Dutch cuisine is formed from the cooking traditions and practices of the Netherlands. The country's cuisine is shaped by its location on the fertile Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta at the North Sea, giving rise to fishing, farming, and overseas trade. Due to the availability of water and flat grassland, the Dutch diet contains many dairy products such as butter and cheese. The court of the Burgundian Netherlands enriched the cuisine of the elite in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century, a process continued in the 17th and 18th centuries thanks to colonial trade. At this time, the Dutch ruled the spice trade, played a pivotal role in the global spread of coffee, and started the modern era of chocolate by developing the Dutch process of first removing fat from cocoa beans using a hydraulic press, creating cocoa powder, and then alkalizing it to make it less acidic and more palatable.
Dutch cuisine can traditionally be divided in three regions. The northeast of the country is known for its meats and sausages (rookworst, metworst) and heavy rye bread, the west for fish (smoked eel, soused herring, kibbeling, mussels), spirits (jenever) and dairy based products (stroopwafel, boerenkaas), and the south for stews (hachee), fruit products and pastry (Limburgse vlaai, apple butter, bossche bol). A peculiar characteristic for Dutch breakfast and lunch is the sweet bread toppings such as hagelslag, vlokken, and muisjes, and the Dutch are the highest consumers of liquorice in the world.
