Vanillevla (Dutch Custard Vla)

Open any Dutch refrigerator and you will find a litre carton of vla, usually half gone, tipped straight into bowls after dinner without ceremony. It is the national everyday dessert — not cake, not ice cream, but a cool vanilla custard thin enough to pour and eat in the same breath. Children drink the last of it from the carton; adults pretend they don't.

A dessert built by the dairy

Vla in its modern, pourable form is a product of the post-war dairy cooperatives, when reconstruction-era Holland turned its huge milk surplus into cheap, wholesome puddings sold in cartons at every corner shop. The word is old — it once meant a flat cake or a filling — but the smooth vanilla custard that Dutch people now mean by vla belongs to the age of the refrigerator and the supermarket. Homemade, it is simply the honest version of that carton: milk, eggs, vanilla, and just enough starch to hold it.

Pourable, not set

The whole character of vla lives in its texture, and that texture is a judgement call made in the last minute at the stove. Cornflour and egg yolk together will set milk into a firm custard if you let them; the trick is to stop short. Cook it only until it coats the spoon and just bubbles, then pull it off — it will thicken again as it chills, and a vla that looked perfect in the hot pan will turn to paste in the fridge.

Vla should fall from the spoon in a smooth ribbon — pudding you can pour, custard you can drink.

Eat it plain and cold, or do as Dutch households do and build a vlaflip: a layer of vanilla, a layer of red fruit vla, a swirl of yoghurt, spooned down through all three at once.