Recipes from the Netherlands

The great fishing ports of the Netherlands are IJmuiden and Scheveningen. We knew Scheveningen well when we lived in The Hague in the 1950s and would enjoy eating simple fish meals in a restaurant on the fishing quay, with glimpses through the window of Scheveningen women going by in their traditional costume. The Dutch capacity for combining progress in technology with a pleasing conservatism was brought home to me on a recent visit to the same restaurant (Restaurant J. van der Toorn), when as I ate my fried sea-wolf I saw the same sight, but this time against the background of the splendid new fish market, where there is a kind of amphitheatre with a huge revolving price clock and the merchants sit at desks and press buttons as the ‘Dutch auction’ proceeds. Dutch fishermen, by the way, take 80 per cent of the soles caught in the North Sea and the price of these had already soared off the top of the clock by 1976.