Aaltje, that Aaltje has a recipe combining kale, potato and sausage. According to the same essay, the ingredients were not pounded together until the twentieth century, when the stamppot way of mashing everything (the name means roughly "pounded pot") appeared. All of this belongs to the making of the modern stamppot, which came after this older layer.

Stamppot is usually talked about as a potato dish. Yet the 1756 cookbook De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd gives ways of stewing curly kale with no potato. Sausage appears in only one of them, as something that "may also" be added. The cookbook shows the dish was being made by 1756 at the latest; when people first began making it is uncertain.

A story about the Siege of Leiden in 1574 is also often told as the origin of stamppot. In the traditional telling, the pot found when the siege was lifted held carrots, parsnips, onions and meat, with no curly kale in it. That story belongs to the hutspot line, and it is a separate tale from this older dish of stewed kale.

What is certain is that kitchens of 1756 had a winter dish of curly kale stewed without potato, and that it was finished by stewing, not by pounding. Potato came in later, and the mashed form of today's stamppot arrived only in the twentieth century.