Comment by prmph
4 days ago
Aren't they supposed to be full of sugar? Each time I've been tempted to pick them up when shopping, one look at the ingredients and nutritional profile is enough to dissuade me. I guess trying them once in a while won't kill me, though.
Apparently, they are a brand of speculoos cookies, and this Wikipedia synopsis is eye opening:
> speculaas [speːkyˈlaːs] ⓘ refers to the more traditional variant, made with a mix of various spices, which is nowadays most popular in the Netherlands; speculoos [speːkyˈloːs] ⓘ refers to a Belgian variant that omits the traditional spices in favour of caramelized sugar for flavour, and which is nowadays the most common variant in Belgium and worldwide
So the Belgians enshittified speculaas to create speculoos, pumping it full of sugar, and presented it to the world as something special.
They're... cookies. A treat.
Looking at the nutritional profile of cookies doesn't make sense. You're supposed to eat them in such low quantity/frequency that it doesn't matter.
Yes, cookies are not the most healthy thing, but there are better and worse ones. It is not just even about it containing some sugar. Why replace the spices that made a traditional cookie special, with more sugar? What is distinctive about sugar?
There is a good reason for that. Even traditional speculaas (not Lotus or other mass produced speculoos/biscoff) contains less and less speculaas spices the further you move away from Amsterdam. Because the spices arrived there, they were cheapest there. The further away (in this case south) you moved, the more expensive they were. This leads to bakers, especially commercial ones, to use less in their recipes.
Biscoff is a highly spiced cookie that's less sweet than most American cookies.
And sugar is special because it's essentially a drug that our brains are programmed to seek out and eat more of.
> So the Belgians enshittified speculaas to create speculoos
Yes and no. This "Speculoos is actually cheap Speculaas" isn't completely true. That's what people like to say today, but the "Speculoos" name has been around much longer than Lotus bakeries. It's just a dialect thing and there is no reason. Some people called it "Speculaas", some people called it "Speculoos", and _then_ a cheaper variant got made and they choose the "Speculoos" term for it.
It all just sounds really fitting because the "-loos" suffix in Dutch means "without".
Thanks for the explanation. I agree the -loos suffix is indeed (amusingly) fitting, if that's what it means. Specu-loss?
Specu-less would be the English etymological equivalent. Like careless or tasteless.
Yes things made with sugar have sugar.