Cooking through history, one kitchen at a time.
PodGront's Kookpotcast episodes put a pan on the stove and tell the history while the food cooks, from a lamb pastry out of a 1593 cookbook to how cocoa ended up in Spanish monasteries. Guests pick the recipes, and the visits go from a village outside Arnhem to North Brabant.
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PodGront is the name on the feed, but every episode sampled here carries another name: Kookpotcast. It is a cooking series with a strong interest in history. A duo, Merit among them, cooks with a guest, the guest picks the recipe, and the story of the dish gets told while something sizzles. In 2020 the series joined the October Month of History and its East-West theme, and the guests' choices ranged widely. Corona delayed the start of that run, and it also moved one episode's opening out of a guest's kitchen and into a living room, over a cup of tea. Marleen Willebrands' visit is built around a lamb pastry from a cookbook dated 1593. The talk around it covers spices that arrived before the VOC existed, and Antwerp: by the middle of the sixteenth century it held the staple rights for spices and sugar, so that trade no longer ran through Venice. In the Danny Jansen episode, where he is introduced through his 24kitchen programmes, the dish is a chicken curry, and the plan was to explore Indonesian cooking. While an onion fries, the conversation drifts to collecting old cookbooks: antiquarians who phone when something turns up, wanting the whole set, and trading up to better copies. The chocolate episode is set with Norbert and Gerhard, on land outside Arnhem given over mainly to vegetables and fruit. Its history runs from the Aztecs, who lived a little too far north to have cocoa of their own, to Spanish monasteries that kept it as a kind of secret for close to a century. The conversation names the Monasterio de Piedra near Madrid as the place where the first version of chocolate as we know it was made. Then Johanne Maria van Winter, a professor emeritus known on the show as Marietje, travels from Utrecht to Groningen to cook. Her episode goes back to Hippocrates and Galen and to how their medicine nearly faded from Western Europe. Syriac and Arabic translations carried it on until it reached Latin by way of Italy and Constantinus Africanus. The production makes no effort to hide how it was made. A dog in the background wants feeding. The record button gets pressed a third time. One closing teaser has the pair trying to guess a sweet on the table from its sound alone. Much of the warmth comes from that looseness, and from guests who are clearly enthusiastic about the subject. The episode titles are in Dutch. For the medicine thread, start with 'Kookpotcast Aflevering 19: Koken met Marietje'. For spices and Antwerp, try 'Kookpotcast Aflevering 16: Lammeken-pastey met Marleen Willebrands'.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes food history told at the stove rather than from a lectern, doesn't mind a loose, homemade production, and is comfortable with Dutch.
What sets it apart: The history is tied to a dish that is actually being cooked, so it comes in pieces between the cooking steps: Antwerp's spice staple, cocoa in Spanish monasteries, Greek medicine carried through Arabic into Latin. The guests choose the recipes, so the range is wide, from a 1593 lamb pastry to a chicken curry.
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A 1593 lamb pie comes with a spice-trade detour; your dinner plans may need footnotes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A kitchen recipe becomes a guide to Greek medical knowledge returning to Western Europe.
The season finale uses Johanna-Marie van Winter's Marietje as a practical route into the preservation and return of Greek medical knowledge. As vegetables are cut and cooked with meat, the episode follows ideas associated with Hippocrates and Galen from Greek into Syrian and…
A loose kitchen conversation turns chocolate pie into a curious trip through cocoa history, gardens, and monasteries.
A chocolate pie becomes the doorway into a roomy, unhurried food history, following cocoa from southern Mexico to Europe and on toward a monastery near Madrid.
A curry, an old manuscript, and white mustard seeds turn kitchen nerves into lively food history.
A curry cooked from a historical manuscript gives this episode its pleasingly tense center: the pan is busy, the book is precious, and every possible stain feels like a small threat.
A lamb pie leads into sixteenth-century cookery, Antwerp's spice and sugar trade, and the practical work of tart-pan baking.
An old lamb pie gives this episode a clean route into sixteenth-century cookery. The hosts work from a 1593 recipe, following its prunes, lemons, ginger, bacon fat, sugar, butter, and verjuice into a wider look at late-sixteenth-century trade.
Bourbon talk, barrel stories, messy good pours.
Bourbon reviews with memory, candor, and community.
Everyday life, thought through together.
["PodGront's Kookpotcast Aflevering 19, Koken met Marietje, closes the season in Groningen with Johanna-Marie van Winter and a 13th-century Syrian recipe.", "Van Winter, called Marietje, says she started cooking medieval cookbooks in 1964, used history students on a three-burner gas stove, and later wrote a Spiegel Historiaal column on material culture.", "She walks through Scents and Flavors, a Syrian cookbook about smell and taste, and the hosts cook a sour-grape stew with meat, chickpea balls, aubergine, courgette, sour apples, mint, thyme, coriander, garlic, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger.", "The episode's biggest historical claim is that Arabic cookbooks show cauliflower and yoghurt centuries before European recipe books, while Greek medical knowledge moved through Syriac, Arabic, and Latin via Constantinus Africanus and the school of Salerno."]
The episode’s strongest claim is that the oldest cocoa finds are in Ecuador, around 3300 BC, not Mexico.
["PodGront's \"Kookpotcast Aflevering 17: Peper Karrie met Danny Jansen\" turns a historical pepper curry from the Royaerts family manuscript into a chicken dish with curry crumble.", "Danny Jansen is presented as a 24Kitchen cook and cookbook author who has written 14 books and keeps a private room of historical cookbooks.", "The recording is framed by COVID-19 and Maat van de Geschiedenis's East-West theme, which ties the recipe to Dutch-Asian food history.", "Jansen argues that an old recipe should be treated as the \"soul\" of a dish, and he wants a luxury culinary history book built from more than 400 transcribed recipes."]
Kookpotcast's season opener stays in a living room over tea after corona kept the hosts apart since March.