Old Dutch desserts and related treats often have delicious names. Rice pudding. Water abomination. Dot-in-the-hole. Lamb porridge. Three in the pan. You’d put your spoon into those words with relish, right? The same is true with today’s classic, which has been requested by no fewer than three readers. Although it took me a while to realize that this was the same delicacy three times, because there are different names for it in circulation: poffert, boffert, kettle cake, jack-in-the-bag, brother. (I can’t emphasize enough how much I am learning from this classic series and how happy I am to receive your requests.)
Let me first share what I read in The Dutch Baking Book by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra. ‘Poffertbrood’ often adorned the tables of wealthy people in the seventeenth century, but over the centuries it was eaten by more and more sections of the population. This was a firm, compact pudding that was prepared in a pan on the stove and served as a main course, side dish (with legumes: smart, because this way you got all the essential amino acids) or as a dessert. The recipe differed per region. The pudding could be made from wheat flour, buckwheat flour or both. Sometimes raisins were added, and/or currants and/or brisket and/or fried bacon cubes. Poffert was eaten warm, with syrup sauce.
Although poffert was called poffert in much of the Netherlands, the name boffert was used in Drenthe. This Drenthe boffert should not be confused with the Frisian boffert, which is a turban. To make things a little more complicated – or perhaps I should say: more interesting – the same batter could also be steamed in a pudding mold with a lid and was then called kettle cake. And when the batter was poured into a cloth and boiled in a pan of water, it was called jack-in-the-poke.
That leaves the name brother. This is used, for example, in a recipe collection from 1950 by the Hague Huishoudschool. The ‘broodje or poffer’ is first cooked in a pan on the stove and then baked in the oven. And with that baking in an oven, dear readers who have not yet dropped out due to acute turrelurism, we come very close to the Hoorn brother again, also an old Dutch classic, but one that, despite the name, is no longer within us. cutlery falls. While with poffert, boffert, kettle cake, jack-in-the-bag and brother we are still talking about a pudding, a bread-like pudding indeed, but a pudding nonetheless, a Hoorn brother is really a bread, namely a richly filled, sweet raisinbread.
And here we switch to another book, the recently published one West Frisian cookbook by Thijs and André Dekker, in which these brothers search for the flavors of their youth. André is a visual artist and made beautiful brush drawings in ink of the West Frisian countryside. Thijs was trained as a chef and wrote the stories and recipes. Their book contains a recipe for Hoornse broeder, i.e. the bread. But also one for a cooked brother, or Jack-in-the-Pocket. That recipe comes from Uncle Cor Dekker, one of their father’s eight brothers, who was a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Egmond. Brother Cor cooked for his fellow brothers there for 46 years. Sobriety was an asset. Only syrup sauce, a mixture of butter, syrup and water, you were allowed, no, you had to be generous with it.
Brother Cor died of corona a few years ago at the age of 97. It’s nice that his ‘brother Cor brother’ now lives on, thanks to his cousins.