Boerenkool met worst (kale with sausage, before potato stamppot) Period COrigin theory BVerified

Stamppot, the dish that stands for winter at the Dutch table, has a layer older than its potatoes. This is that older form: curly kale (boerenkool in Dutch) with sausage, and no potato at all. In Dutch it goes by boerenkool met worst, and it is the forerunner of today's stamppot. Farmers and ordinary households made it at home in winter.

Curly kale, the heart of the dish, is a leafy green grown in the gardens of the Low Countries. The Cruydt-Boeck, a herbal (a book describing plants and their uses) published in Antwerp in 1644, lists "crinkled cabbage" (Gekronckelde Koole) among the cabbages sown in gardens, and says it was common and could be found almost everywhere in the region. By the middle of the seventeenth century at the latest, curly kale was an ordinary vegetable in the Low Countries. The kale was cooked together with sausage and root vegetables.

The dish itself appears in writing in a cookbook of 1756, De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd (The Perfect Gelderland Kitchen Maid). Its recipe for boerenkool met worst has no potato in it. So by 1756 at the latest, a dish of kale and sausage without potato was being cooked in Dutch kitchens. Whether the kale of that time was pounded to finish the dish, or simply cooked together with the sausage, is uncertain.

Potato came into this dish later. A hutspot (a stew of finely chopped ingredients) made with potato appears in a Dutch cookbook in 1797, and a cookbook of 1828 includes a dish that combines kale with potato. Even that 1828 dish does not yet pound its ingredients; the stamppot style of mashing everything together (the name means roughly "pounded pot") took shape only in the twentieth century. All of this belongs to the making of the modern stamppot, which came after this older layer.

Stamppot is usually talked about as a potato dish. Yet the 1756 cookbook De Volmaakte Geldersche Keuken-meyd carries a recipe for boerenkool met worst that brings curly kale and sausage together with no potato. The year 1756 is when the dish shows up in the record, not necessarily when it was born. When people first began making it is uncertain.

A story about the Siege of Leiden in 1574 is also often told as the origin of stamppot. In the traditional telling, the pot found when the siege was lifted held carrots, parsnips, onions and meat, with no curly kale in it. That story belongs to the hutspot line, and it is a separate tale from this older dish of kale and sausage.

What is certain is that before potato went into Dutch pots, a winter dish of curly kale and sausage was already being made. That dish later took in potato, and in the twentieth century moved on to the mashed form it has today.