Ah, where are the days when I started off rowing across the Thames to witness the sun rise above Port Meadow, spent my day drinking tea with milk in the lab and ended up having dinner and a pint at the Royal Oak? Right, those days are long gone. Yet now all this comes back to me whilst walking through The Hague’s brand new M&S. A true delight.
Like all nationalities, the Dutch have something with food. However, unlike quite a few other nationalities, for the Dutch ‘having something with food’ does not mean ‘having a sophisticated cuisine’. The Dutch approach to life – sober, functional, yet efficient – also holds for their eating habits. Though sliced bread is officially an American invention, the Dutch deserve a prize for so eagerly embracing this concept. Indeed, with their endless plain cheese or peanut butter sandwiches, the Dutch are often ridiculed as being prepared to eat anything. Having grown up in Belgium – the culinary buffer zone between France and The Netherlands – I definitely also sensed a gradient (a step function, actually) of culinary complexity when crossing the border.
From those new to The Netherlands, I have heard personal accounts of going through various stages of surprise, to astonishment, disbelief, disgust, rebellion, and finally to acceptance by sticking with home cooking. While home cooking might be a good alternative meaning for ‘going Dutch’, it is only then that people realize that the supermarkets do not offer what could be bought abroad.