Dutch cuisine

Dutch cuisine is formed from the cooking traditions and practices of the Netherlands. The country's cuisine is shaped by its location on the fertile Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta at the North Sea, giving rise to fishing, farming, and overseas trade. Due to the availability of water and flat grassland, the Dutch diet contains many dairy products such as butter and cheese. The court of the Burgundian Netherlands enriched the cuisine of the elite in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century,^[1] so did in the 17th and 18th century colonial trade, when the Dutch ruled the spice trade, played a pivotal role in the global spread of coffee, and started the modern era of chocolate, by developing the Dutch process chocolate.^[2]

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Dutch food and food production became designed to be efficient,^[3] which was so successful that the country became the world's second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States.^[4] It gave the Dutch the reputation of being the feeders of the world, but Dutch food, such as stamppot, of having a bland taste.^[3] However, influenced by the eating culture of its colonies (particularly the Indonesian cuisine), and later by globalization, there is a renewed focus on taste, which is also reflected in the 123 Michelin star restaurants in the country.^[5]

Dutch cuisine can traditionally be divided in three regions. The northeast of the country is known for its meats and sausages (rookworst, metworst) and heavy rye bread, the west for fish (smoked eel, soused herring, kibbeling, mussels), spirits (jenever) and dairy based products (stroopwafel, boerenkaas), and the south for stews (hachee), fruit products and pastry (Limburgse vlaai, apple butter, bossche bol). A peculiar characteristic for Dutch breakfast and lunch is the sweet bread toppings such as hagelslag, vlokken, and muisjes, and the Dutch are the highest consumers of liquorice in the world.^[6]