Ode to the Cocktail Peanut
You mindlessly polish off a bag in one evening, but perhaps from now on we should look at our old, familiar cocktail peanut with a little more love and attention. The hero of disappointing receptions, the champion of the sports club canteen and the favourite at every family weekend: long live the old-fashioned cocktail peanut!
Official figures: every week, 250,000 kilos of cocktail peanuts roll off the production line at the Duyvis factory in Zaandam. That amounts to 13 million kilos of cocktail peanuts a year, exported throughout Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the cocktail peanuts are nowhere as popular as they are in the Netherlands.
Nuts in the cement mixer
Cocktail peanuts are made from ordinary peanuts. To make beautifully round cocktail peanuts, the small, round nuts are selected. The peanuts generally come from Brazil. In a kind of enormous cement mixer, they are coated with flour, cornstarch and spices, held together with a little oil or water. They are then deep-fried or baked in a convection oven.
Cocktail peanuts from their own kitchen
Where do cocktail peanuts come from? In Indonesia, they are a well-known snack. The first Dutch cocktail peanuts came from the kitchen of the Go family. In 1954, Mr Frans Go started a family business in Indonesian specialities, such as gado gado and prawn crackers, from the garage of his house in Naarden. His sisters also tried to make the katjang shanghai they knew from Indonesia. The two women also worked at a pharmaceutical company, where they saw a machine that coated pills with a layer. Handy for the nuts, they thought, and they persuaded Frans Go to buy a few dragee machines. He did, making their company the first official producer of cocktail peanuts from 1960 onwards. At first, they called them ‘crack peanuts’ because, according to the sisters, the peanuts made such a deliciously crunchy crackle in your mouth. Later, the Go-Tan company sold the patent for the peanuts to Calvé, which later sold it on to Duyvis, the company where the peanuts are still produced today.
New flavours or not?
That good old cocktail peanut… Isn’t it time for something new? Not according to Duyvis. “We did introduce an unsalted range, Duyvis Unsalted,” says spokesperson Karlijn, “but consumers appreciate the cocktail peanuts so much that we’re keeping them authentic!” Well, there are of course Tijgernootjes, also from Duyvis, with creative flavours such as bacon and cheese and paprika fiesta.
Luxury fish food
What many people don’t know is that anglers who want to catch carp lure them to their fishing spot by scattering cocktail peanuts in the water. Starch, protein and a nice bit of salt—the fish supposedly can’t resist them.
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