Dutch birth rusks buttered thickly and scattered with sugared anise comfits
Origin: The Netherlands
From the journey of Anise.
There is no other dish in Europe in which a single spice carries this much social weight. When a Dutch child is born, the household buys rusks and a tin of muisjes, and every visitor who comes to see the baby is handed a beschuit, buttered thickly and scattered with them. Colleagues bring a tin into the office. It is not a treat offered to guests so much as an announcement made in food, and refusing one would be understood as a comment. Muisjes means little mice. They are anise seeds coated layer by layer in hard sugar until each is a small ball with a short tail left protruding, which is the tail that gives them the name. Pink and white are set out for a girl and blue and white for a boy, a colour convention that dates only from the twentieth century; orange muisjes appear for a royal birth and are sold only for the occasion. The everyday version, gestampte muisjes, is the same thing crushed to a coarse pink or white powder and eaten on bread at breakfast. The custom is old, certainly seventeenth-century and probably older, and its logic is the same as everywhere else anise is used around childbirth: the seed was believed to help a nursing mother's milk, which turns out to have a foundation, since anethole has a weak oestrogenic action. The sugar shell had its own reputation, being thought to keep evil away from the cradle, and the whiteness of the sugar stood for the purity of the newborn. Beschuit itself deserves a note. It is not a biscuit but a twice-baked round rusk, very light, very dry, and structurally fragile: the standard Dutch complaint about them is that they shatter under a butter knife. They are sold in cylindrical packets of thirteen, a baker's dozen supposedly allowing for the one that breaks. Assembly is a matter of thirty seconds and there is a correct way to do it, which is why it is written down here at all.
Muisjes are made by De Ruijter, who have produced them since 1860, and are sold by Dutch delicatessens and online; there is no real substitute, since ordinary sugared aniseed lacks the layered shell and the tail. Gestampte muisjes, the crushed version, is the everyday breakfast form and goes on ordinary buttered bread rather than on a rusk. Beschuit can be replaced at a pinch with a plain twice-baked rusk or a very light melba toast, though neither has the right shattering crumb. Dutch supermarkets abroad stock them widely. The colour convention is worth getting right if the dish is being served for its proper purpose: pink and white for a girl, blue and white for a boy, orange for a member of the royal family. Plain white muisjes exist and are used for everyday breakfast rather than for an announcement. The other traditional Dutch anise preparation, anijsmelk, is often served alongside, and the two together are the standard offering to visitors in the first weeks after a birth.
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