I have never been brilliant with satnavs, and my first attempt at reaching our holiday cottage in Oud Gastel proved this beyond doubt. Somewhere near Breda I managed to turn a straightforward ninety-minute drive from the Eurotunnel into a meandering two-and-a-half-hour tour of every roundabout in North Brabant. My partner sat in the passenger seat, making that particular face he reserves for when I insist I know a shortcut. The shortcut, apparently, involved three laps of an industrial estate and a brief but thrilling encounter with a farm track meant exclusively for tractors.

By the time we finally spotted the cottage, tucked down a quiet lane on the edge of the village, I was ready to eat my own steering wheel. The place itself was lovely, all proper Dutch cosiness with exposed beams and a kitchen that actually looked like someone had cooked in it rather than just staged it for photographs. I made a mental note to do something impressive with the stove later, possibly involving herbs.

The first priority, though, was finding food before I became genuinely unpleasant company. We wandered into Oud Gastel's compact centre, which turned out to be the sort of place where you could stand in the middle and see everything worth seeing. I spotted a baker, a butcher, and what looked like a proper greengrocer, all within staggering distance of each other. This was promising. I am deeply suspicious of supermarkets on holiday; they feel like surrendering to the familiar when the whole point is to eat things you cannot pronounce.

The baker was my first stop, and I emerged with something called a "worstenbroodje," which the woman behind the counter described with the sort of reverence usually reserved for religious artefacts. It turned out to be a soft white roll wrapped around spiced sausage meat, and I ate two before we had even reached the butcher. The butcher himself was chatty in that direct Dutch way, recommending his own smoked sausage and something he called "spek" that looked like bacon but tasted more interesting. I bought both, plus some meatballs he insisted were traditional to the region.

That evening I attempted what I grandly termed a "Brabant platter," arranging my market purchases on a wooden board with some cheese I had also acquired. It looked respectable enough, though my partner pointed out that arranging things on a board does not technically constitute cooking. I defended my efforts by pointing to the stove, which I had definitely switched on at some point. We ate outside as the light faded, the sausage and spek and cheese gradually disappearing alongside a bottle of local beer I had selected purely because the label featured a cheerful pig.

The next morning I felt ambitious. The cottage kitchen had a proper range, and I decided to attempt pancakes, which I understood to be a serious matter in Dutch households. Mine turned out less like the elegant, dinner-plate-sized creations I had imagined and more like abstract sculptures. The first one stuck to the pan in a way that suggested I had fundamentally misunderstood something about butter. The second was recognisably round but oddly chewy. By the third I had achieved something approaching edible, which I ate with stroop from the village shop, a thick, dark syrup that made up for numerous structural deficiencies.

We found a Saturday market in a nearby town, stalls crowded with seasonal vegetables I had to ask about. A woman selling tomatoes of perhaps six different varieties talked me through their uses with patience that exceeded my Dutch vocabulary. I nodded along, understanding perhaps every fourth word, and bought more than I could reasonably use. That evening's attempt at a proper meal involved these tomatoes, some local potatoes, and the remaining spek, all thrown together with more enthusiasm than technique. It was, against reasonable expectation, rather good.

By the end of the week I had developed a minor obsession with the village baker's morning offerings, returning each day for something different. The "tompouce" on our final morning, a cream-filled confection with violently pink icing, felt like an appropriate farewell. I ate it on the cottage's small terrace, already planning how I might recreate these flavours back home, knowing perfectly well that I would not. Some things belong to the place you found them.