Goudse en Leidse Kaasplank

A Dutch cheese board is not a board trying to impress you. It is a table deciding to stay open a little longer. In my grandmother's second notebook there was no recipe for kaasplank, cheese board, because who writes down how to cut cheese? She did write down who liked jonge kaas, young Gouda, who wanted the brokkelkaas that crumbles under the knife, and which uncle would steal every zilveruitje, little pickled onion, before the coffee arrived. This too is cookery. The family table keeps records in appetite.

But let me tell you a secret: Gouda is not really a cheese from Gouda in the narrow way people imagine. It is a market name, a trading name, the name of the town where the wheels were weighed, bargained over, and sent onward. Leidse kaas, Leiden cheese, tells a different story. It is leaner, drier, flecked with cumin, born from farms where the cream had already gone to butter and the remaining milk still had to earn its place at supper. Exuberant cookery in a frugal country, yes, even in a cube of cheese on a cocktail stick.

So the work here is restraint. Cut the young Gouda into clean cubes because it is soft and friendly. Break the aged Gouda into rough pieces because its crystals deserve edges, not obedience. Shave the Leidse thin with a kaasschaaf, cheese slicer, so the cumin opens on the tongue instead of arriving as a hard little sermon. Add mustard, rye bread, pickled onions, and a glass already poured. Hou het altijd simpel: the board is finished when people begin reaching across it.