Horrors of Dutch Drop (Liquorice)

Depending on how long you have been in the Netherlands, you may or may not have yet noticed just how much the Dutch love their drop (liquorice). But it isn’t the sort of liquorice you may think.

If you are from America, you may think of the sugary red stick stuff, or maybe you are from the UK and think of liquorice allsorts, but no no, the Dutch liquorice is black and chewy and comes in all sorts of ‘flavours’. You have four main categories that Dutch liquorice falls under:

• Soft and sweet
• Soft and salty
• Hard and sweet
• Hard and salty

And in those categories you will find lots of flavours, from Englse drop (English liquorice) to honingdrop (honey liquorice), muntdrop (mint liquorice) to the weirder flavours like oceaandrop (ocean flavour ?) and schoolkrijt (school chalk ??).

Drop comes in a whole variety of shapes. Most popular are diamonds, ovals, cubes and circles made to look like money. Some flavours also come in cute designs, like bee shapes for honingdrop and bicycles and cars.

Another fun thing the Dutch enjoy to do with their liquorice is feed it to unsuspecting expats to see their reactions. So if a Dutch person ever offers you a piece of drop, first check for cameras, but do give it a try (with caution), and try to have a tissue on hand to spit it out should you really not like it. Be especially wary of drop that has salmiak in it!