When An Orange Cheese in France Turned Out to Be Dutch
Overwhelming. The selection of cheeses is exactly that: overwhelming. Cow or goat, hard or soft. French or foreign. And on top all the cheese-like products such as those little disks in red wax. I have thoroughly enjoyed this enormous palet to choose from over the first few weeks of living in France. But now I want something that resembles good Dutch cheese. Not the prepackaged slices of Gouda, because they are likely to be anything but that what we in The Netherlands know as Goudse Kaas. Or Gouda cheese for the non-Dutch speaking amongst you. Then my eye falls on an orange one. Mimolette. I take it for our evening meal of baguette and cheese. Its orange goes well with my Dutch mood and I have never before noticed it. Time to try something new.
Growing up in The Netherlands, I’ve been raised on cheese. We love it. We even refer to people typical of our nation as Kaaskoppen. Cheese heads. Our cheese is mainly yellow and we produce a lot of it. Much for export, but a big slice stays within our national borders to be eaten. On bread or “uit het vuistje”, out of hand as a snack. National production in 2018 was about 879 million kilogrammes of cheese. Where I live now, we are surrounded by dairy farms, so I can see the cows chomping on fresh grass in the fields. The milk they produce is for a large part turned into cheese. About 55 % last year, according to the Duth Dairy Association.
So, as a cheese head, I feel good in France, which is maybe even better known for its cheeses. But that day, after a few weeks of living in Paris, I wanted something else. That’s why I picked that Mimolette. A nice combination of the cheese type I was used to and a French product. Quite fitting for a cheese head living in Paris.
The Mimolette was not the best cheese I have ever eaten. It had the consistency and taste that can be expected from a mass-market cheese. It was bland. But, it was nice enough to get occassionally. At one point, almost out of boredom, I studied tha packaging more closely. To my big surprise, somewhere it said in printed letters, that this Mimolette, the Mimolette I had never heard of before coming to France, and I had tried many cheeses in the more than 3 decades before moving to Paris, this Mimolette was in fact a Dutch cheese.
Whaaaat???
We’re now a few years on. and I’m living in The Netherlands again. As said before, surrounded by dairy farms. Some of which make cheese on the premises. Great cheeses. Artisanal cheeses. Dutch cheeses. None of them make Mimolette. In fact, I have never seen it in the supermarkets here either. The closes we can come to it, is a cheese of a similar colour. An English one. Cheddar. For a cheese supposedly from The Netherlands, the Mimolette (which even sounds French) is notably absent from daily life in this country.
