Snert

Snert is split-pea soup.  (And, as far as I am concerned, is the far superior name.)  It is a traditional Dutch food that is very popular, in the winter especially.  When the Erasmus Student Network had their International Student party and had a buffet of traditional Dutch food, snert was one of the six dishes served.  You can buy canned snert in the grocery store.

In Rotterdam, there is a tourist tram, called the "Snerttram" on which, for around $20, you can ride around the city for an hour and a half, listening to a guide, and eating a tasty-warm bowl of snert.  This is one of things I wanted to do but I never got around to it and, now that it is getting up to 60 degrees during the day, it just doesn't seem as special anymore.  In the summer, they have an Ijsjestram instead (where you eat ice cream as you go around the city) but somehow that just doesn't seem as special, either.  For one thing, the graphics just cannot be as good:

(This picture comes from a Rotterdam tourism website.)

Dutch folks love their snert.  And, apparently, so do Dutch babies.  I was about to watch a video on You Tube and a commercial came up. It is the most adorable commercial ever.  I will say, however, that while they captured my interest they failed in the primary aim of commercial: that is to say, in product identification.  The commercial didn't really put the name of the product in until a few second before the end and, as a not very slim Dutch speaker, it wasn't enough time for me to figure out the name of the company or of the product.

(Are you chuckling to yourself over my little misstep, there?  

"Slim", in Dutch, means clever, or smart.  If you make a silly mistake, you can 

say "Niet zo slim, mij, eh?"  So that is a reference to the state of my Dutch 

understanding, not to anything else.)

Well, after quite a few minutes of looking up "Dutch snert baby food commercials" on Google and of starting up various You Tube videos hoping to find the same commercial, I finally found it.  And here it is:


It is so very, very Dutch.  When the mother is coming with the soup, she says "Special soup for my little Superman!" (playing off of the super/souper homophone pun)  and then the tag line is "The first soup for your Superhero."

Olvarit seems to be the Dutch equivalent of Gerber.  One of their tag lines is "better than homemade."  Apparently they do a lot of cute baby commercials.  When I was searching for this commercial, I ran across this collection of "a day in the life of Jip en Job" commercials.  Jip en Job is the Dutch equivalent of Sven and Ollie.



You don't really have to know what they are saying to get the jist of the commercials.  Poor little Jip (the blond one) is getting "Brand X" baby food, instead of the Olvarit that Job gets, and suffers the unfortunate consequences of his mother's bad choices.  (In Dutch, by the way, Js are pronounced like Ys, so when the "babies" talk, you can hear them saying "Yip" and "Yope".)