Albert Cuyp Market: Stroopwafels and the Sugar Trade
Why is it significant?
Find the stall where two hot irons clamp down on little balls of dough, and watch closely. The baker lifts out a thin, crisp waffle, slices it in half sideways while it is still hot, spreads it with dark syrup and presses it shut again.
Key Facts
| Place | Albert Cuyp Market: Stroopwafels and the Sugar Trade |
|---|---|
| Address | Albert Cuypstraat, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35600, 4.89590 |
| Part of Walk | Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the stall where two hot irons clamp down on little balls of dough, and watch closely. The baker lifts out a thin, crisp waffle, slices it in half sideways while it is still hot, spreads it with dark syrup and presses it shut again. That is a stroopwafel, a syrup waffle, and the fresh one in your hand has very little to do with the ones in a packet.
The stroopwafel comes from Gouda, the cheese town, where bakers were making them by the early nineteenth century. The story goes that they began as a thrifty trick, a way to turn leftover crumbs and scraps into something sweet with a little syrup. One Gouda baker, Gerard Kamphuisen, is often named as the inventor, though the details are hard to pin down. For a long time it was a cheap treat for poor families, sold warm on the street. Then the whole country fell for it.
Here is the Dutch way to eat one at home. Pour a cup of coffee or tea, lay the stroopwafel flat on top of the cup and wait a minute or two. The steam softens the syrup until it begins to stretch... and then you bite. On the market you do not need to wait: it comes off the iron already warm and slightly chewy.
But behind the syrup there is a harder story. In the seventeenth century Amsterdam was one of the great sugar-refining cities of Europe, with dozens of refineries along its canals. The raw sugar came from plantations in the Americas, including the Dutch colony of Suriname, worked by enslaved Africans. Syrup, stroop, is what is left over when sugar is refined, and the sweet tooth of this country was built on that trade.
That history is not far away on this market. Further east, the stalls start to smell of curry, roti and peanut sauce, the flavours of people whose families came from those colonies. Keep walking east along the Albert Cuypstraat, almost to the end of the market, where it meets the Van Woustraat.