To a degree it's like home, a wet green landscape ideal for growing grass and turning it into milk, but here it's flat, flat to the horizon of trees five miles away. The straight roads follow straight drainage canals for mile after mile.
We spent the last night of August in the carpark of a cheese and clog factory on the outskirts of Edam. That might not seem like a natural combination, but if you have a carpark big enough to host motorhomes and tourist coaches it makes perfect sense.
A very helpful woman showed us around their vast shop and talked us through the cheese making process. It seemed very similar to the cheese making process in other places; it's amazing how one can turn out creamy and crumbly and another one smooth, elastic and spicy. Subtle differences of timing, temperature and inoculant obviously make a huge difference.
We went away with a small Gouda cheese, which was remarkable for two reasons;
- It was made in Edam. Apparently as long as you follow the recipe you are free to make Gouda in Edam or Edam in Gouda. You can't imagine the French standing for that.
- It's a delicious 'Belegte' mature cheese, smooth and dense but as piquant as a mature cheddar. The Dutch cheeses you get in Britain always seem to be mild, bland and rubbery, but here they sell ones that have been matured for months or years. They even had goat's milk cheese and crumbly cheese which was harder and more pungent than an Italian grana. It seems they keep the most interesting stuff for themselves.
Before our night outside the cheese and clog factory we'd walked to the centre of Edam just in time to see the wooden stalls of the weekly cheese market being packed up and driven away. After we left Edam we parked and rode into Alkmaar only to find the cheese market was finished for the year. On our way north Richard was keen to call into Hoorn, because he knew he'd been there before and had liked it, even though he couldn't remember much of it. In the town centre we were surprised and delighted to see a sign advertising a cheese market at half past eight – the last one of the year!
We parked the van in Hoorn Marina, walked into town and settled ourselves at a table outside a pub on the market square. We were surrounded by magnificent buildings from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, leaning against one another like a crowd of drunken friends as their foundations settled in the marshy ground.
The chief cheese lady took pains to emphasise that Hoorn used to have the biggest cheese market in the region (maybe a dig at Alkmaar and Edam). It closed in 1949 as cheese production became concentrated in larger factories. It's a tradition they miss, so they re-enact the market twice every Thursday in the summer.
The show started (for those of us who'd arrived early) with a big yellow refrigerated wagon being towed into the square by a Jeep, and then crashing into the back of that very Jeep. An army of volunteers started unloading hundreds of big cheeses from the wagon and stacking them around the square.
When the re-enactment began in earnest, a bell was rung signalling the beginning of the market. Cheese experts took samples from the cheeses to assess their quality, then they were auctioned. Cheese carriers took eight cheeses at a time on a wooden platform suspended from straps from their shoulders, carried them across the square to be weighed, then across to horse drawn wagon to be taken to the warehouses (they were actually being returned to the yellow wagon with the dented bonnet). This was accompanied by women in traditional Dutch costume dancing in their clogs, people in mediaeval costume offering tastes of syrup waffles and selling small cheeses.
Since it was the last re-enactment of the year everyone was in high spirits. Beemster Cheeses had sponsored the whole event and provided what must have been thousands of pounds worth of cheese for the show, much of which was being dropped or slung surreptitiously into car boots around the square. It was a little poignant to see the square full of identical cheeses – Beemster being exactly the sort of big dairy that killed the old market and the variety that must have once existed, but it was great fun for participants as well as spectators.
On our way from the Netherlands to Denmark we stayed in Germany for two nights – taking advantage of their free overnight parking places for motorhomes. Some of these are in lovely spots, and very generous; the first one we stayed at had free electricity. We also stopped in Bremen, wanting to have a look at it without really knowing why.
We caught the train into Bremen Hauptbahnhof, and emerged from the station to a cityscape of rather stark post war buildings – a bit like Kingsway Swansea with a bigger budget. We were relived to find the old town square with its mediaeval cathedral, town hall and giant statue of Roland (the Christian hero from the Dark Ages who we keep running into on our travels). There was a lot of space around these monuments. It was pretty obvious that this was a town that had taken a pasting in the war and had to be rather selective about which buildings they tried to save.
One district, Schnoor, had survived relatively well. The warren of mediaeval streets is now full of tourist shops and restaurants. In its heyday it probably wasn't half so chic! It was interesting to see the Dutch style gables on the houses, carved panels above the doors and inscriptions in language that wasn't quite Dutch and wasn't quite Deutsch. When these homes were built, Bremen was an independent city state. The Netherlands was a patchwork of provinces, nominally ruled by distant emperors but in practice independent. The cultures were aligned quite differently to today. Friesland meant something long before Netherland or Deutschland had been invented.
After that we pushed east and north, past Hamburg and heading for Denmark. We noticed Germany is scattered with these road signs, anyone know what they mean?
This blog update is posted from Ribe, the oldest city in Denmark, celebrating the fact that we've managed to find a mobile phone shop and buy a Danish SIM card which gives us a week's access to the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment