From kitsch to cookies, Holland American Market brings the Netherlands to Bellflower
By Dave Wielenga

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Maybe I ought to feel more at home in the Holland American Market, having grown up just around the corner, but it’s not all my fault that I don’t. The place has changed since the 1960s, when my mom would dispatch me for Birds Eye frozen fish sticks and Kraft macaroni-and-cheese for our no-meat-on Fridays, and I was would run over to spend my Saturday allowance on Popsicles, SweeTarts, Sugar Babies and Wampum corn chips. But the Holland American Market doesn’t sell that stuff, anymore.

Actually, it’s been nearly 40 years—about the time the dairies cleared out and the supermarkets started moving in—since the Holland American Market went back to its niche, its heritage, which is the local Dutch, Frisian and Indonesian enclaves it has been serving since 1943.

That’s my heritage, too. Just about everybody in my Bellflower neighborhood had roots in The Netherlands. But I wasn’t much into being Dutch—or, more accurately, Frisian; as my neighbors never tired of telling me, my last name derives from the northern province of Friesland, which has its own language, culture and flag. Whatever. Descending from a line of windmilling, wooden shoed, canal-skating, cutesy-curtained, tea-sipping, sweet-cake-nibbling, finger-in-the-dykers with accents that sounded like sore throats . . . was uncool. I ignored it all, including the Holland-American Market.

There were occasional exceptions. In college, I once bought some mettwurst—the richly-flavored minced-pork sausage that’s always sold with the ends of the tube tied together—for an ethnic-foods potluck. Occasionally, I’ve stopped in for a jar of pickled herring and a cellophane bag of extra-strong peppermints; it’s really a crime against humanity to buy the fish without the candy. Last Christmas I shopped for gifts—Delft-blue ceramic ornaments, a pair of kitschy wooden-shoe-shaped slippers, a few boxes of butter-and-cinnamon Speculaas cookies.

Still, I feel kind of funny in the place—and even funnier about feeling funny in a place that was so crucial to my childhood, and is filled with things that really ought to be familiar to me now. Over at the gift counter, a seven-year-old girl is happily trying on a Dutch milk-maid’s hat with her mother. Meanwhile, my heritage—its staples and its sweets, its traditions and its kitsch—seems almost foreign to me.

“You’re not that unusual,” saleswoman Cathy Croswhite says reassuringly. “Our clientele definitely skews toward the older folks. Many have been coming here all their lives. Some still come back after they’ve moved away, such as retirees from Las Vegas and San Diego who are looking for foods they can’t get there. We even get a few old farmers from Visalia, who still prefer to work in wooden shoes.”

There are rows of wooden shoes in the back of the store, some plain and others painted for display, that range from about $25 to $50. Amazing anyone would still wear something so primitive.

“They’re so easy!” explains Croswhite. “You put on a couple pair of thick socks and slide your feet in. You don’t have to bother with lacing boots.”

Most of the Holland American Market’s inventory is food—the fish, pickled vegetables, dairy products and chocolates of chilly Holland, and the spicy fare from its long-ago sub-equatorial colony of Indonesia, along with a few select products from Belgium, France and Germany.

Shoppers are greeted by big bright wheels of Gouda and Leiden cheeses—aged, smoked, spiced—and strangely compatible tastebud bedfellows like pickled herring and mussels, smoked mackerel, as well as the particularly powerful rollmops (herring slices wrapped around pickled cucumbers).

Another aisle features jar after jar of pickled-and-spiced everything (cabbage, sauerkraut, beets, carrots, spinach, beans, peas)on one side, and chocolate-covered everything (gingerbread, yogurt, cranberries and other chocolates) on the other. How much do the Dutch dig chocolate? They buy it in sprinkles (called chocoladehagel, which only sounds like choco-holic) to put on their bread for breakfast.

They like peppermints and licorice almost as much, and at fierce strengths and in mouth-puckering combinations—like the eye-watering white mints used to stay awake during the notoriously long sermons of Dutch Sunday services or the fish-shaped, salted black licorice that was a traditional favorite of fishermen.

But there is comfort, too, in the endless assortment of unabashedly sentimental cakes and cookies in all kinds of traditional shapes, along with teas and coffees to wash them down, of course in delicate cups and saucers. My grandma used to pour the tea from the cup into the saucer to let it cool, and let me drink it from there. After each sip, we’d smile and let out a long, satisfied aaahhhh. I haven’t thought about that in years.

HOLLAND AMERICAN MARKET 10342 E ARTESIA BLVD | BELLFLOWER 90706 | 562.925.6914 | 1DUTCHMALL.COM