I ate so
much herring in Amsterdam that I won’t be able to approach small fish for some
time.
Herring is everywhere, and my preferred style was to have the bony little guys tucked into soft white
bread, sprinkled with chopped onions and pickles (you can get it without the
bread, stuffed with onions and pickles, lowered into the mouth from
overhead--but that was a little more Dutch than I could handle).
Netherlanders also have a way with baked goods; the breakfast pastries were uniformly great,
and there’s a “sausage roll” I became addicted to (when I got back from Italy, it was the first thing I went for): it’s either a round sausage
or sausage meat inside a wrapping of flaky puff pastry. It makes Philadelphia’s
cheesesteak look positively healthy, and leaves your hands and face glowing
with spicy grease.
A great cup
of coffee is everywhere in the Netherlands; Dutch sea trade in the 17th century imported and popularized the drink, and one of the first customers was Lloyds
of London when it was a cafe, before Lloyds got into the much more lucrative
insurance business.
Asian food
here refers to Indonesian or Thai—I found myself longing for good old-fashioned
Chinese. I wasn’t able to find a single Chinese restaurant until my last day in
the university town of Leiden (and it was excellent).
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