Cheesmaking made the Dutch cleanest people of Europe

NRC International, by Dirk Vlasblom, 18 December 2009 13:53

Why were Dutch cities cleaner than others, two historians wondered. The strict hygiene necessary for making dairy became firmly entrenched in Dutch culture in the Middle Ages.

As early as the late Middle Ages, travellers were amazed by the vigour with which Dutch housewives and maids scrubbed and polished. Not only Dutch homes, but markets and barges too were spotless, they noticed. This Dutch cleanliness was way ahead of public hygiene in the rest of Western Europe, where similar levels weren’t reached until the 18th and 19th centuries.

British historian Simon Schama, in his The Embarrassment of Riches, an influential work about the Dutch Golden Age which spans most of the 17th century, found an explanation for the widespread cleanliness in Calvinist mores. Women, armed with buckets and brooms, were symbols of the inner struggle against vanity, unbelief and carnal desires, the historian claimed. Moreover, Schama argued cleanliness served as proof of patriotism: the Dutch wanted to rid their land of foreign blemishes after they revolted against the Spanish empire.

Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblom, two economic historians from Utrecht, were not convinced by Schama's theory and wrote an article for the historic journal Past & Present explaining cleanliness in the Netherlands preceded Calvinism and the Dutch Revolt. They say the tidiness has more prosaic roots: the hygiene that was required to produce cheese and butter to sell on the markets.

Commercial dairy production on farms began in the western Netherlands after 1350 and grew explosively through the 15th century. Production and storage of dairy products had to take place in squeaky clean environments.

A cited travelogue from the middle of the 17th century portrayed female farmers from Holland washing their hands before churning. They rinsed buckets and barrels with cold or hot water and dried them over straw or peat furnaces, in a manner of proto-sterilisation.

At the same time, there was no clear division between cities and rural areas, the historians say. Half of the 55,000 households in Holland were making butter and cheese around 1500, with women and girls doing most of the work. About 30 percent of urban residents still owned one or two cows. It wasn't until after 1600 that cities stopped participating in agricultural production, according to the historians. By that time city-dwellers had already incorporated the hygienic practices of the dairy industry.

Massive urbanisation between the late 14th and late 16th century also had a strong influence on living and working habits in the cities. Bourgeois families hired maids who came from the countryside, bringing their knowledge of dairy farming and hygiene with them. Cookbooks from that era show dairy made its way into the urban diet and domestic and public hygiene was needed to preserve those goods, at home and on the markets where they were sold to the expanding city population.