I recently visited a friend in the Netherlands, who enquired whether I needed anything from the supermarket. Milk, for instance? Something for lunch? or...
"Do you need any peanut butter?"
Now the concept of *needing* peanut butter was a new one to me, but I thought that could be quite agreeable.
To my surprise, the supermarket - and this was just a little neighbourhood shop, not a big store - had a whole shelf devoted, from top to bottom, to peanut butter. Different brands of peanut butter. Peanut butter with caramel. Peanut butter with chocolate. Peanut butter with chili.
"Well," said I, "This is splendid. We don't get this kind of thing in France."
"Oh, this is nothing. You should go to the Peanut Butter Shop."
Wait! There's an entire shop devoted to peanut butter?
Indeed there is. He wrote its address down on a piece of paper so that I'd be able to find it. Pindakaaswinkel, 102A Grote Houtstrat.
(Now that's intriguing. For the Dutch, peanut butter is peanut cheese. It's butter to anglophones, the French, and the Germans, Italians, Spanish and even Czechs and Ukrainians. But for the Dutch, it's cheese.)
An airy shop; a clean, white, well lit space with shelves full of jars of peanut butter. I tasted different varieties. Chili and lemongrass was a hit; onion and garlic was a miss. Sea salt caramel? Definitely a hit. Coconut, unexpectedly, not as good as I thought it should be, but Mokka probably the best of all.
So why did the Dutch become obsessed by peanut butter? One explanation I heard was that they acquired the taste from Indonesian satay dishes, made with peanuts. (The Pindakaas staff suggested I could use the lemongrass and chili version as a satay sauce by just mixing it with my stir fry.) Someone else said they picked it up from WWII GIs - and it is true big brand Calvé didn't start producing peanut butter till 1948.
They even sell peanut butter at the open air museum of Zaanse Schans, where the spice grinding windmill produces spice and herbal blends.
Other Dutch food obsessions include buttermilk, hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles for putting on buttered bread), and The Asparagus Season (the reason I was in the Netherlands in the first place). But peanut butter is definitely the oddest.
