Longing for the Netherlands, Stroopwafels, and the Real Thing

The things I took for granted in the Netherlands before I moved abroad include commuting by bicycle, an abundance of very old buildings, and fashionable raincoats. Something I never considered missing was the food. One thing the Dutch do particularly well, for instance, is boiling the texture and flavor out of carrots, potatoes, and onions, then mashing them together. Voila, it’s hutspot. Another mainstay is having pancakes for dinner. I used to eat mine smothered in apple sauce—a practical, less elegant take on the French classic crêpes à la confiture.

Growing up, I always chose sweet over savory, because it was so elusive at home. My mother, who loves fruit, also loathes added sugars. Processed foods and candy were carefully rationed, so I took my curiosity and cravings elsewhere. I stuffed myself at birthday parties, overdoing it on whipped cream and icing, often the first in line to go back for a second slice of cake. The sugar rush always delivered, folding itself around my moodiness like a sparkly Instagram filter. Watching American kids and their bulging bags of Halloween candy in movies turned me gummy-worm green with jealousy.

While we didn’t have a candy jar, we did have a cookie tin. Mainly meant for guests, cookies were kept in an antique closet in the living room. Over time, I became very adept at unlatching the closet door and popping the lid off the tin without making a sound. I’d take as much as I could without being found out. I wasn’t picky, pilfering anything from marzipan rolls to butter cookies, but my favorite was always the stroopwafel.

It’s a deceptively simple creation that doesn’t look all that appetizing: no colorful glaze or appealing sprinkle of sugar or nuts, just a plain brown disc. But then you take a bite, and you realize that the stroopwafel doesn’t need flashy looks, because its substance is a buttery dream of two wafer-like parts that hold a rich layer of syrup, each bite perfectly proportioned and satisfying. The best way to eat a store-bought stroopwafel is by perching it over a hot beverage. The cookie softens as it locks in and soaks up the liquid’s steam. I used to sit and watch my cup of tea, impatiently waiting for my stroopwafel to become even more perfect.

I left the Netherlands in my early twenties because I wanted my life to change in a way I couldn’t imagine happening there. Leaving behind my family, rain, bikes, and cookies was the price I had to pay for crossing over to the United States. I did so without giving it a second thought.

At first, living in New York felt like being stuck in a pool full of jelly, unable to swim. My first few months went by in a haze. The room I had rented sight unseen wasn’t a room at all, but a corner of someone’s living room sectioned off by a wall that didn’t reach the ceiling. Between sirens blaring outside and one roommate practicing the theme to Amélie on his accordion inside, preferably late at night, I wasn’t sleeping.

A city like New York allegedly makes you a more interesting version of yourself, the rich lives of countless others rubbing off until they penetrate and transform even the most hesitant and scared into the fascinating specimens they were meant to be all along. I had given up so much to be here, to be her—the new me, final version pending. I didn’t want to admit that I felt swallowed up and out of step.

At Trader Joe’s one day, I was in the process of mentally subtracting the combined cost of my basket from the meager balance of my checking account, when a bag of mini stroopwafels caught my eye. Inexplicably perched above the frozen-vegetable section, it made itself known with a whisper.

“Hey, you. Remember me?”

I came to a full stop, meeting baskets and elbows in the crowded store. “This is my favorite cookie!” I nearly exclaimed, but didn’t. This was New York; those who scream in public places are avoided, and what I wanted was the opposite: to be surrounded and absorbed by the city’s people and its foods, the honey-dipped smell of roasted-nut carts and the fast chop-chop-chop of the halal street vendors mixing spiced meats and onions right on the sidewalk. Pancakes for breakfast instead of dinner. Salad bars in crammed delis. Free coffee refills that made me jitter across town, still trying to match my pace to the city’s heartbeat.

Yet, at Trader Joe’s, I was transfixed by the mini stroopwafels, like they were an old friend showing up in my new town, completely unannounced. The one bag I bought was a luxury purchase and I planned to make it last for weeks, but I failed at that resolution within two minutes of getting on the subway.

