Nagelkaas

Eastside Road, June 15, 2010—

I MUST HAVE WRITTEN before about nagelkaas. (Googles it; gets distracted; looks up in earlier posts:) Nope. I've mentioned it three times, but never really written about it.

Our love affair with Netherlands goes back to 1973, when I first visited Amsterdam; 1974, when I returned with Lindsey and we lived a week or two in The Hague; 1976, when we met our dear friends Hans and Anneke. We've visited frequently since, and walked the length and breadth of the country. In the last thirty-five years we've watched the country's cuisine move from dour and doughty to state-of-the-art: two of our favorite restaurants in the world are in Amsterdam.

And, of course, there's nagelkaas. The Dutch word for "clove", the spice, is nagel, "nail", pronounced with a voiced fricative on the "g" for which I can't think of an English equivalent. Nor can I think of one for the cheese itself, which is simply unique and perfect. There are plenty of flavored cheeses, of course; I suspect it began as a way of improving otherwise bland cheese. We like Dutch cheese flavored with mustard seeds, and cumin seeds, and caraway seeds; but particularly the Frisian nagelkaas. We've found inferior cheeses flavored with cumin and caraway, but never with cloves. Perhaps the idea of eating cloves simply doesn't have sufficient appeal to justify extending it to bland cheese; perhaps the clove flavor simply needs the competition of a really good cheese to offset it.

In any case we always buy a good-sized hunk of nagelkaas when we're about to leave Netherlands; vacuum-wrapped, the otherwise fierce American customs regulations relent and allow it in. (As they did a good hunk of Beaufort last week.) And we've finally found it more or less locally, at Dutch American Market and Import up in Beaverton, Oregon: we get to Portland even more often than we do to Netherlands.

So tonight, too rushed again for a proper dinner, we made do with slices of nagelkaas on toast, and a green salad, and were content, even with only…

…cool clear water