A hundred candles on a Den Bosch ball will be difficult, but if the maker were still alive he would be allowed to blow out as many today. The sheklaodebol as most people from Den Bosch know it is exactly one hundred years old. People have literally been licking their fingers after eating a Bossche bol since 1924. But who thought of making such a difficult-to-eat pastry?
Erfgoed ‘s-Hertogenbosch delved into history and came up with the answer. In the early twentieth century, many pastry chefs from Den Bosch were involved with the chocolate ball. There was plenty of advertising in the ‘s-Hertogenbossche Courant and the Provinciale Noordbrabantsche.
The first chocolate ball
The first chocolate ball probably came from pastry chef Joseph Johannes Lambermont. He was the first to advertise with it in 1903. In 1919, several advertisements also appeared in which the bakery wrote that they made the only real chocolate balls, “because we have been selling this item as a specialty of our business for more than thirty years”.
The bulbs that Lambermont advertised are just not the bulbs we know now. These buns contained yellow baker’s cream and not the whipped cream from the famous Den Bosch bun. There are two people who are thought to have been the first to put whipped cream in it.
One of those two is Hagenees Henri van der Zijde. He came to Den Bosch in 1920 to start his own pastry shop. Many pastry chefs from Den Bosch then sold the chocolate ball with baker’s cream in it. Henri would therefore have decided to put whipped cream in it.
The Bossche bol
The problem with this story is that there is no hard evidence for it. There are no reports in which Henri advertises the chocolate ball at all. The stories all come from Henri’s relatives.
Joseph Lambermont, on the other hand, advertised the new variant of the chocolate ball in 1924. For just twelve cents each you could buy a chocolate ball with ‘pure whipped cream filling’. From 1934 onwards, there are no longer any advertisements for the old variant. Lambermont could now be seen as the inventor of the modern-day Bossche bol.
Sjeklade bol
The striking thing is that the name Bossche bol was not used for a long time. Rob van de Laar, city archivist and Den Bosch expert, previously explained to Omroep Brabant how this is possible: ”A story that has never been proven is that the name was created by Mayor Van Lanschot. He advertised Den Bosch on the radio and renamed the chocolate ball the Bossche ball. It was not until 1933 that the first demonstrable use of the term occurred, in an advertisement by a Helmond baker. But a real citizen of Den Bosch still just says ‘sjeklade bol’.”