Holland Food & Traditional Cuisine

Dutch cooking was shaped by a fertile delta and a frugal culture, and it has a long-standing reputation for plainness that its own cooks would not entirely dispute. What it has instead of refinement is quality of material: the grassland makes the dairy, the sea makes the fish, and both are outstanding.

The country divides roughly in three. The west is fish and dairy -- soused herring, smoked eel, mussels, kibbeling, stroopwafels, farmhouse cheese -- and jenever. The north-east is meat and sausage, rookworst and metworst, with heavy rye bread. The south, around Limburg and Brabant, is stews, fruit and pastry: hachée, Limburgse vlaai, the bossche bol.

The other half of eating here arrived from the colonies. Indonesian food became widespread after independence in 1945 and is now ordinary rather than exotic -- nasi goreng, saté, sambal -- and the rijsttafel, a Dutch-Indonesian invention of a dozen or more small dishes filling a table, is the closest thing the country has to a banquet.

Haring -- soused herring, maatjesharing -- is the one to try first and the one most visitors get wrong. It is eaten raw, cured rather than cooked, usually with chopped onion, from a stall. The technique that made it keep is medieval, and it is the fish that built the western towns.

Kibbeling is the other fish-stall staple: chunks of white fish in batter, fried to order, sold with sauce. Fast food, and good.

Bitterballen are deep-fried balls of ragout, the miniature version of the kroket, and are what appears with a beer. They are served scaldingly hot and are best approached with some caution.

Stamppot -- potato mashed with a vegetable, often kale or endive, with sausage -- and thick pea soup, snert, are the winter dishes, and are genuinely winter dishes rather than year-round menu items.

Stroopwafels originate in Gouda: two thin waffle layers with syrup between them, best bought warm off a griddle rather than packaged. Speculaas, spiced with cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and ginger, belongs to the Sinterklaas season.

And drop, salted liquorice, is worth one honest attempt. The Dutch are the highest consumers of liquorice in the world, with more than eighty varieties, and visitors are reliably unprepared for the salty ones.

The market is where Dutch food is at its best, and nearly every town has a weekly one. What to look for is the fish stall -- herring, kibbeling, smoked eel, prepared in front of you -- and the cheese stall, where the thing worth buying is not the young supermarket Gouda but an aged farmhouse cheese, boerenkaas, sold in wedges off a wheel and offered for tasting as a matter of course.

Cheese deserves a moment. Gouda's recorded history arguably begins in 1184, making it one of the oldest cheeses still made; Edam has been produced since the fourteenth century. Both are named for towns that traded them rather than for a recipe, and the difference between a four-week and a two-year Gouda is the difference between two entirely different foods.

The cheese markets at Alkmaar and Gouda are staged demonstrations of a historical trade rather than working markets, which is worth knowing before travelling for one. They are good theatre; the actual cheese buying happens everywhere else.

Brown cafés -- bruine kroeg, dark wood, older than they look -- are the other institution, and the food is incidental to the point: a beer, bitterballen, and no hurry whatsoever.

The Netherlands is not a wine country, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice. What it has instead is jenever, the juniper spirit the English turned into gin, and a brewing tradition that is much older and more varied than the international lager brands suggest.

Jenever is the national spirit and is drunk differently from gin: served cold in a tulip-shaped glass filled to the brim, so the first movement is to bend to the glass rather than lift it. Jonge is lighter and more neutral; oude is maltier and closer to the original. Lucas Bols in Amsterdam and Nolet in Schiedam are, respectively, the oldest and third-oldest distilleries in the world.

A kopstootje -- literally a little head-butt -- is a jenever alongside a beer, and is the traditional order in a brown café.

Beer is where the range actually is. The large exporters are lagers, but Dutch brewing includes a strong Trappist and abbey tradition in the Catholic south, and a very active independent scene in the cities. Ordering the local rather than the familiar is nearly always the better call here.