• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1840 0

hare, a Westphalian ham, a bolt of mutton, veal on the spit, anchovies, bread, butter, mustard and cheese, lemons and twelve tankards of wine.” In 1703, at most seven churchmen from Arn-hem reportedly consumed, in one sitting, “fourteen pounds of beef, eight pounds of veal, six fowl, stuffed cabbages, apples, pears, bread, pretzels, assorted nuts, twenty bottles of red wine, twelve bottles of white wine and coffee.” Even meals in the poorhouse usually included vegetable soup, meat stew, bread and butter, the occasional fowl, and fresh fruit and red wine for the sick.

The Dutch ate even more on special occasions. In addition to major holidays like Christmas, Martinmas, and Fat Tuesday (which required eating waffles, pancakes, sausages, and ham pies), the Dutch had feasts for births, baptisms, swaddlings, betrothals, funerals, school openings, lottery inaugurations, new apprenticeships, organ installations, ship arrivals, even “feasts of inversion,” at which master and mistress exchanged roles with their servants. Guests at these feasts might be served as many as a hundred dishes. One deceased innkeeper, otherwise unmemorable, received what Simon Schama calls “a bumper send-off,” with townspeople at his wake consuming

20 oxheads of French and Rhenish wine

70 half casks of ale

1,100 pounds of meat “roasted on the Koningsplein”

550 pounds of sirloin

28 breasts of veal

12 whole sheep

18 great venison in white pastry

200 pounds of “fricadelle” (mincemeat)

topped off as always with bread, butter, and cheese.

But food, even in gluttonous quantities, raised no serious religious difficulties. Bread, after all, had been broken at the Last Supper, and “ [e]ven for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.” The problem was that the Dutch were also notorious drinkers and smokers. “Men drink at the slightest excuse,” deplored one pastor, “at the sound of a bell or the turning of a mill…the Devil himself has turned brewer.” In 1613, there were said to be 518 alehouses in Amsterdam alone. Around the same time, it was estimated that 12,000 liters of beer were consumed daily in Haarlem, two-thirds of it at home. Meanwhile, tobacco smoking and even tobacco chewing were practically national addictions, among both sexes and at every level of society. “The smell of the Dutch Republic,” writes Schama, “was the smell of tobacco.” Foreign visitors found especially repulsive the tar-blackened teeth of Dutch women, and even locals liked to comment that “a Hollander without a pipe is a national impossibility.”27

All this vice and excess caused deep distress among the sternest Calvinists. In 1655 in Amsterdam, a pious burgomaster pushed through a law prohibiting extravagant wedding feasts. At another point, the city of Delft banned gingerbread men. Clergymen from a number of towns tried to prohibit the consumption of alcohol on the Sabbath.

But in the end, such measures failed miserably. It was not just that they were unpopular. (An attempt to ban cookies on the feast of St. Nicholas triggered a furious revolt of eleven-year-olds.) The forces of capitalism also worked ruthlessly against them. Beer and tobacco were two of the Dutch Republic's most important commercial products. Roughly half the labor force of Gouda was employed in pipe making. Even the West India Company—famous for its hardline Calvinist core—made immense profits from its colonial tobacco trade. These economic interests easily triumphed over church-led suppression efforts. In Rotterdam, for example, a law banning Sunday drinking was immediately reversed by the town's powerful breweries. Neither was the church itself unconnected to the “vice” trades. It was perfectly common for local preachers to sneak a quick smoke between sermons, and Amersfoort's great tobacco magnate, Brant van Slichtenhorst, was himself a deacon of the Reformed Church.28

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was famous throughout Europe for being excessively liberal—socially, morally, politically, and intellectually. Foreign visitors were constantly