As the train rattled me back to Bed-Stuy, I dropped bite by bite of syrupy goodness into my mouth, eating tiny blueprints of home, which reminded me that, just like every other person in this subway car, I came from somewhere. Somewhere good. Maybe my key to feeling at home wasn’t erasing what came before but honoring it.

I was transfixed by the mini stroopwafels, like they were an old friend showing up in my new town, completely unannounced.

When I got on a United Airlines flight to San Francisco a few years later, I wasn’t surprised when a weary flight attendant handed me an individually wrapped stroopwafel. Trader Joe’s had kicked off an unexpected chain of events: Stroopwafels were now everywhere, from the cookie aisle at Whole Foods in Chelsea to the gas station register in Jersey City. I began seeing something called the Swoffle, a bastardization of the word that’s fun to say out loud but still looks odd to me when printed on packaging. (“Swaffelen,” in Dutch, means to dickslap a person or an object.)

Once I found my own personal slice of New York—enjoying art shows, dive bars, and black box theaters—I no longer felt compelled to reach for echoes of home. I even found a new favorite comfort food, enjoying the salty-sweet crack of a peanut butter cup as I bit into it, its chocolate quickly dissolving in the thick gooeyness of pulverized peanuts.

I still visited the Netherlands about once a year, but instead of letting a stroopwafel soften over a cup of my dad’s strong coffee, I scoured the Dutch stores for decent peanut butter cups. My new home and my old home had switched places. I now looked for signs of the United States in the town where I grew up, trying to mesh them together in reverse.

By the time the pandemic hit, I had moved to Los Angeles. As much as they try to prove how different they are from New Yorkers, most Angelenos are used to moving around too— crisscrossing endless freeways in their cars, every so often popping over to LAX, to temporarily exchange the relentless orange sun for a different flavor.

In March 2020, that first month of silence, traffic stopped—save for Amazon delivery vans, slowly trawling the streets like beetles after the apocalypse. The skies were clearer than I had ever seen them. I kept looking up, imagining a plane and myself on it, starting that twelve-hour direct flight home I once dreaded. Now that I no longer had the option to fly, I wanted nothing more than to opt in.

When early pandemic activities like hoarding canned food and disinfecting groceries made way for careful ordering out and skittish trips to the grocery store, I started noticing something I hadn’t paid attention to in years: stroopwafels. The local health food store sold a gluten-free version. A wrapper at Starbucks boasted this particular stroopwafel’s “low carb count” and an added vanilla flavoring. I considered buying one but never did. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still hoped I would be able to visit my family again soon, so I didn’t have to settle for a knockoff.

*

Then my grandfather died. He passed away in the Netherlands, during one of those weeks that could have been any other week, days bleeding into each other with meals and sleep as the only markers of time. There was nothing anybody could have done to keep him alive, and now there was nothing anybody could do to bring me home. His obituary said he had wanted to “leave the way he came: in silence.” The pandemic granted his wish. The number of attendees for his service was capped at ten.

The morning of, I got up at 4:30 a.m. My wife made coffee and I cranked up all the living room lights in an attempt to push out the darkness. On Zoom, I saw a small portion of the service through the lens of my cousin’s iPad camera: the end of the casket, the upper bodies of those who spoke, and a few flowers. Within forty-five minutes, my family had to clear out to make room for the next rushed remembrance.

Before clicking “leave meeting,” my cousin turned the camera toward my grandmother. She looked straight at it, her small eyes widening as if to say, “Can you believe all of this?” Then she launched into a memory I’ve heard many times before, about taking me out on her bicycle in the dead of Dutch winter, and how I had complained to her about the conditions. Over and over, she recalled, I grumpily requested blankets and Werther’s Original butter candies.

Time became even harder to grasp after my grandfather’s death. Like thin mountain air, sucking in more of it didn’t make me feel any less winded. FaceTime facilitated daily check-ins with my grandmother, who sat alone in her room halfway across the world, forced to miss my grandfather in complete isolation.

