A true hate it or love it dish, nieuwe haring is not for everyone. This Dutch sashimi is a staple of our diet, and has been for many centuries. Nieuwe haring, also called maatjesharing and Hollandse Nieuwe, is herring from the Skagerrak (or thereabouts), conserved with salt and eaten with pickles.

That description alone can be quite enough for some viewers. Yep, raw fish indeed although the nastiest bits are removed on the fishing boat. Hollandse Nieuwe is then stored in small containers (vaatjes) and brought to shore. The first vaatje to land, some time in July, is traditionally auctioned off somewhere and it makes headline news.

Hollandse Nieuwe (herring) with pickles

The concoction has quite an -eh, shall I say intriguing, yes intriguing- aroma. Some folk like to top it off with raw onion, as if the scent isn’t overwhelming enough. Truth be told, haring tastes excellent, especially when enjoyed fresh from a stall (viskraam). It’s chock full of healthy omegas, too. Most often you would purchase them from the stall and eat the herring on the spot. You can either grab that sucker by the tail and lower it into your throat. Don’t worry, the head is chopped off. Usually though the vendor will dice the herring and give you a prikker (fork) to consume it.

Netherlands is called that way for a reason. The country is very, very, very flat (i.e.; nether). In fact, about half of it is below sea level. And big parts of it used to be sea, but we drained the sea out. What you’re left with is polders. We would like to think of them as a typically .nl invention.

A polder is a Dutch piece of land that used to be sea. There is really no translation for it; a polder is a Dutch invention and very few other countries have a use for polders. A polder is surrounded by dijken and the soil is clay. As always, Wikipedia has an complete description about this phenomenon.

Polder south of Wilnis

In the olden days, we used windmills to drain the sea out of the polder. These are the iconic devices all tourist love. They are so typically Dutch I can feel a new blog post coming up even. In the mean time, if you are visiting Netherlands and would like to see some bona fide windmills, go to Kinderdijk. This is a tiny village in Noord Holland (one of our provinces) and it has the most photogenic windmills on the planet. But really, windmills are everywhere in our country.

Another polder, this one on the island of Terschelling

Back to polders. Well there really isn’t much to say about them. It’s just a flat piece of land almost always used to grow grain or potatoes. There is one notable exception. The polder called Haarlemmermeer (yes, Harlem Lake) was drained of sea to eventually fill up with airplanes. This polder is now home to our national airport Schiphol.

Ice skating is one of the great national sports in .nl, but only when it freezes. You see, all the water we have then turns to ice. And when all around you are great frozen lakes, beckoning for you to conquer them on ice skates, when the roads turn to a grey slosh, the call is irresistible. So when it freezes, seriously freezes, we ice skate. And we do it properly.

Ice skaters plus windmill

Ice craze

During those freezing times – last seen in January 2009 – a strange virus takes hold of .nl folk. It seems everyone has a pair of ice skates laying around, and time to go out and get on the ice. There are a few distinct classes of ice skaters. Everyday folk with everyday skates. Kids with hockey skates. And older people with long-distance skates (noren). All go outside at the crack of dawn and stumble across the frozen tundra.

The ‘official’ depth of the ice is 10 centimeters, at which point it is considered thick enough to hold the onslaught of Dutchies and assorted parafernalia such as chairs and food stands. But the official depth is pretty hard to reach: it has to freeze for over a week for the ice to grow that thick. So invariably after just a few days the first dare-devils will go out on the ice. Strangely enough, the older someone is, the more likely he/she will take the risk of early ice-capade. Presumably this is because older people long for the olden days when every winter used to be icy from November till March. So invariably the first accounts of natuurijs (natual ice) are accompanied with reports of people slipping into a hole in the ice (a wak) and the freezing of assorted body parts.

