“It’s going to be hard work tonight. If you think it will be quiet sitting… no. I’m going to cook a lot of dishes so I’m going to encourage you a bit.” The guests smile. “Yes, I’m still nice. But I’m really going to be a bit strict.”
Nel Schellekens has just given a high-five tour of the shop. Now she stands in the spotlights with her blonde quiff and black jacket behind the central kitchen island in the converted barn at the Keunenhuis, an old Scholten farm in completely original condition on a Natuurmonumenten estate.
Previously she cooked for a long time in De Gulle Waard, not far from here in Winterswijk. In the Keunenhuis she has come out of the kitchen, or rather: she has moved the kitchen to the dining room… and that suits her much better. Because Nel needs to be seen and heard. Her kitchen revolves around the story, the philosophy: in essence she acts against contemporary consumerism and the waste that goes with it.
Nell is a phenomenon. She goes by many names. She is “the head-to-butt chef,” “the man-eater,” and “the high priestess of the waste-free kitchen.” Head-to-butt (or head-to-tail) primarily means: if you eat meat, then you have a duty to use the whole animal, otherwise it is immoderate and disrespectful. But you can also extend it to vegetables: for example, we start with a fresh salad with pickled tulip bulbs, served in the tulip flower itself (which you can also eat just fine).
You can also approach the entire chain from a head-to-butt mentality. You need laying hens to produce eggs. You have nothing to do with roosters. But they are born. These day-old chicks without ovaries immediately go into the shredder, otherwise they only cost money for space and feed. The same applies to udderless bull calves and kid goats. A particularly brutal form of waste. So Schellekens adopts a man (bull, goat or rooster) for all dairy and eggs she purchases. He names them all and pays a fair price for them, so that the farmer can take good care of them until they reach an adult slaughter weight. And that’s what we’re eating tonight.
She also cooks with great love for vegetarians, but then it becomes vegan. Otherwise, the final bill will not be correct. Because anyone who eats 100 grams of goat cheese per week should eat 840 grams of goat meat per year, she calculated. “Do you eat egg? Then that rooster is part of it.”
Heart on the tongue
On the menu tonight: a delicious reepaté, tender nagelholt of milked dairy cow, an incredibly tasty dry sausage made from billy goat and rillettes from leghaan (which could have had a little more salt) and classic leftover products such as beam paste and black pudding. But also hard baked udder. “It’s not really tasty, but yes, it’s part of it.” Everyone tries.
Later we eat ‘rendang’ of goat with Achterhoek magnolia. And a classic from the Gulle Waard era: heart on the tongue. She prepares the heart live: everyone sees the organ turn into slabs of meat. She serves the hard baked heart of the plancha on a buttery slice of beef tongue. It’s amazing how many people eat that for the first time tonight.
There’s a lot of meat on the menu, but it’s all little bits – only about 70g per person over the whole evening. We do eat a lot of pumpkin seeds (about two handfuls per person), because the farmer had a surplus, and you should take care of each other a bit.
The casserole of white asparagus (the ones that normally go to the pigs, simply because they are not straight enough) is wonderfully comforting with potato and cracklings in a sauce of tarragon vinegar, egg, cream, butter and topped with farmer’s cheese. And of course nothing is thrown away: she makes a revitalizing stem-stalk-peeling broth from all the trimmings of the vegetables and truly the most delicious, creamy, rich vegetable croquette I’ve ever eaten.
Not everything is as great as that croquette. For example, the blood sausage is a bit bland, a single salad is a bit wet, some plates are a bit sloppy and the Achterhoek wine is not a high flyer either. One big sin: somewhere in the evening an uncooked, soggy green turd passes by that must pass for gnocchi with kale (because it had to be eaten too) – it should never have seen the light of day. Anyway.
It remains very impressive to think that she does everything all by herself – from drying, fermenting and preserving to mise-en-place and washing up – together with ‘her’ Henk. During the day, he is her life and business partner. But in the evening, during the show, he is a willing reporter and victim. Henk also takes care of the drinks, the tour of the museum and at the end of the evening the finances (on one of those old calculators that still shows a receipt), and supports Nel in every possible way, with clearing away, serving, preparing.
Nel Schellekens is not only a gifted cook, but also a born entertainer. What started as a little diatribe against contemporary consumerism – “cauliflower too expensive? It is winter!! There shouldn’t be any cauliflower at all” – degenerates into a full-fledged cabaret act. I’m not going to tell jokes here, but please ask for the story of the pepper sauce.
The two of us provide a small twenty people with thirteen courses of Achterhoek omakase in a full evening dinner show, which requires dedication and considerable preparation. The plates are not all as perfectly made as in a star tent, but who careswe ate really well and hadn’t had such a ‘gloeps gift’ evening in ages, as we say in the Achterhoek.