History

Originating in the 1600s, stamppot is one of the oldest Dutch recipes that remain popular today. The traditional Dutch stamppot recipes use mashed potatoes as the base, and then incorporate a vegetable (most often sauerkraut, kale, endive, spinach, and turnip greens) and sometimes a meat, making the quintessential comfort food dish. There are no real rules about what goes into a stamppot, though, so the variety is as endless as your imagination.

Stamppot originated as a winter dish, perfect to fill up the potato farmers during harvest. One of the first stamppot created is the hutspot, which was born out of the Dutch’s “Eighty Year’s War” with Spain. The story goes that when the Spanish soldiers fled, they left behind bits of a stew that the starving Dutch welcomed and named hutspot, meaning “mix pot.”

Renewal

[ text explaining the renewal of the recipe by students]

Preparation: 75 minutes

Cooking time: 30 minutes

Number of servings: 6

Ingredients

• 1250 gr carrots (those thick ones, ‘winterpenen’ in Dutch)
• 1250 gr floury potatoes (if you can’t find them, just use the ones you can find and let them cook a bit longer)
• 300 gr white onions
• 500 ml beef stock (or vegetable stock if you’re vegetarian or vegan)
• 25 gr butter
• Nutmeg
• Curry powder
• 100- 120 ml Milk
• Salt
• Pepper
• Oil/ butter to grease the frying pan
• Optional: 2 bay leaves (to add with the carrots)
• Optional: 2 cloves of garlic, some sambal and/or a splash of ketjap manis
• Optional: Fresh parsley to sprinkle over the hutspot when it’s finished

1. Peel the potatoes and cut them into chunks
2. Peel the carrot and grate them. Don’t grate the carrots too finely; you still want to know that it is carrot and not some orange baby puke.
3. Add the potatoes to a big pan and add the beef or vegetable stock (the bouillon needs to cover the potatoes, and depending on how you cut them and place them in the pan, you could need more or less stock).Add the grated carrots to a big pan with water and add a bit of salt (the water needs to cover the carrots).
4. Cut the onions into slices and heat a frying pan with a bit of butter or oil on medium-high heat.
5. Add the onions to the pan and add salt and pepper on them. You want the onions to be a bit brown. You can also add two cloves of garlic (pressed in the garlic press, or very finely diced) to your onions, as well as a small splash of ketjap and a bit of sambal. It gives it a whole other taste.
6. The pan with potatoes need to boil for +- 20 /25 minutes; until they are done. They need to be done right; if they’re still a bit tough, I recommend you to cook them longer. As they are grated, the carrots take less long to boil, but I would still cook them for around 15 minutes. But, one carrot is not the same as the next, so don’t be afraid to taste the carrot whether they are done or not.
7. When the potatoes are done, pour off the water/ stock. Do the same for the carrots.
8. Mash the potatoes with a masher.When you’ve mashed it, add the milk to a little pan to heat it quickly.When it’s hot you can add the milk to the mashed potatoes (bit by bit, until you find that it’s smooth enough) as well as the butter.
9. Add curry powder, black pepper (salt: if you didn’t use the stock at all) and nutmeg to your mashed potatoes until you like the taste.Then add the cooked, grated carrots to the pan of mashed potatoes. Mix this around until it’s evenly combined.
10. Then, you will add the baked onions to your hutspot: mix this around, so it’s combined.
11. Lastly, you can add the fresh parsley over the hutspot, and it’s finished.

Instructions

Traditionally, this Dutch hutspot recipe is eaten with many different pieces of meat. From ‘klapstuk’, which is meat from ribs of a cow, to some bacon to a ‘rookworst’ (smoked sausage). Klapstuk is a fatty meat that must simmer for hours to get the best taste.