Albert Cuyp Market East: Roti and Rijsttafel
Why is it significant?
Breathe in at the eastern end of the market: cumin, garlic, frying onions, peanut sauce. Between the fabric stalls and the phone covers you will spot trays of bright yellow flatbreads, jars of sambal and bags of spices whose names are in Sranan and Javanese as well as Dutch.
Key Facts
| Place | Albert Cuyp Market East: Roti and Rijsttafel |
|---|---|
| Address | Albert Cuypstraat at Van Woustraat, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35660, 4.89900 |
| Part of Walk | Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp |
| Generated | Generated |
Breathe in at the eastern end of the market: cumin, garlic, frying onions, peanut sauce. Between the fabric stalls and the phone covers you will spot trays of bright yellow flatbreads, jars of sambal and bags of spices whose names are in Sranan and Javanese as well as Dutch. For a lot of Amsterdammers, this is what home cooking smells like.
To understand that smell you have to go back to 1667. At the peace of Breda that year, the Dutch kept Suriname, on the north coast of South America, and the English kept New Amsterdam, which they had renamed New York. Suriname became a plantation colony worked by enslaved Africans. Slavery was abolished there in 1863, but the formerly enslaved were forced to keep working for another ten years, until 1873.
To replace them, the planters brought in contract labourers, first from British India and later from Java. Their descendants made roti, a soft flatbread wrapped around curried chicken, potato, long beans and egg, part of Surinamese cooking. When Suriname became independent in 1975, tens of thousands of Surinamese moved to the Netherlands, many of them to Amsterdam, and cheap, crowded neighbourhoods like De Pijp were where many first found rooms.
The other great flavour here comes from Indonesia, and it hides a paradox. The famous rijsttafel, the rice table, with a dozen or more small dishes around a mountain of rice, is not a traditional Indonesian meal. It was a colonial invention, a showpiece banquet of the Dutch in the East Indies, served by a long line of waiters. After the Netherlands recognised Indonesian independence in 1949, many people from the colonial society came here, bringing their recipes and opening their own shops. Today the rijsttafel survives far more in the Netherlands than in Indonesia.
So every bite on this corner is a history lesson, sweet, sour and sometimes painful. Now leave the market and walk south down the Tweede Sweelinckstraat, where the houses open onto the trees of a park.