Friday is cheese day in Alkmaar, and by daylight gaily painted farm wagons are disgorging their loads of golden cheeses on the pavement in front of the Town Weigh-house
These weighmen constitute a distinct feature of every cheese market in Holland. Their dress may seem ludicrous and their duties a bit undignified, but they go about their calling with all the seriousness of statesmen. Until recently they were divided, one might say, into four colors: red, blue, green, and yellow, as distinguished by their hat bands. Latterly, a fifth color, orange, has been added. In the weigh-house there are five pairs of scales, each pair painted a different color corresponding to the colors of the weighmen. The “red” weighmen must weigh their barrowfuls of cheeses upon the “red” scales; the “blue” weighmen, upon the “blue” scales, and so on. An Alkmaar cheese weighman holds a life position, is elected by the community, and receives in commissions a certain percentage, determined by the value of the cheeses, of each hundred kilos weighed, or fraction thereof.
At ten o’clock promptly the heavy sheets of canvas are dragged from the piles. The market is thus officially opened, and for the ensuing two hours the visitor will be treated to some of the shrewdest of shrewd Dutch bargaining. The stolid, unemotional makers of cheeses stand doggedly by their respective piles, while the crafty wholesale merchants flit hither and yon testing. Not a word passes between them other than a surly “how d’ y’ do” in Dutch. The merchant selects a cheese at random, jams into it an instrument that any competent housewife might mistake for an apple corer, gives it a twist, pulls it out slowly, and tastes the end of the sample thus taken. What remains of the sample is drawn from the instrument, slipped back into the parent cheese, and the tester moves along to attack another pile.
At the end of an hour every merchant on the ground will have tested and tasted every pile of cheeses—in itself no small saporific achievement. Not only will he have used the taste test on the different piles, but he will have called upon his other four senses to confirm or countervail its decision. He will have examined cheeses by sight; he will have held them to his ear and shaken them, as we might an egg; he will have felt of the weight and solidity of them; and he will have taken long, knowing whiffs of their fragrance. At the end of an hour, then, he is qualified to approach this or that particular dealer and offer him so much per hundred kilos for his cheeses. Then it is that Greek meets Greek. In a moment’s time the dull-looking, uncommunicative, apparently unconcerned provincial maker of cheese seems to be transformed into a cunning, canny, clear-headed man of business. The two of them, merchant and maker, stand for a full minute with their right hands outstretched, like a picture of Captain John Smith sealing a treaty with the Indians. Suppose the maker finally agrees to the price offered: without uttering a syllable he grips the hand of the merchant, and the bargain is closed. If he does not agree, he slaps the merchant’s hand a whack that resounds across the square. By eleven-fifteen the walls of the surrounding houses reverberate with what a stranger around the corner might easily suppose to be the premature explosion of a number of toy balloons—for cheese makers are but human and would rather wait in the hope of being offered more for their stock. Competition is the essence of trade, even in Holland.
When a bargain is negotiated, they call a pair of weighmen who load the cheeses upon a barrow—a queer kind of barrow that resembles more a stretcher on sled runners—and carry them to the scales to be weighed. After being weighed and their sale recorded upon the books of the superintendent, the cheeses are loaded back into the wagons and boats to be transferred to the warehouse for shipment.
The cheese goes through no further preliminaries if intended for native consumption. If destined for export, however, it must needs undergo a peculiar, yet withal a simple process: it must be well scraped and painted over with a thin aniline dye which rapidly turns as it dries to a glorious vermilion. The scraping is done by machinery, but the dyeing is done by hand and with almost incredible swiftness by the men employed in some of the establishments in Alkmaar.
The question was asked if the dyeing assisted in the preservation of the cheese or helped to keep it immune from mould or corrodings. Not at all. The ultimate consumer across the seas would turn up his nose at an un-dyed cheese and snub it as a cheap imitation. The foreign public demands that the genuine North Holland cheese bear a distinctive hall-mark. That hall-mark is its coat of red dye. Since this province probably supplies a good three-fifths of the 55,000 tons of cheese exported in a single year the reader can imagine what a deal of red dye it takes to satisfy a foreign fancy.
A distance of thirty miles or more north of Alkmaar lies The Helder, figuratively the top of the kingdom. Geographically, it is only in the same latitude as the most northerly point of Newfoundland at the Straits of Belle Isle, and so there are plenty of towns over in Friesland and Groningen that lie still farther to the north, but these do not have the conditions to contend with that does The Helder. Surrounded on three sides by the waters of the Zuyder Zee and the North Sea, The Helder assumes much of the responsibility of protecting the whole province of North Holland from a general and disastrous inundation. More than any other part of the province, indeed of all Holland, it is exposed to the ravages of the most violent winds, which kick the sea into a maelstrom and pound it with relentless fury upon the coast line.
At The Helder may be seen the “big story” of Holland—the dikes that represent the persistent, patient strife of the Dutch to hold the land made out of the sea bottom