THIS week I will be travelling over to my homeland of Holland for the funeral of my uncle. Visiting my birthplace is a bittersweet experience.

The bitter is the huge industrialisation, huge like you just can’t imagine, of the Europoort corridor, which my hometown is a part of.

The sweet, apart from the indescribable pleasure of meeting once again with family, are the particular Dutch foods. Number one being the cheeses. Dutch cheeses are sold by maturity, so you can find a single variety as a young, classic sweet “rubbery” cheese, or a hugely matured version which is hard and dry and incredibly tasty. When my cousin came over last year he bought me four ages of two different cheeses, which was wonderful.

In reply, I have decided to take him a large piece of Jonathan Crump’s Double Gloucester. It is a wonderful cheese of complex flavours and, interestingly, completely different to the Dutch cheeses described. It is crumbly, delicate even, and really only half way between a soft and a hard cheese. At this week’s market Smart’s Traditional Gloucester cheeses will be in attendance with their single and double Gloucester cheeses, which have a character and texture of their own. We are fortunate to have 3 of only a handful of cheesemakers still making these cheeses with the milk of the old Glouceser cattle breed, with Godsell’s cheeses also producing their own single Gloucester. Each of these three have their own particular character, it’s fascinating!