I imagined visiting, with her standing behind a window in the care facility where she lived and me outside, like a cruel in-person version of the video calls we were already doing. I’d never felt this far removed from home; the improbably blue sky above me was completely devoid of the metal wings that could bridge the gap. I wondered if I’d be able to make it back before my grandmother, too, would pass away.

As I ventured out into Los Angeles once a week, I started resenting the stroopwafels. They reminded me of where I wasn’t sitting, of who I wasn’t holding.

Inside a supermarket so empty it looked like a movie set, I squinted at the baked goods aisle. “No self-respecting Dutch person would eat your vanilla stroopwafel anyway!” I wanted to yell. I didn’t, because the staff was having a hard-enough time as it was. They didn’t need to see a grieving Dutch woman losing her mind over a cookie.

In December 2020, my parents sent a care package. It took a month to make its way to Los Angeles and arrived swaddled in clear plastic. I carried it inside like a prize, my heartbeat low in my throat. Underneath the plastic, the box was torn open and a note peeked out: US Customs and Border Protection had “inspected” it. I clawed through the contents. A holiday card. Chocolate letters. Marzipan. Had they not sent stroopwafels? That’s really all I wanted. The real thing, from the real place.

On the phone, my mom patiently confirmed that she had, of course, included stroopwafels. Regular ones for me, vegan ones for my wife.

“What do you mean they’re missing?” she asked, incredulous. I laugh-cried at the absurdity of my own insistence and tore into a piece of marzipan shaped like a mouse.

I started resenting the stroopwafels. They reminded me of where I wasn’t sitting, of who I wasn’t holding.

*

More than a year and a half after my last visit, a year after my grandfather died, and six months after US Customs plundered my holiday package, I walked my freshly vaccinated body onto a flight to the Netherlands. The plane, the airport, and the train were all hollow without the crowds that usually filled them. The people didn’t appear until I made it to my hometown of Leiden, where outdoor dining had just resumed and every waterside terrace and café patio was fully booked. Boats filled with giddy families glided through the canals, ignoring the incoming clouds.

The day after a restless overnight flight always has that same jellylike consistency I remembered from my first months in New York, feet heavy, head floating. I drove to my grandmother and was allowed to hug her thin shoulders while crying into my mask. On the other side of the window, it started to rain.

Later that week, I turned to my mom while making breakfast, to ask her a question I’d been thinking about since I got on the plane. “Do they still sell stroopwafels at the markt?” I meant not the supermarket, but the markt: a biweekly outdoor gathering of temporary stalls that pops up in the center of town. She didn’t know, because she wouldn’t consider spending two euros on a stroopwafel down the street, the same way I refuse to buy a Swoffle at Starbucks. We don’t crave the things we’re close to, even if they’ve shaped us into who we are.

The stall was there, right in front of the nineteenth-century church on Leiden’s main shopping street. The woman behind the counter had just made a batch, so I didn’t get to see the dough being rolled out on the cookie iron and pressed thin, before being sliced in half down the middle into even thinner layers, or the slathering of syrup right before the two halves are pressed together.

I paid with a two-euro coin and got my cookie, faintly smelling of cinnamon and still warm to the touch. I took a bite. Chewy, yet soft. Sweeter than I remembered, maybe because it had been so long.

A man dressed as Elvis stood nearby as I ate, bike in hand, trying to engage shoppers. I watched him while chewing, wondering if he’d ever bought a fresh stroopwafel. Maybe he didn’t even notice the stall and dreamed of visiting Graceland and eating fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwiches instead.

I brought one bag of vegan stroopwafels back to the United States for my wife, but none for myself. The next time I have one, it will be at that same stall, while chatting with my mom, wondering if the Elvis look-alike has made it to Memphis yet. I have used the stroopwafel to define my own sense of belonging over the years, but ultimately it’s just a cookie. A very delicious one, but no stand-in for being home.

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