After twenty years, confectioner Siemon de Jong announces to stop his acclaimed children’s program Pies of Abel. Since 2003, baker ‘Abel’ has been standing at the door of children from all over the Netherlands with two shopping bags filled with sour mats, pink cakes, marzipan and all kinds of sweets. While baking, the children told their stories about small and big suffering.
De Jong visited children who had written a letter for him because they wanted to bake a cake with baker Abel for a special person in their lives. Like Araya baking a cake for her father, because she missed him so much since her parents’ divorce. Or the gifted Auke, who wanted to bake a cake for teacher Co, because he always helped when he was bullied. And sometimes it was simply cakes to say sorry after a fight, or to declare love to a classmate.
To overcome fears
Like with nine-year-old Deyan, whom Abel will visit in 2018. He wants to make a love cake for his girlfriend Lieke, with whom he has been dating since group 1 – for five years now. While the pink marzipan hearts are being formed, Abel asks if Deyan has any advice for boys and girls who want to date too. “When you see someone you’re in love with, you just have to say: do you want to date? And if they say no, ask them to fall in love with you,” advises Deyan. And if they don’t dare? “You just have to overcome your fears.”
Parents are sent out of the house, and Abel goes through the letter with the child at the table. Often this involves a drawing – the design of the cake – and together the two decide how to assemble the cake as beautifully as possible, preferably just like the drawing. When the plans have been made, the aprons are put on and the garlands are hung. Then it’s time to bake.
Best conversations
While kneading and chatting, the two discuss life, often resulting in funny and moving portraits. Like with Bjorn, the only child in the Netherlands with the aging disease Progeria, or Ole, whose boyfriend died in a car accident. These are heavy subjects, but in the kitchen with Abel every child is strong enough to tell his story.
Juliëtte van Paridon, editor-in-chief of VPRO Youth, called De Jong in the press release about his farewell as “a phenomenon of Dutch children’s television”. “He does not put himself in the foreground and asks simple, concrete questions. This is how the most beautiful conversations arise.”
For example, twelve-year-old Bjorn says that most people with Progeria live to be fifteen years old. But he doesn’t think much about the fact that he may already be in his final years. When Abel asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he doesn’t have to think long: a scientist. “And I’m going to the atheneum, so that will be fine.”
Magic of the program
De Jong won several awards for his Pies of Abelincluding the Nipkow disc (2012) and the Gouden Stuiver for best children’s program (2011).
Earlier, De Jong said against NRC: „ My father often looks with sweat in his hands: ‘How dare you ask that?’ But I try to ask questions that I would dare to answer without embarrassment. And I ask out of genuine curiosity. I also try not to make TV, I especially try not to make TV.”
De Jong says about his farewell that he “does not want to lose the magic of the program”. “I had many special encounters and I was able to have great conversations. Now I feel like doing new things.” The last episode of Pies of Abel in which De Jong and former participants look back on the past twenty years.