When I was a kid growing up in Minneapolis, we soft-peddled ethnicity. I realized, of course, that my last name was Dutch, and that many of my relatives came from Holland, Michigan. But, apart from an unpronounceable surname, few traces of Dutchness were left in my fifth-generation immigrant family. One clue? Our family was irrationally fond of windmill cookies— crunchy, deep-brown treats tasting of burnt sugar and spices. Rife with slivered almonds, these cookies were shaped like ancient-looking windmills, the meaning of which we pondered as we gobbled them up.
Years later I learned their cultural significance. To begin with, cookie is a Dutch word, an English adaptation of “koekje, which means “little cake.” These little cakes had been made since medieval times in the Lowland Countries, with the designs imprinted using a hand-carved wooden mold. In the 1800s, these “cookie boards” were replaced with mass-manufactured tin cookie cutters, an innovation of the Industrial Revolution. Koekjes were originally most popular at Christmas time, when they were imprinted with images of Sinterklaas, the Dutch forerunner of Santa Claus. He was often portrayed brandishing a switch that he used to beat bad children. (He wasn’t jolly, like our Santa.)
But gradually, stamped cookies became a year-round treat, and bakers simply looked around them for inspiration. The image on our windmill cookies must have dated from the 18th century, when the type of windmill pictured was first developed. (There were 9,000 of these windmills in Holland by 1850.) Inside was a maze of tightly packed, whirring gears and shafts, an amazing engineering feat. In Dutch, the ubiquitous windmill cookies are called speculaas, which refers to the spice mixture that flavors the cookies (cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace are most commonly used).
Back when my brothers and I used to sit on the floor and eat them one by one—first nibbling the bricks at the bottom, and leaving the blades till last—we had no idea that a part of our family history was encoded in the ridges and holes of the cookies.
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