Monday, December 15, 2008
Sinterklaas, episode VI: The return of De Sint
One of the recent hit from the dutch band Bløf sings Oktober is de wreedste maand, October is the cruelest month.
Despite this, Autumn is actually one of the best season in Holland.
"It is in Autumn that Amsterdam feels like at home" as one of the main critic of our modern society had to say.
The proof of this is that the only remarkable festivity in the Dutch tradition is Sinterklaas, at the apogee of Autumn.
Moreover this is the only period in which The Netherlands offer some good stuff to eat (or some eatable stuff for good), mainly candies and sweets.
There are in fact a lot of typical Autumn sweets sold only in this period and they make the athmosphere pretty warm and Christmas-like. So yes, this is definitely the best period to visit Holland (this, and the Koninginnedag, of course).
The main sweet of the Sinterklaas period are the Chocoladeletteres: thick alphabeth letters made of chocolate. Every kid gets usually the first letter of his name, or a neutral S (for Sinterklaas) or P (for Zwarte Piet). In smaller letters, such as Js or Is, the thickness of the chocolate layer is larger, so to compensate the amount of choc-ness with bigger letters such as Ms.
Then there all kind of other candies and biscuits:
- speculaas, baked cookies with a cinnamon flavour, with some figures stamped on the rectangular front side;
- kruidnoten, small round cookies made from the same dough as the speculaas, they exist also with a chocolate shell;
- pepernooten, not to confuse with pepernoten, they are instead made of rye. They are traditionally scatterd around to children together with coins or candies;
- marzipan! This is of course my favourite! And after last year's 2kg marzipan pig-head Eleonora bought me, this year this became a tradition and I got another one (but bigger, tastier and marzipaner)!
Eet smakelijk!
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4 comments:
Interesting! Traditional dutch sweets seem to be very good! perhaps a little heawy for me..
Can I ask you why : "episode V, episode VI"?
Where on earth go the episodes I, II, IV ?
PS: This is an english exercise, please correct me if necessary.
posso esser el primo (e l'ultimo) a dir che Oktober is de wreedste maand sè una citazion de la terra desolata?
mz
per bon?
E scrivere un poema dal titolo Wastedland?
O questa e` una citazione da Tiziano Ferro?
Per l'inglese: credo sia "where do (did) the episodes go?"
Per il resto mi par corretto.
Ma non son T.S. Eliot, per cui potrei sbagliarmi.
BTW.... the English correction is wronger than the original sentence.... so I wouldn't trust this teacher....
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