What does “glad als een Goudse kaas” mean in Dutch?

In Dutch, glad describes both physical slipperiness and the human kind — the person you can’t quite get a grip on, who wriggles out of everything. Related words like gladjanus and gladjakker show this meaning runs deep. “Glad als een Goudse kaas” stretches it further: Gouda, the Netherlands' most iconic cheese, is famously smooth and waxy — making it the perfect cultural anchor for a slippery character.

In the clip, Lotte is at a small podcast listening event when a man in a suspiciously neat jacket starts holding his phone up as if filming the room. When he catches her eye he pretends to type. “Dit voelt zo glad als een goudse kaas,” she mutters — this feels as slippery as a Gouda cheese. The simile isn’t a set proverb — the fixed idiom for a slippery operator is een gladde aal (“a slippery eel”) — but it’s exactly the kind of spontaneous riff Dutch speakers build on glad. You can make the same move yourself: anything smooth, waxy, or hard to pin down can slot in. The cheese just happens to be the most Dutch thing imaginable — a national symbol since the 14th century, when Gouda acquired trading rights for the county of Holland.