Who Doesn't Love Boerenjongens? - NYTimes.com Henk Wildschut for The New York Times Janneke Vreugdenhil at her home kitchen in The Hague. When I was in the Netherlands, looking for someone with whom I could cook "Dutch," I expected to find a grandmother. You know, some kind of stolid old-timer to show me the way of traditional Dutch home cooking. Yet I kept being steered by friends and journalists to the 43-year-old food writer Janneke Vreugdenhil, who grew up near Rotterdam and now lives in The Hague. Vreugdenhil in turn invited the Amsterdam chef Eke Marien, who runs Boerenjongens, a food shop where he prepares traditional homestyle dishes. Boerenjongens can mean a couple of things in Dutch; for a shop like Marien's, you wouldn't be wrong to translate it as "farmer boy," but it has other meanings, as you'll see in a minute. Together, the three of us ate herring, drank schnapps and prepared a fairly typical Dutch meal. Vreugdenhil grew up with food everywhere, working as a tomato picker in the massive greenhouses that dominate parts of the Dutch countryside and learning how to cook from her mother. "But I learned how to eat," she says, "from my father, who would stand on a chair and applaud my mother whenever she cooked something exceptional." As her mother became more and more inclined to cook Mediterranean ("She made risotto in the "70s, which in Holland was completely unknown"), Vreugdenhil began to focus on cooking Asian food. Her background, then, is eclectic. You're as likely to see a Ligurian specialty like farinata on her site as the Dutch standard stamppot. Although she considered a life in food, Vreugdenhil went to law school thinking that she would become a judge. But after researching the relationship between food and health, she produced a cookbook. She has now written or helped write around a dozen, including the latest, "Comfort Food" - sadly, for us at least, they're all in Dutch. Soon after her first cookbook, the national newspaper NRC Handelsblad called and asked her to write. And since she "always wanted to write for a newspaper, I hired two or three baby sitters, started working 80 hours a week . . . and suddenly I was a food writer." And an impressive one: for years, she produced a daily food column. (She's currently taking a break. "I needed some space," she says simply, though she intends to get back to it soon.) Of the recipes that she, Marien and I cooked, the most unusual and surprising was hangop met boerenjongens. There's that word again; this time it means "brandied raisins," a super dessert with the raisins soaked in strained buttermilk and Cognac. It's especially good this time of year, when fresh fruit is rare. But you need genuine buttermilk, not the weird cultured low-fat stuff sold in most supermarkets. Good yogurt makes a fine substitute. Hutspot is a traditional stewy soup (or soupy stew), a Dutch variation on the kind made throughout Europe. Vreugdenhil explained that its origins are in fact Spanish, but you can see that it has a Dutch pedigree because the vegetables are mashed; stamppot, any combination of mashed vegetables, is the national dish. Endive soup is the easiest of these three recipes, and one that's likely to become a part of your repertory, as it relies on bitter greens and other things you can find any time of year. It's not the most common soup in Holland; that honor goes to pea soup. But with Vreugdenhil's bold preparation - caramelized endive! - I was grateful that I wasn't cooking with a grandmother.