Flour power keeps Dutch windmills turning

Published on Saturday 26 July 2008 22:45

THE Dutch are building windmills again. Up and down the coast, just offshore, you can see them: white and tall and slender as pencils, their three slim blades turning lazily in the North Sea breeze.

These generate electricity, of course, rather than grind grain. Yet the government is also building, and rebuilding, mills like the squat, homely ones that have seemingly always dotted the Dutch countryside, and reflect as much the nature of the country as do tulips or Gouda cheese.

Last year, the government, concerned that one of the foremost symbols of the Netherlands was about to disappear out of neglect, approved an $80m programme to build or restore 120 mills of roughly 1,040 still standing. That has created a backlog of work for previously strapped mill restorers.

"We have special companies, very specialised mill makers and restorers," said Leo Endedijk, director of Dutch Mills, a group that supports mill restoration, in an office in the shadow of De Gooyer, a soaring 18th-century mill now housing a popular brewery.

The need to find renewable sources of energy is driving the Dutch to build the modern mills, which Endedijk insists be called turbines, not mills. "We as an organisation don't work with modern wind turbines," he sniffed, adding, as if to underscore the gap between the traditional and the contemporary, that while the four blades of traditional windmills turn counterclockwise, the three of modern wind turbines go clockwise.

But the fast pace of change in the modern Netherlands is reviving interest in the old mills. As globalisation spreads its veil of uniformity over life in the Netherlands, many among the Dutch are looking for their roots. "It's a little bit of national pride," said Lukas Verbij, whose company, Verbij Hoogmade, is one of the leading mill builders and restorers.

Some of the renewed interest in mills is driven by the search for traditional food and drink. Patrick Langkruis, whose bakery, Het Bammetje, features 28 different kinds of bread and 35 different rolls, uses only flour ground by a traditional mill. "The taste is fuller, there's more flavour," he said. "It's also because the grains are ground slowly."

His supplier is Karel Streumer, who has been grinding out ordinary and exotic grains for the past eight years at his mill, De Distilleerketel, or distillery pot, in Delfshaven, on the edge of Rotterdam. He uses technology – huge mill stones and enormous wooden gears that make visitors feel they're inside an immense and ancient clock – that has not changed since the mill was built in 1727.

Streumer, 54, his shock of curly white hair perpetually dusted with flour, is one of a growing number of millers who are taking over restored or rebuilt mills. In addition to wheat, he said, counting off his products on a dusty hand, he grinds familiar grains like corn, rye and oats, and some unfamiliar ones, like grain sorghum, or milo, and spelt (a kind of wheat). One customer arrives once a month from Frankfurt to pick up 55 pounds of mashela, or pearl millet, which is widely used in African cooking.

Curiously, though the revival of the mills is a back-to-the-roots activity, many customers come from a wide range of countries, Streumer said, including Ethiopia, Morocco and Turkey. "80% of my customers are not natives of the Netherlands," he said.

One of them is Samson Tesfai, whose restaurant, the Taste of Africa, specialises in the dishes of his native Eritrea, which he fled in 1986 because of the fighting between his homeland and Ethiopia. Each week, he said, he buys mashela, sorghum, ground corn and wheat flour from Streumer to use in the ethnic dishes he prepares. "We can find it elsewhere," said Tesfai, 43. "But this is a good address, with a good product, so why go somewhere else?"

Neither the spread of ethnic restaurants, with increased immigration, nor the return to traditional tastes among the Dutch is enough to keep millers like Streumer in business. Without a crew of volunteers who help out at weekends, he said, the mill would not be profitable. "It's hard to make the money to keep the mill in good shape, and to pay employees, too," he said. "We are not professionals."