History
Traditionally the Dutch diet consisted of bread and herring. In the 18th century the potato (which had been brought from Peru to Europe by the Spanish in the 16th century) gained popularity, to become the staple food by 1800.
Historically Dutch cuisine was closely related to northern French cuisine, which is still visible in traditional Dutch restaurants and the Southern regional cuisine. In the course of the 15th century haute cuisine began to emerge, largely limited to the aristocracy, but from the 17th century onward these kinds of dishes became available to the wealthy citizens as well, often consisting of a rich variety of fruits, cheeses, meat, wine, and nuts.
The national cuisine however became greatly impoverished at the turn of the 20th century, when there was great poverty in the Netherlands. As mass education became available, a great number of girls were sent to a new school type, the Huishoudschool (housekeeping school), where young women were trained to become domestic servants and where lessons in cooking cheap and simple meals were a major part of the curriculum, often based on more traditional Dutch dishes, a process which has been slowly turned.
Read more about this topic: Dutch Cuisine
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“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)