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Overview
Ruth van Waerebeek’s wonderful compendium of Belgian recipes celebrates the country that boasts more three-star restaurants per capita than any other nation—including France.
It’s a country where home cooks—and everyone, it seems, is a great home cook—spend copious amounts of time thinking about, shopping for, preparing, discussing, and celebrating food. With its hearty influences from Germany and Holland, herbs straight out of a medieval garden, and condiments and spices from the height of Flemish culture, Belgian cuisine is elegant comfort food at its best—slow-cooked, honest, and hearty. It’s the Sunday meal and a continental dinner party, family picnics and that antidote to a winter’s day.
In 250 delicious recipes, here is the best of Belgian cuisine: Veal Stew with Dumplings, Mushrooms, and Carrots; Smoked Trout Mousse with Watercress Sauce; Braised Partridge with Cabbage and Abbey Beer; Gratin of Belgian Endives; Flemish Carrot Soup; Steak-Frites; Steamed Mussels; and desserts—some using the best chocolate on earth—including Belgian Chocolate Ganache Tart, Almond Cake with Fresh Fruit Topping, and Little Chocolate Nut Cakes.
As the Belgians say, since everybody has to eat three times a day, why not make a feast of every meal?
“Ruth is an engaging writer, plenty of stories and reminiscences pepper the text. . . . Bask in Belgian goodness, a cuisine that really deserves to be better known.” —Foodepedia
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781910690611 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
EUROPE'S BEST-KEPT SECRET
When shopping for dinner, a Belgian will happily go twenty minutes out of her way if it means her family will enjoy a better loaf of bread or a more tender bunch of asparagus. Food is an extremely important part of Belgian life. Not only do Belgians spend considerably more money on food than the average westerner, but they also devote a great deal more time and energy to discussing it, shopping for it, preparing it, and consuming it. The Belgian approach to food is perhaps best summed up in the following motto: We eat three times a day, so we'd better try to make a feast of it every time.
But what is Belgian food? When faced with this question, most people might answer, after a puzzled pause, "French?" "German?" or, perhaps, "Dutch?" Even other Europeans find Belgian cuisine enigmatic. To a great extent, that sad fact is our own fault, since Belgians tend to keep a low, even self-effacing international profile. But it is all the more confounding when you consider that Belgian food is truly some of the finest Europe has to offer and that Belgium has more three-star restaurants per capita than France.
Although present-day Belgium can aptly be described as a nation tied to its traditions, its very culture sprang from a pastiche of foreign influences. Over the centuries, Belgium has been invaded by almost every other European people – including the Romans, Vikings, Spanish, French, Germans, and Dutch – effectively becoming a meeting point for the Germanic cultures of northern Europe and the Latin cultures of the south. Favourite cooking techniques, ingredients, and styles of the invaders were picked up by the natives, who by the Middle Ages, had developed a cuisine they could call their own. Now we Belgians are fond of saying that our food is cooked with French finesse – and served in portions of German generosity. At some point, the urge to forge and preserve this hard-won and slow-cooked identity eventually became a sort of national mania, reflected in a native suspicion of strangers and a hard-shelled, highly conservative resistance to any further exotic influence. Our customs, traditions, folklore, and festivals were frozen in time, along with our cuisine, which has remained doggedly faithful to its origins.
A MEDIEVAL BIRTH
Belgian cuisine is still deeply rooted in medieval cookery. The influence of the Middle Ages, a time when Flemish culture was very highly developed, can be seen today in the way we use condiments, mustards, vinegars, and dried fruits to obtain delicate balances of sweet-and-sour or sweet-and-salty in the same dish; in our use of fresh and dried fruits and nuts, particularly almonds, to enhance flavour and presentation. The spices we use so abundantly to season everything from meats to vegetables, desserts, and wine – nutmeg, cinnamon, peppercorns, saffron, ginger, and bay leaves – can be traced back to the spices of the Middle Ages. We love fresh herbs, particularly chervil, tarragon, thyme, sage, parsley, and chives. These are the same ones that grew in the herb gardens of the medieval monasteries, and we use them lavishly. We drink more beer than wine and produce more than 300 varieties, many of them crafted by small artisanal brewers whose family recipes and techniques go back hundreds of years. The exuberant and subtle beer cuisine of Belgium is just now beginning to have an influence outside of our borders.
