Month: July 2016

Not far from where my dear old mother lives in the Netherlands is an area known as the Gelderse Vallei. A valley in the Netherlands is a rare thing, given that much of the country is as flat as a pancake – for there to be valleys you’d need mountains or at least hills, and those are few and far between in Holland. But here, between two glacial moraines left after the last ice age, it’s there: the Valley of Gelderland. The southern part of this area is known as het Binnenveld, an area with a diverse mix of farms. Many of the farmers here are trying new things (or go back to really old things for that matter) and their eagerness to experiment is supported by the proximity of Wageningen University & Research Centre, the 21^st-century guise of the venerable national agricultural university and the initiative Food Valley, a cooperation between 8 local communities that promotes knowledge and information about healthy food and sustainable agriculture. The latter claim sounds a bit pompous and vague but driving around the area it quickly becomes apparent what it means: small, crooked country roads provide access to beautiful farms where an agricultural cornucopia is being produced, from fruit juices to pork and from fresh advocaat (a drink made with eggs, sugar and brandy) to honey. A local bakery makes rusks out of locally grown Spelt while a bit further down the road a farm store sells eggs, advokaat, fruit juice, jams and a host of other things, all locally produced. And, of course, there’s cheese. I have posted something about Remeker already, but there are other farmers in the area that also produce cheeses from a particular breed of animal, usually valuing quality more than quantity, when it comes to the milk the cows give.

There is Michiel Cassuto and his Brandrood herd; the de Hooilanden Farm with its Blaarkop cows; Welgelegen, a farm with Montbéliard cows and the van Dijk family farm with 1,200 Saanen goats.  The latter three have their raw milk cheeses aged and marketed by the Meester-Affineurs (“master agers”), a company that takes its mission to produce a natural product very seriously. As an example, they have successfully fought off mandates to disinfect the boards on which the cheeses ripen. They did so with the assistance of a local company that did the tests to show the boards were fine without getting sprayed. Given that they work with raw milk cheese, they do have very strict hygiene rules: for example, in winter the tails and the udders of the cows need to remain cleanly shaven… close proximity to the other animals and the conditions inside a barn require more stringent rules, clearly. The Master Agers have a clean, crisp website, and they ship. So I was able to order a decent chunk of each of their three cheese and try them a week after my visit in the Food Valley.

I had visited the van Steenbergen farm, which has a delightful farm store that sells beautiful things from all over the region, along with their own eggs. They have chickens, cows and wallabies. Wallabies ?! “Yah, we had some leftover land and my husband had read an article about wallabies so we thought: why not?” the woman who runs the store said. Believe it or not, she said it with such conviction that it sounded like the absolute best thing to do. Wallabies in the Food Valley. Of course.

The Saanen is basically a Gouda cheese with a goat twist, or a chèvre with a Gouda twist – a semi-hard cheese with a pale ivory paste, very creamy, initially without an outspoken goatiness. Kind of sweet, delicious. You need to keep it in your mouth a while for the goat flavor to really unfold, but then it packs a nice punch. The Montbéliard has a lot of small holes in it – nutty, with a pleasant chewiness, a bit of barnyard and salty. The Blaarkop was similar, perhaps a little sharper than and not as creamy as the Montbéliard. The picture shows the trio the way the Dutch eat their cheese: in slices, on a rusk or a slice of bread.

 

Cheese: Hooilander Graskaas

Producer: De Hooilanden

Where: Bennekom, Gelderland, the Netherlands

Lodewijk and Fleur Pool are the farmers at the Hooilanden (the Hay Lands), a farm that sits at the end of a long, somewhat twisted country road in the Gelderse Vallei. I visited their farm, saw the cows and bought a piece of cheese, all the while not meeting anyone. There were signs that told me where to go and what to do, and that, the Pools must have decided, should suffice. I picked up a piece of Hooilander Graskaas. Grass-cheese is made using milk from cows who feed on fresh grass rather than hay, it is creamy and quite mild, and the piece I got was still quite young; it had not ripened more than 8 weeks. Often young cheeses (the Dutch tend to select their cheese, most of which is the same ‘Gouda-style’ kind of cheese, based on its age and use 5 or 6 age labels to differentiate) in the Netherlands do not have a lot of flavor yet, but this one does, surprisingly so. It is a creamy, flavor-packed delight, not too salty but not as bland as many young cheeses taste. It has a very clean finish, the flavors do not linger all that much: a perfect cheese to cut up in cubes and eat as a snack with a glass of cold beer.

