Erwtensoep (Dutch pea soup) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Erwtensoep is the Dutch winter staple of dried peas simmered until thick and smooth, with a smoked sausage, rookworst, and pork sunk into it. It also goes by the name snert.

The lead ingredient, the pea, is an old crop rooted in Dutch soil. By around 500 BCE peas were grown and commonly eaten across the Mediterranean, and in the Netherlands they have been cultivated for a thousand years. Dried, they keep for a long time.

Two things had to come together for the thick Dutch form to take hold. One was that dried peas and smoked sausage, both foods that keep, were available on the market. The other was the means of simmering the peas for hours until the soup thickened. It has been handed down in homes as a bowl that warms you through the cold season. Its place at winter stalls came only in recent years.

Erwtensoep comes with a much-repeated origin story: that this thick soup was born and caught on during one severe winter of the sixteenth century, and that it started out as the fare of the skating stalls (koekenzopie) set up on the ice of the canals and waterways.

No contemporary record has been found to support either anecdote. Both turn up only in tourist and food-blog writing, and they have no basis in scholarly editions or in the official heritage records. On the tie to the skating stalls, several accounts say plainly that it is a custom of recent years and that things were not always so. The seasonal character of a winter keeping food was, at some point, retold as a particular founding event.

What the sources show has more layers to it. Pea soup itself is an ancient dish: in the Knights and the Birds, the fifth-century-BCE comic playwright Aristophanes depicts street vendors in Athens selling hot pea soup, a humble everyday food. The oldest known recipes for pea soup written in Dutch are found in a fifteenth-century manuscript (KANTL Gent 15, edited by Braekman in 1986) and in a printed book of around 1514. But that was a plain meatless pea soup or porridge for Lent, cooked with onion, oil, saffron and cumin, and a different thing from today's snert with its smoked sausage and pork. The word snert appears in a 1768 collection of ordinances from the Dutch East Indies, inside a comparison: beans are to be cooked "broken like snert." Then the second edition of the cookbook Aaltje, de volmaakte en zuinige keukenmeid, published in 1804, gives a green pea soup with sausage and bacon as "so-called snert." The versions in the same book that are cooked in meat broth or made without meat are not called snert. Snert in its present form, with sausage, is on record by this time at the latest.

Records of pea soup survive here and there, from ancient Athens to a fifteenth-century Dutch manuscript and a cookbook of 1804. The story of a single harsh winter or a skating stall finds support nowhere in these records.