10 september 2009 - For a good talk and an evening meal we shall pull up a chair every other week with a TU/e staff member or student. Recipes will be published on www.tuemeetingplace.nl, an initiative of TU/e Internationalization staff member Willem van Hoorn (53). What is his favorite dish, by the way?

Seated at the table are Willem, his daughter Anne (21, a social work student) and his wife Wilma Raaphorst (52, psychiatry nursing specialist). Later that evening Anne’s friend Ferdy van Mastricht (21, radio diagnostic lab assistant) joins us. While enjoying a delicious starter of shrimps and herring on rye bread in a sauce of crème fraîche (double cream) and white vermouth we discuss Dutch eating customs. “The Dutch actually talk about good food very little. They do mention cheap, healthy and good-quality food. Could that be a remnant of our Calvinistic past?”, Van Hoorn wonders. “Sometimes eating appears to be of minor importance in our culture. We even have lunch while working on the computer!”

“I can’t face the sight of bread anymore”. During the opening of the academic year it was mentioned, but Willem van Hoorn has heard it more often at TU/e over the past few years. “Whatever our merits may be, it is not ‘la cuisine’, in the eyes of international colleagues.” Nevertheless the Dutch cuisine has more to offer than just the ‘notorious croquet’. “I’m originally from Delft, near the coast. I grew up eating fresh fish. That’s why we’re having fish tonight.” Van Hoorn serves us a dish from Zeeland soil: baked eel on a bed of green, with fries, spinach and carrots.

Whilst the Netherlands may not have a genuine food culture, once you sit down at table with guests you are never without one prime Dutch ingredient: ‘gezelligheid’ (conviviality, companionableness). “Although we have a strongly task-oriented culture, we do find ‘gezelligheid’ very important.” A dessert of apple-raisin yoghurt and a sponge-finger concludes our dinner. And why not: a cup of coffee and tea with Dutch ‘stroopwafels’ (treacle waffles).

You can find the recipe on the forum of www.tuemeetingplace.nl.
Would you like us to sample your cooking skills? Send an e-mail to engcursor@tue.nl.