Zoute Drop (Salmiak)

The Dutch do not so much eat zoute drop as confess themselves with it. Offer a bowl to visitors and the room sorts itself at once: the Dutch hand reaches in, the foreign hand hesitates, and someone makes the face of a person betrayed by candy. But let me tell you a secret. That face is part of the pleasure.

The name already tells you the argument. Zoute drop means salty licorice, though the salt is not kitchen salt doing ordinary kitchen work. Salmiak is ammonium chloride, a sharp mineral salt once sold through apothecaries, and in the Netherlands it found its way into the candy tin with the confidence only a small country can have in a very strong opinion. Drop itself comes from zoethout, licorice root, the sweet root, boiled and concentrated until it turns black and medicinal and strangely tender. History and cookery, they cannot be separated, not even in a sweet shop.

In my grandmother's second notebook there is no recipe for drop, only a note beside a shopping list: voor onderweg, for the road. That is where drop belongs: in coat pockets, glove compartments, school bags, the little paper bag passed between adults who say they are taking only one and then do not. Homemade drop will never be quite like the polished factory pieces, and that is all right. We are making the kitchen version: dark, chewy, salty enough to make you pay attention, simple enough to trust. Hou het altijd simpel, but buy the salmiak carefully. Food-grade only. The old apothecary bite is welcome; the wrong chemical is not.