Kaasstengels (Cheese Straws)

Every Dutch borrel — that unhurried hour of drinks before dinner — needs something to keep hands and mouths busy between sips, and few things do it more elegantly than kaasstengels. These slim cheese straws are the well-mannered counterpoint to the fried canon: no oil, no dipping sauce, just short, buttery pastry shot through with aged Gouda, baked until it snaps. They arrive in a bowl on the table and vanish, two at a time, without anyone quite noticing.

The refined side of the borrel

Where bitterballen and frikandel came from the twentieth-century snackbar, the cheese straw belongs to an older, more genteel tradition — the nineteenth-century burgher household, where the printed cookbook and the tea-table taught a taste for savoury baking. Cheese biscuits and straws appear in the domestic manuals of that era as a mark of a well-run kitchen, the kind of small, made-to-order luxury a merchant's wife could set before guests. A dairy nation with cellars of ripening Gouda had the essential ingredient close to hand.

Cold hands, sharp cheese

Good kaasstengels rest on two decisions. First, keep everything cold: butter left in visible flecks steams in the oven and shatters the pastry into flakes, while warm, overworked dough bakes to leather. Second, use cheese with real age. A mild young Gouda disappears; a properly matured one — dry, crystalline, sharp — perfumes the whole straw and browns to something almost nutty.

The cheese straw is the borrel's quiet aristocrat: no sauce, no ceremony, just butter and old Gouda snapping between the fingers.

Serve them barely warm, when the cheese aroma is at its fullest, alongside a cold beer, a jenever, or a glass of dry white. They are the easiest thing here to make and, kept in a tin, the most convenient to have waiting.