Boterham met Pindakaas

My grandmother did not write boterham met pindakaas in her second notebook. For obvious reasons: everyone knew how to spread bread. That is exactly how recipes disappear, not because they are difficult, but because they are too close to the hand to be noticed. A slice of bruinbrood, brown bread, a knife drawn through pindakaas, peanut cheese, and a child has lunch before anyone has called it cooking.

But let me tell you a secret. The plainest Dutch lunch is one of the least plain things on the table. The name already tells you the joke: pindakaas means peanut cheese, though no cow has been troubled in the making of it. The peanut came from the warm world, the word settled through Surinamese-Dutch usage, and the factory jar entered Dutch cupboards after the war. Then the Dutch, being the Dutch, put it on bread and made it normal.

Its season is the weekday. Rainy November, sunny June, the school morning, the cheap supper when the cupboard is honest but not generous. If hagelslag, chocolate sprinkles whose name means hail, lands on top, you have the other half of the Dutch sweet slice: not dessert, not quite breakfast, not quite lunch, and somehow entirely correct. Hou het altijd simpel, always keep it simple. Fresh bread, room-temperature pindakaas, spread to the edge. A dish without its story is half a meal, even when the dish takes five minutes.