2 September 2020
A Dutch treat is a date or an affair where each attendee pays their own way. Similar terms are Dutch lunch, Dutch party, and Dutch supper, as well as the phrase to go Dutch. The term originated as an ethnic slur, referring to the stereotype of the Dutch being a parsimonious people. You don’t hear it all that often anymore, and its popularity peaked in the 1920s. The term is an Americanism, arising in the late nineteenth century.
The earliest use that I have found is from 16 April 1870 in The Chronicle of the University of Michigan, referring to a graduation celebration:
But still another move has been made, and now we learn that alma mater is to celebrate the introduction of ’70 into bachelorship with a “free lunch,” as sort of infair. To the merry-making, all the older offspring are invited, and it is hoped, possibly with reason, that a larger number of alumni will be present than the “Dutch treat” of former years has called out.
Another early use, by Charles Fulton in an 1874 book about his tour of Europe, uses the term in reference to German beer drinking. It’s not clear if he considered the Germans and the Dutch to be one people or if he just happened to use the term in a German context:
The “Dutch Treat.”
The Germans in the United States, and those Americans who affect a fondness for lager-beer, don’t drink it as it is drunk in Germany. [...] They never treat one another, but sit down to the tables, and, though they drink together, each many pays for what he consumes, whether it be beer or food. [...] If our temperance friends could institute what is called the “Dutch treat” into our saloons, each man paying his own reckoning, it would be a long step towards reform in drinking. In short, beer in Germany is part of each man’s food. He takes it as a sustenance, and not as a stimulant.
And not to be outdone by the University of Michigan, the following appears in the Yale Record of 22 September 1875, without any quotation marks, indicating the editors did not think it a novel term:
By George, S., you have five cents. So have I. Let’s go on a Dutch treat. It’s a long time since I have been anywhere.
The phrasing to go Dutch dates at least to 1900. From the pages of Brown University’s Brunonian of May 1900, where the meaning is not clear from the context:
Following that pleasant task, the young author meandered down to the corner durggist’s [sic] for “local color,” talked to an admiring coterie on the joys of being a free Bohemian in literature; offered to go Dutch again, and bought a box of chocolate peppermints to share with Christabelle when, her day’s typewriting over, she and he would sit on the boarding-house parlor sofa and discuss—things—and—things.
We get closer to a explicit statement of meaning in Mary Stewart Cutting’s 1910 novel The Unforeseen:
It seemed extremely festive to go “Dutch” with a party to small out-of-the-way foreign restaurants, where odd-looking people at the queer little dabs of food that composed the cheap table d’hôte meal.
Finally, we get a clear definition in the Western Canadian Dictionary and Phrase-Book of 1912:
Dutch. To Go Dutch is to let each man in a party pay for his own drink or refreshment.
Sources:
Cutting, Mary Stewart. The Unforeseen. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1910, 26, HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2010–20.
Field, Jim. “Etchings” The Brunonian, 37.7, May 1900, 360. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Fulton, Charles Carroll. Europe Viewed Through American Spectacles. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1874, 34–35. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. Dutch treat, n.
“Our Natal Day.” The Chronicle (University of Michigan), vol. 1, no. 14, 16 April 1870, 213. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Dutch, adj., n.1, and adv.
Sandilands, John, ed. Western Canadian Dictionary and Phrase-Book. Winnipeg: Telegram Job Printers, 1912, 16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
The Yale Record, vol. 4, no. 2, 22 September 1875, 28. HathiTrust Digital Archive.