Dutch cheese

Gerda van Dorp, a Dutch cheese farmer in the town of Fijnaart, in the south of the country, woke up on March 29 to a mostly empty cheese storage room.

In June, he invited her over for dinner “to give her a taste of what we usually eat in the Netherlands,” he said, and with his maternal grandmother’s recipes made Indonesian spice meatballs, mashed potatoes with Dutch cheese sauce, a cucumber salad and ready-made stroopwafel for dessert.

They arrived with rosé frosted Pepernoten cookies, and lots of Dutch cheese, but after the pandemic forced them to call off that ceremony and then another one in Amsterdam in July, the couple stayed on in Pensacola, and are still there.

But somebody complained about always having the same thing every day so when I went downstairs for breakfast, there were these dismal-looking Danish pastries, some rubbish-looking Dutch cheese and some salami.

The US trade representative’s office released a list of 89 additional items – including olives, Italian and Dutch cheese, Scotch whisky, Irish whiskey, pasta, coffee and ham – that could face tariffs.