Serious sport

Then after a few days, when the freezing continues and the country is covered in a white blanket, the first cries for an “Elfstedentocht” are voiced. This long-distance ice skating marathon runs over eleven Frisian villages, hence its name, Eleven cities trip. Or quest rather, because it is a very strenuous and difficult trip. It requires very low temperatures for two weeks for all the ice surrounding these eleven cities to grow thick enough to support the contestants. But when it happens, oh boy the country is filled with joy. For a brief period, all is good, Netherlands is Nederland again, ice skate sales go through the roof and we all sit behind the tube, since the trip is broadcast verbatim across the country. Sadly, the last edition was in 1997. Thank you global warming.

Common scene across entire .nl in Winter

Of course, there are other sporting events besides the mother of all trips. The Dutch Championships run every year, since we have a plethora of indoor skating rings all over the country. But fairly soon after the first natural frost, the first outdoor national championships are held in shallow waters. We had the last one in January 2009. The best contestants of the national championships compete in Europe, and people from this pool compete in the Olympics as well. Tiny as .nl is, we have a fair number of world-class athletes who have won some serious medals. Innovations such as the klapschaats (clapping skate) are Dutch, too.

Food and beverages

Where there’s hoards of people, there’s others catering food and beverages. Outdoors ice skating is no exception and it will not be long before you see your first koek en zopie. Koek means cake or cookies and zopie means beverage, usually alcoholic. The term koek en zopie applies to every catering outfit on the ice and it is one of those strange Dutch words that every native seems to  understand without ever being explained. 

Hot chocolate is a favorite on the ice, with added rhum optional. All kinds of cookies and granola bars can be had as well, plus chocolate bars such as Mars and Snickers (insert local brand name chocolate bar here). On the hearty side, snert (thick pea soup) is abundant, as is the rookworst (smoked sausage), with a thick slice of bacon optional. As you’d have guessed, winter in .nl means serious calorie intake and huge amounts of animal fat. Just go along and worry about your diet when the temperature rises again.

This subject leads itself to so many puns it is funnier for me to stick to the facts and let y’all laugh amongst yourselves. The subject is dikes (dijken), sans any fingers in holes (grr! couldn’t resist) but with a couple of facts about these water stopping devices.

As the eskimos (alledgedly) have hundreds of words for snow, Nederlanders have literally tens of words for dijken: rivierdijk, zeedijk, ringdijk, binnenwaterdijk, buitenwaterdijk… you get the idea. But what, in actual fact, is a dijk?

Ringvaartdijk, Amsterdam Oost

It is a big heap of dirt that keeps water away.

You’d feel cheated out of your hard-earned money if I left it at that, so allow me to ramble on about these quintessential Nederlandse things. Today’s post is about the ringvaartdijk (pictured above) i.e. circular water dike. This type of dike has been instrumental in creating the Nederlandse landscape. They work as such: imagine a lake you would like to build houses/grow grass/produce cheese on. You divide this lake into manageable chunks by building dams in it.

Once you have your basic chunk you can start milling the water out of it. You do this by pumping it up and throwing it across (or under, as it happens) the dams. The water level drops and soon enough it’s land ahoy. But what to do with all the water that is now outside your patch of new earth? Simple. You pump this out some more until you’ve reached sea. Ringvaarten are the key step. They surround the (soon former) lake and are generally situated above sea level. Once the excess water is in the ringvaart, it can flow out into sea.

Ringvaartdijk, Amsterdam Oost, from the bottom of the former lake

As you can see, the difference in height is quite noticeable. The photo above was taken from the bottom of the former lake Watergraafsmeer, now a residential district of Amsterdam.

Typically, every dijk had a molen (windmill) for the pumping action but these days the water is pumped out with electric pumps, nicely tucked away in nondescript buildings. And yes, every day, every year, water is in fact pumped out of the former lakes. If this doesn’t happen, they fill back up again eventually. There’s no fighting nature even in Nederland.

Since Dijk is so instrumental to .nl, we have a rock group named so, many expressions and there’s even a website by American photographer Rachel James named aan de dijk.

I will cover other forms of dikes in coming posts.