BY The Editors

PUBLISHED December 18, 2024

According to some historians, these cookies, often referred to as speculoos, were created in Belgium as a cheaper, spice-free alternative to Dutch speculaas. In the seventeenth century, importing spices into Belgium was more expensive than in the Netherlands. So, instead of spices giving the Belgian cookies their color and flavor, caramelized sugar was used, providing the warming notes characteristic of the Dutch cookie. This style of sugar came about because processed sugar at the time in Belgium was made from sugar beets, and the molasses that came from it (which would typically be added back to white sugar to make “brown sugar”) was so high in nitrogenous waste, it was considered unfit to consume. So, as a workaround to get a brown sugar, regular white sugar was caramelized and turned into rock candy-like sugar called kandij suiker. This caramel sugar gives these cookies their distinctive taste, which is different from the bitter notes provided by the likes of molasses or other brown sugars made from sugarcane.

Another theory for how the cookie came about involves two rival cookie manufacturers. According to the Lotus Biscoff website, a Belgian baker named Jan Boone, Sr., created a caramelized cookie like speculoos and named it Lotus, after the flower that symbolizes purity, and in the 1950s started individually wrapping the cookies and selling them. But at the same time, according to LU (another large cookie manufacturer), a baker in Antwerp named Louis Parein created the “Bastogne cookie”— or Bastognekoeken, the name of this recipe—to commemorate the Battle of Bastogne in World War II. It is, like Biscoff’s Lotus cookie, a caramelized sugar cookie flavored with only cinnamon, but engraved with ridges on the top.

However the cookie came about, it seems the key ingredient is the brown rock candy sugar and the addition of cinnamon, though many other recipes now include a pinch of cloves or nutmeg and some vanilla, too. Modern recipes mix maple syrup or molasses with regular sugar to replicate the specific taste of speculoos, but the authentic syrup would be schenkstroop, a Dutch caramel syrup, which is available online or in some specialty food stores. Many recipes use the kandij suiker and the caramel syrup together; it’s listed as an option in this recipe, but if you use regular white sugar, the caramel flavor will be a little less prominent. – Ben Mims