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UK Wednesday 16, April 2014 30,31 1157 sq. cm ABC 292801 Daily page rate £10,472.00, scc rate £44.00 020 7005 2000
A Dutch dairy y tale Edam and Gouda might not be as celebrated as French or Swiss cheeses, but the Netherlands is catching up, says David Atkinson as he explores the nation’s offerings
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h i n k c h e e s e . Yo u probably think of artisan producers in France or the Alpine-pasture produce of Switzerland – but Holland? Yet Vermeer, a Gouda cheese produced by the company FrieslandCampina, took the top prize at the 2012 World Championship Cheese Contest in the US (although it was bumped off the top spot by a Swiss Emmental last month). So why don’t we make more of a fuss about it? “Sadly, much of our exported cheese is young and lacking in flavour,” says leading Dutch cheese maker Henri Willig, himself a former winner of the contest for his Polder Gold goats cheese. “Yet proper Dutch cheese has a unique flavour given the soil, the grass the Friesian cows feed on, and the milk they produce. It is creamy with a hint of sourness.” There are 150 cheesemakers along Holland’s burgeoning cheese trail, ranging from big companies such as Willig and Cono to small-scale artisan producers. Much like travelling the Route des Grandes Crus in French wine country, you can drop in and visit most cheese-producing farms.
Larger producers offer tours and gift shops for cheesy souvenirs. I’ve come to the rural heartland of North Holland, a region traditionally associated with dairy, sheep and flower farming, to follow the trail. During a self-drive weekend of bucolic villages, slow-paced life and a chance to consume my own body weight in cheese, I want to explore the rural traditions that are the cornerstone of cheese-making in Holland. Driving north from Amsterdam, the countryside opens up to reveal a steam-ironed landscape of grazing pasture, demarcated by dykes and polders, land beneath sea level pumped dry of water by windmills. Monks invented the pumping technique and farmers developed it for agriculture from the 16th century. Colourful village festivals, based around the agricultural calendar, developed soon after and, by the time Vermeer painted The Milkmaid in 1658, many towns across northern Holland had their very own cheese market. My first stop is the city of Edam itself, home to a historic cheese-
weighing hall. William of Orange first granted Edam the right to trade cheese in 1576 and the town still hosts a cheese market during the summer months, although these days it’s more about show than trade. Cheese shops around town stock examples of the three traditional Dutch varieties of cheese, namely Edam, Gouda and cumin-spiced Leiden. Local restaurants also support the cheesechomping mania (my dinner that night featured a Messenklever Edam and a Bergens Blonde, served with fig compote). The next day I head to Beemster, the oldest polder in northern Holland, dating from 1612. The reclaimed region, parcelled out in a rectangular grid and dotted with farms and merchants’ stately mansions, is now a World Heritage Site. The Farming Museum highlights the importance of traditional technology in man’s battle with the water to maintain the quality of the dairy-farming pasture, using dykes and windmills to control the water level. The Holy Grail for the cheese cognoscenti, however, remains the town of Alkmaar, where Waagplein,
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