I usually try to include a blog post on the cuisine of a country if I spend some time there. Sampling the local specialties is one of the highlights of traveling. I found that to be somewhat hard, though, for the Netherlands which is known more for certain high quality specialty products and treats than definable cuisine.

So when was the last time you ate at a Dutch restaurant in America? Pennsylvania Dutch doesn't count because those people are of Deutsch (German) ancestry and developed a somewhat unique cuisine in North America . Their ancestors are not from the Netherlands. Maybe you’ve seen a Dutch pancake house or two, but I can’t recall any restaurants advertising specifically Dutch food. And you know what? – There aren’t many in the Netherlands that advertise a seriously Dutch menu either.

So how can that be, that a country so advanced in visual arts and science and engineering, never developed too specific a cuisine? Germany and Belgium have similar climates and ingredients and are known for their unique cuisines. My Flemish Belgian mother would have said that it was Dutch people were too stingy to cook, that they’d rather just save their money that eat well, subsist on bread and cheese - (Flemish people nickname Dutch people Kaaskopen (Cheeseheads) – or make a soup with a meat-based stock rather than eat real meat. Maybe there is something to the notion of Calvinist frugality. If you draw a line across Europe between where the Reformation took hold and where it did not, the Catholic side of that line roughly corresponds to the parts of the continent known for great cuisine vs just "Meh!" food.

The one very Dutch meal I had was at a place called Café Rembrandt in Amsterdam next door to the painter’s old house. What I had was Mustard Soup, something I’ve never had before that’s supposed to be a very Dutch dish, and Stoemp, a mixture of mashed potato and spinach topped with a sausage and a big meatball . Hutsepot, a similar mixture of potatoes and mixed vegetables cooked to mushiness and topped with bacon was also on the menu. These were two things my Flemish mother would occasionally make as a kind of comfort food, but they were considered really basic unrefined peasant type dishes that would be cooked at home but not served in restaurants.

Of course, there’s plenty of good food in the Netherlands, but it’s the cuisines of other countries, European and world. The Dutch have particularly adopted the foods of their former colonies as a type of national cuisine the way the British have with Indian curry. The best known of these is Rijsttafel, an Indonesian style feast of numerous small dishes with many different ingredients and flavors served over rice. Well, they don’t actually do it that way in Indonesia where people would only make one or a few dishes for a meal, but it became a way of Dutch officials there to show off their wealth and influence by having all the dishes of Indonesian cuisine served as a banquet . I quite like it. Then there’s also Surinamese food, something I had never heard of before. From what I can tell, though, it’s essentially Indian food which was what was eaten by indentured laborers brought from India to work on Dutch plantations in Suriname.

So then that brings us to those well-known Dutch specialties, which break down into several categories – cheese, fish & seafood, fried things, sweets, and beer. The Dutch are especially known for their cheese, which they produce in mass quantities. This cheese, though, mostly consists of different versions of Edam and Gouda, aged to different extents and sometimes flavored with different herbs and spices. As best I can tell, there’s not quite the variety of cheeses as in France, Italy, and Spain.

The Netherlands is well known for fish and seafood and all of these are on display in markets or for sale in snack bars. Some are deep-fried fish fillets or pieces like Lekkerbek and Kibbeling, while other products like salmon, herring, mackerel, and paling (eel), are usually smoked and served on sandwiches (broodjes) . Herring is a particular favorite that is often eaten raw on sandwiches, somewhat of an acquired taste even for a sushi lover. Tiny little North Sea shrimp go for a premium on a per kilo basis relative to their larger Norwegian cousins, and The Netherlands is especially known for the quality of its mussels. It’s not that Dutch people cook them in more refined ways than Belgians or French people, but rather that those grown in the Netherlands are especially large, plump, and tasty. The pot of mussels I had in Scheveningen was the best and most meaty I can recall anywhere.

Almost everywhere in The Netherlands you’ll see people eating french fries (chips to my British friends) from paper cones with a big dollop of mayonnaise on top, a popular snack but one they attribute to the supposed Belgian origins of frites. The shops selling them usually display the Belgian flag rather than Dutch, just as pizza places show display the Italian red, white, and green tri-color. Something more Dutch is olliebolen, fluffy dough puffs fried in grease and powdered with sugar .

But the sweets don’t stop there. Big waffles maybe Belgian (sometimes called Luikse or Liege waffles), but wafer thin waffles with a layer of toffee caramel between them called stroopwafels are uniquely Dutch. Americans use the expression “As American as apple pie”, but apple pie is something also considered to be very Dutch. Pancakes and crepes are very much associated with the Netherlands, but the most traditional type I found on the markets were Poffertjes, tiny little bite-size griddle cakes usually 8 to 12 per serving and topped with butter and powdered sugar. And there’s no shortage of sweets available on the markets, everything from oatmeal cookies to coconut macaroon of all flavors, to tartlets and cakes. It will take you a while to sample all the new things you see on the market without needing to go to a specifically Dutch restaurant.

The Netherlands is well north of where wine grapes can be grown commercially so is solidly a beer company . I always think of Heineken, Amstel, and Grolsch when I think of Dutch beer, sort of like the cheeses, well-known well-regarded mass produced staples. There’s actually a much more varied tradition of beer-brewing in the Netherlands that resembles the better known Belgian beers. One of the eight famous Trappist monasteries that brews beer, Koningshoven, is in fact on the Dutch side of the national border. What I believe has happened recently, though, in the Netherlands is a vast proliferation of craft beer production from new microbreweries similar to what’s taken place in North America. I was amazed that I could go into cafes and pubs and have hundreds of beers available, some on tap but most in bottles. In many cases some of the offerings were the better known ones from south of the border (Belgium), but other places served only Dutch beers that were just as Belgian in style as anything I’ve ever had. And many advertise “American Style” beers too like Quadrupels and very bitter IPAs, styles that emerged in America with the growth of microbreweries.