The Dutch Christmas dinner tradition where everyone cooks their own food at the table
Part of: Dutch Culture
Gourmetten is a Dutch Christmas institution: a table-top grill or hotplate in the centre of the table, a spread of raw meat, fish, vegetables, and sauces, and everyone cooking their own food throughout the evening. It takes two to three hours, produces considerable mess, and is one of the most looked-forward-to meals of the year.
The equipment is a gourmetset — an electric hotplate with a row of small individual pans (pannetjes) underneath and a shared grill surface on top. Each person has their own pan. You cook what you want, when you want: a slice of beef, some prawns, a small omelette, peppers, a mushroom. The table is crowded with small dishes of raw ingredients and an assortment of sauces — garlic, herb, mustard, whatever the host has prepared.
There is no fixed order, no single dish arriving at once. It is slow, social, and deliberately unpressured. The point is not the food itself but the two hours of conversation it creates while everyone is quietly busy with their pan.
Gourmetten is primarily a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinner tradition — eerste kerstdag and tweede kerstdag (25 and 26 December, both public holidays in the Netherlands). It is also common on New Year's Eve. A significant majority of Dutch households do it at least once over the Christmas period; in the south of the country it is especially embedded.
The tradition arrived in the Netherlands in the late 1970s, promoted by Dutch meat industry organisations as an alternative to Swiss cheese fondue. The campaign worked. Within a few years, gourmetsets were a standard household item and gourmetten had become a national Christmas habit with no equivalent in most other countries.
If a Dutch family invites you for a kerst dinner and it is gourmetten, expect: - A long, relaxed evening — two to three hours at the table minimum - A lot of raw ingredients to navigate, often without much instruction - To cook your own food — no one serves you; that is the point - The smell of cooking to linger in the house until morning
It is deeply gezellig. The unhurried pace, everyone occupied with the same small task, the conversation running parallel to the cooking — this is what Dutch Christmas often looks like from the inside.
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