An added bonus was certainly to meet the friendly cows that provide the milk and to have such a sense of place associated with what’s on the plate. In my next post, there is more about the area and about the other cheese Lodewijk and Fleur make: Blaarkop (“Blisterhead”), named after the cow breed they keep here. The blaarkop has been around in the Netherlands since the late Middle Ages and they are easily recognized by the oval colored spots (the blisters around their eyes. They have always been dual-purpose, and this is how it is at Hooilanden: you can buy cheese and steak here…

Cheese: Azeitão

Producer: Queijaria Artesanal Victor Fernandez

Where: Palmela, Portugal

At the Mercado da Ribeira, I found my cheeses at the Manteigaria Silva, where a very friendly Portuguese man took the time to carefully explain exactly what he was giving me. While I got four different pieces of cheese, my pick for the week was clearly the Azeitão.  This creamy sheep’s milk cheese comes from a town with the same name, less than 20 miles south of Lisbon. Some of the neighboring towns are also allowed to produce it (the cheese has a Denominação de Origem Protegida (DOP) designation, so there are rules); mine came from the creamery of Victor Fernandes, and the British Guild of Fine Food agrees with me that this is one fine cheese.

Just like the Spanish Torta del Casar, the way to eat this puppy is to slice off the top, take a spoon to it and go to town. Sure, you can take a piece of bread and slather the delicious goop all over it; add a sip of wine if you want. But if no one is looking, why bother? I ate mine straight up, and I must confess it did not take long. Yes, it is that good.

The official leader of the pack of Portuguese cheeses is the Serra da Estrela, named for the mountain range where the sheep live that provide the milk. There are two different breeds, the Bordaleira Serra da Estrela and Churra Mondequeira, both of which do well in the rather unfriendly climate with long harsh winters and hot summers. Old Lucius Columella, a roman expert on agriculture already wrote about these sheep and the cheese made with their milk. They packed me a chunk of Estrela Velho, ripened for 18 months. It’s no longer runny, of course, but semi-hard. To me, the mix of tang, sweetness and saltiness was not that different from the Azeitão, even if the Estrela was sharper and obviously has a completely different texture: both are wonderfully complex (but not complicated) cheeses, they somehow seem a bit related.

A third cheese I tried that was interesting was also from the Estrela Mountains: Queijo da Cabra da Serra da Estrela – a goat cheese with a straw-colored rind and a semi-soft pale white paste. If found that the eating the rind made this cheese a bit too salty, but cut it away and you’re left with a nice, robust goat cheese that packs a bit of a punch. Quite a nice cheese, but not really a match for the other two.

 

“No”, said the people that were kind enough to make reservations for me at the end of my week traveling in the Douro area. “You need to change your schedule and not go back to Porto until Monday. On Sunday, we celebrate the feast of St. Anthony in Lisbon, and you don’t want to miss that.” So I did as I was told and ended up in Lisbon, more than thirty years after my first visit, on the day the Lisboetas celebrate their saint. You see, St. Anthony of Padua, as it turns out, wasn’t from Padua at all: he started his life in Lisbon as Fernando Martins de Bulhões, and after a stint as an Augustinian, he became a Franciscan when he heard about the martyrdom of five Franciscans in Morocco, an event depicted in all its gruesome detail in the church of St. Francis in Porto. He did eventually make his way to Italy and he did die in the city he has become associated with.

Saint Anthony is a big deal in Lisbon. The saint of lost articles is believed to help Portuguese men and women find their mate, and Sílvia Monteiro, the woman who took me around pointed to a motorcade of oldtimers, each with a bride in them, on the way to the church of St. Anthony. That’s where the couples get a blessing, before they walk to the cathedral of Lisbon, right next door, to get hitched. Apparently, the city pays for the dresses of the stars of this parade – they tend to be picked based on their wealth, or rather lack thereof.

