Gebakken Goudse Kaas (Fried Gouda)

There is a moment, biting into a good piece of fried Gouda, when the crust gives way and the inside is simply gone — melted to a hot, salty thread that stretches from the plate to your chin. It is not elegant. It is one of the small, greedy joys of the Dutch cheese country, the sort of thing eaten standing up at a market stall or passed round a café table with the first cold beer of the evening.

Cheese as the whole point

The Netherlands built cities on cheese. The weigh-houses of Gouda, Alkmaar and Edam turned green polder grass into a currency that crossed oceans, and for centuries a Dutch larder without a wheel of it was a poor one. Frying was the thrifty cook's way with the odd ends and offcuts — coat them, crisp them, and a heel of ordinary cheese becomes something worth sitting down for. The dish belongs to the same nineteenth-century household economy that gave the country its borrel table of fried snacks.

The physics of the melt

Everything here turns on temperature. Cheese wants to melt at a lower heat than the crumb wants to brown, so the two are working against each other. The answer is a cold core and hot oil: chill the slabs until firm, wrap them in a double coat of egg and crumb, and drop them into oil hot enough to seize the crust in seconds. Done right, the shell is set and golden while the middle has only just begun to run.

Fried cheese is a race between the crust and the melt — win it, and the inside is molten silk in a shattering shell.

Serve it the honest way: a little mustard, or the Dutch fondness for sweet against salt, a spoon of redcurrant jelly on the side. Eat it the instant it is cool enough to hold, because fried cheese waits for no one.