Dear friends,
I’ve said it before, but will say it again: it’s not blogbandonment, it’s just a marshalling of resources and brainpower at a time when I have little of each. It’s not that I don’t have much to say, because there is always something to contemplate and natter about, considering how interesting are the times in which we live. I’m just having trouble finding exactly how to write about it. This is a temporary state of affairs, and I promise to get through it as fast as is humanly possible.
In the meantime, since I missed shouting out to Tislet on her birthday and Pam the Beancounter on her blogday (both of which fell on October 6), I thought I would share with you one of the best things I’ve read in one of the best books I bought this year. The book in question is Windmills in My Oven: A Book of Dutch Baking by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra, published by the lovely, lovely Prospect Books in 2002. I picked it up after spending much of this weekend reading Food Politics by Marion Nestle, a brilliant book, but one filled with depressing statistics on the food industry and their manipulation of the public discourse on health and nutrition. It is excellent and necessary reading, but it is also sobering, and frequently infuriating. Thus did I find myself putting Dr. Nestle down, and picking Ms. Pagrach-Chandra up. Windmills in My Oven is packed to the rafters with excellent recipes for breads both savory and sweet; for cakes, biscuits and oliebollen. It is also packed with scrupulous research, historical and geographical contexts for the recipes included in the book, and warm, friendly, intelligent prose. The passage below is a description of a traditional Dutch birthday celebration, and I never tire of reading it. What a way to celebrate a birthday. What a way to celebrate the birthday person, and the people around them. What a way for us to tell each other that our lives matter to other people. What a way to drink what sounds like a truly amazing fruit punch. Dear friends, read this and tell me if you think—or if you don’t—that this is a good tradition to appropriate from the Dutch. Shall we have Dutch birthdays in 2005?
In Dutch, as in any other language, there are words and expressions impossible to translate accurately to convey the literal meaning and the subtle undertones. One such word is gezellig. It means cosy, snug, pleasant, convivial, cheerful, entertaining, welcoming and a lot more. And one expression is naar een verjaardag gaan. This is literally “to go to a birthday”—not a birthday party, but a birthday. A birthday party would imply that you had received an invitation to attend and you don’t really need an invitation to go to a birthday. The Dutch set great store by birthdays and it is considered a compliment if people drop in to wish you well. Birthday calendars, which often hang, inexplicably, in the lavatory, are consulted daily and busy bees will find themselves juggling the birthdays that fall on the same day. If you are the birthday girl or chap, you will have no idea of how many people will come round but in rural communities in particular, you are expected to be “at home” to visitors. They will not take kindly to your slipping out without prior warning. If, for some reason, you can’t celebrate your birthday on the actual day, it is customary to let family and friends know on which day you will be available. A birthday in Holland is gezellig.
The first such celebration I attended was at the house of my husband’s parents, and it was a bit of a culture shock. It was my mother-in-law’s birthday and the ‘phone had been ringing incessantly since breakfast, conveying the good wishes of those who were unable to come. Around 10:30 in the morning, people started to arrive. Some neighbours were first. They came in, shook my mother-in-law’s hand, congratulated her, then offered her a token of their esteem. Next, they shook my father-in-law’s hand and congratulated him on his wife’s birthday. In our turn, my brother-in-law and I were also similarly congratulated. I hadn’t been prepared for this. I was used to invited guests showing up at a pre-arranged time and crying or muttering, depending on their disposition, “Happy Birthday,” before dashing off to check on the edibles. It was to get even better. More neighbours arrived and the whole ritual was repeated. When they had finished congratulating the family, they passed to the first set of neighbours and, to my great astonishment, proceeded to congratulate them on their neighbour’s birthday, whereupon the wishes were reciprocated!
It was a busy morning. On arrival, the guests were given coffee with great dollops of sweetened whipped cream on top, and their choice of cake. They settled down to eat, drink and chat. These occasions are a primary source of local news and gossip and are used to compare and discuss ailments. (In one extreme case years later, I entered my living-room with fresh coffee to discover a few of my guests, socks and shoes strewn about them, displaying their bunions to each other as the rest watched interestedly proffering advice.) Meanwhile, the telephone was still ringing and trips had to be made to the railway station from time to time to collect various aunts. Each arrival was followed by the ritual handshaking and, depending on the relationship with the aunt in question, hugs and the traditional three kisses on the cheeks. Coffee and cakes made way for nibbles and drinks, and that typical Dutch celebration bowl. Bowl is a kind of very wet fruit salad—or very fruity punch, depending on how you look at it—which for some reason is always served with the drinks. It contains the maker’s choice of fruit, liberally moistened with mineral water, fruit juice or white wine. It is served by the cupful and you are given a spoon—whipped cream is optional. Almost everyone had a helping. Then most of the men had a glass of gin and the women had either fruit juice or advocaat.
By midday, the first guests were ready to leave. This was accompanied by more hearty handshaking. The traditional wish of “Many more happy and healthy years,” triggered the response, “May you be a witness to it for many years to come.” Formalities over, they departed. The aunts were staying all day so the atmosphere was as busy as ever. Many of them only saw each other at times like this and had a lot of catching-up to do. I joined in wholeheartedly, seeing an ideal opportunity to practise my newly-learned Dutch.
The birthday I have described is an old-fashioned country celebration. Birthdays retain their importance but ways to mark them are changing. City-dwellers, or those with busy jobs, have to cope with a preordained routine, but even the busiest seldom fail to treat their colleagues to a selection of cakes at work. Children are, as ever, the lucky ones. They usually end up with two parties, one for their friends and another for relatives and adult family friends.