Fish-shaped jelly pudding

Raised in Brabant, with a mother who subscribed to the traditional meat-and-three-veg style of cooking, Schols used to see food as primarily functional. Meals were eaten as a family around the table, a tradition she and her husband have continued with their own two daughters. “My mother often made chicken curry with green beans and boiled potatoes. I still recall the first time I had spaghetti, and when the Chinese restaurant opened up in town. And later my mother-in-law’s jelly dessert, shaped like a fish. I couldn’t stomach it; as a child I’d had a mildly traumatic experience.” At a buffet, carrying a tray with a little jelly pudding on it, she accidentally tripped. “I can still see it rolling ahead of me.”

Pure flavours from Japan

These days, the entire family has a soft spot for Japan and Japanese cuisine. It started in the days when sushi restaurants were still rare in the Netherlands. “There was a restaurant in Maastricht that served Japanese dishes in the style of French cuisine. In Japan you normally get all courses on the table at the same time, but they’d first serve a Japanese soup, then hors d’oeuvres and so on.” They got hooked on the flavours, and began bringing home piles of cookbooks. “Japanese cuisine is so much more than sushi and sashimi. It’s about pure flavours, the combination of sweet and salty, small servings of pickled vegetables … Once we even made a Japanese Christmas dinner for the family.”

Fresh, pure and characteristic

And then she went to Japan, and discovered that everything tasted different there. She recalls visiting the fish market in central Tokyo with her two daughters. “Sashimi with freshly cut raw tuna”—she mimes swallowing appreciatively—“you can’t taste that anywhere else. So fresh, so characteristic.” It may well top her list of the most delicious things she has ever tasted.

That said, the leeks from her own garden are not to be sneezed at. “They’re just as fresh; you pull it straight from the soil and prepare it immediately. Leek that you’ve bought from a shop doesn’t taste like that.” After their boxwood hedges succumbed to a moth infestation and had to be removed, they began planting all sorts of vegetables, from leeks to beets and herbs: “Anything that wants to grow here.” The challenge is to make a ‘salad stack’ from whatever is on hand in the garden and in the fridge. “Looks good, tastes good.”