 

In the narthex of the Church of Santo Antônio, people were selling bread. You are to take a piece of bread, wrap a little note with a prayer with it and stick it in the frame of a picture of the saint. It goes back to the legend of a woman whose son was brought back from the dead by our intrepid saint: in gratitude, she donated her son’s weight in wheat to feed the poor.

If you do not yet have a girl to take to the altar, help can be had by buying a terra cotta pot with a green globe of basil (manjerico), often with a (paper) carnation pinned to it: add a little poem for your loved one and hand it to her with a flourish: guaranteed to work (I think).

Of course the best of all the Saint Anthony stories is where he’s walking along the beach in Rimini, thoroughly disgusted with his inability to reach people. As he is muttering to himself the fishes from the sea begin listening to him, lining up to hear him preach: success! And that’s all you need, in Lisbon, to start grilling sardines on pretty much every street corner of Alfama, the old quarter under the cathedral, on the Feast of St. Anthony. Sardines, Sangria, a salad with grilled green peppers: eat it and you will feel that melancholy in your soul that says: if only for a little while, I am now Portuguese.

But wait, there is more in the way of food and religion here: there are the Pastéis de Bélem, the small egg-yolk custard pastries originally created by the monks of the  Jerónimos Monastery in Bélem, a suburb of Lisbon and today sold all over the country. The egg whites were used to starch the monks habits, hence the yolk surplus. There is the venerable institution of the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém, not far from the actual monastery itself, which is a stunning example of the typical Portuguese version of Gothic architecture, the Manueline style. They serve them warm there, and they are spectacular, even if the size of the place and the number of patrons inside do give you the sense of being in a fábrica, a factory. Sure, these things probably make your cholesterol go through the roof, but honestly, they are worth taking a few months off your life.

And finally, a food with a dark religious side: in 1497, King Manuel I of Portugal, the same ruler after whom the architectural style was named, followed his neighbors, Spanish King and Queen Ferdinand and Isabella, as he expelled all Jews from the country. Those remaining had to convert and give up their sinful ways, and one way to demonstrate that they were now part of the team was by eating sausage – pork, that is. So along came the Alheira, a sausage made with a lot of garlic, chicken or game, and bread – a pork-imposter as it were. (Paella, laced with shellfish and sausage, is said to have the same mean-spirited roots.)

With Sílvia, I walked the streets, sipped coffee at Café A Brasileira, bought a drawing showing famous Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa on a donkey at the Livraria Sá da Costa Editora, and a felt St. Anthony from a friendly lady who had set up under a leafy tree on the edge of Alfama. She dropped me after several educational and entertaining hours at the Mercado da Ribeira, a hip, modern market with a plethora of eateries, a cheese and meats shop where I got my Portuguese cheese and giant screens to follow the European Championship soccer games. I enjoyed some delicious cod (I believe it is actually illegal to spend more than 3 days in Portugal without eating the national fish) and a glass of wine before I walked on, in the relentless heat, and made my way to Alfama where, as the afternoon slid into the early evening, I used a few Spanish words, my hands and some creative facial expressions to order my sardines. As the square where I sat, sharing a table with a friendly Portuguese woman and her mom (“your Portuguese is very good – not really”) was getting increasingly crowded, my soul began to feel heavy with each bite of a sardine. The vague sadness that stems from the loss of empire, the notion that centuries past may have been the best of times and the certainty that even with Cristiano Ronaldo on the team, the European Championship was a very, very long shot. For a fleeting moment, on the Calçadinha de São Miguel, I too, was Portuguese.

As I strolled back to my hotel in the early evening, with shadows lengthening but the sun still sizzling, Fado music from speakers tumbling out of sidewalk cafes, I realized it had all been a dream. I was not Portuguese at all, I had to pack for a long drive to Porto the next morning, and the saint of lost articles was a fraud: somewhere in the city of St. Anthony, I had not found, but lost my sunglasses. Maldição! As if I needed a reason to return to Lisbon.