Belgians love potatoes in nearly every guise; fried potatoes are practically the Belgian national dish. Mussels, another passion, are eaten regularly in great quantities, always accompanied by Belgian fries. Belgians are definitely a nation of meat lovers, consuming large quantities of pork, beef, veal, chicken, and rabbit. We also eat a large amount of game, everything from rabbit to wild boar, and wild birds of every sort – duck, grouse, quail, partridge, and dove. We often make a meal of our excellent charcuterie accompanied by a selection of breads and a glass of beer.
We are famous for our fresh vegetables (who has not heard of Belgian endive or Brussels sprouts?) as well as for waffles, and of course, chocolate. Belgians have a very well-developed sweet tooth; I think it is fair to say that we have unparalleled cravings for chocolate. Not only do we produce some of the finest chocolate in the world, but the average Belgian consumes nearly seven pounds more per year than his western counterpart. In short, everybody eats well in Belgium.
Given this bounty of wonderful food, it may surprise you to learn that there are few cookbooks devoted to Belgian cooking published in Belgium. The reason is simple: In Belgium, the secrets of cooking are still transmitted orally. Recipes, techniques, traditions, tastes, and passions are passed along from generation to generation in a country where "family values" is not merely a political catchphrase but a living reality. Our cuisine, like our nation, is at heart bourgeois – home cooking at its best.
For that reason, I want to introduce you to Belgian cooking through three generations of Belgian mothers and daughters: my great grandmother Marie, her daughter Jeanne, and her granddaughter (my mother) Anny. I am now a professional chef, and a cooking teacher, and I learned about cooking in their busy kitchens in the medieval city of Ghent, where I grew up. These women are truly remarkable cooks, and each is thoroughly Belgian in her approach to cooking. Yet from each of them I have learned a distinct and recognizable style.
MARIE
My great grandmother Marie was a simple country woman, a farm wife whose plain, hearty cuisine represents the more or less unchanging aspects of Belgian peasant family fare as it has existed for centuries. The farm provided all of her ingredients, and tradition framed her menus. She was eighty-six years old when she died in 1972 and had been a part of my life for thirteen years. We were very close. A visit to my great grandmother meant stepping into a world of living history. Marie, in her farmhouse near the tiny village of Oostrozebeke, lived her life much the same at the end of her days as she did fully sixty or seventy years before.
Alas, most of the details of her small red-brick country house are vague now in my memory, but I remember her kitchen so clearly – the large round table surrounded by wicker chairs, the crucifix on the wall flanked by gleaming silver candelabras, and the huge grandfather clock with its satisfyingly loud tick-tock.
But most powerfully I remember the leuvense stoof, the large potbellied stove that dominated the entire room and was really the heart of the whole house. The stove demanded, and received, constant attention – there was wood to fetch, coals to rake, ashes to remove, then, more wood, more coals, more ashes, over and over. No wonder Marie had never travelled far beyond the confines of her village, had not even visited the shore of the North Sea, a mere 20 kilometres away, until she was well over forty years old. Besides her family – her husband, four children, and mother-in-law – she had cows, chickens, and her garden, plus that stove to keep alive. She was tied down by necessity. If, rising early in the still-dark morning and going first to the kitchen to heat water for coffee, for washing up, and for cooking, she found the stove cold, its last embers dead, it meant hours to build a new fire from scratch. Those were hours spent shivering in the cold, deprived of the most basic comforts. But in the end, of course, the stove would respond to her attentions and pay her back in full. Marie knew every inch of it – which spot on the surface was the hot-test, which one just warm enough to keep a pot of coffee going through the morning, where in its capacious oven to bake the crustiest bread. No bread I have ever tasted could compare in flavour or texture to hers.
And in the cold northern European winter, the family would huddle around the stove in the evening, and by the light of a candles, tell stories to pass the long, dark hours. And huddled we were, because underneath the bulging potbelly of that stove there was a recess for our feet. And so we sat, like so many spokes on a wheel, our legs stretched luxuriously to catch every bit of warmth the stove could offer. No warmth I have ever felt has been as cozy.
For me, the enduring memories of my great grandmother live on primarily in my senses of smell and taste. The scent that I associate most strongly with her is that of fresh air and sunshine, like clean linen that's been hung outside to dry. And the foods she prepared to feed her family I still prepare today – hearty, satisfying dishes like soup with potatoes and buttermilk, and the robust stew of potato, cabbage, and carrots called stoemp. Interestingly, the foods she prepared conform almost exactly to the dietary guidelines that have been pronounced healthy for today – very little meat and an emphasis on complex carbohydrates and fresh fruits and vegetables.
JEANNE
My grandmother Jeanne is an artist, an independent and somewhat gentrified woman, who often used to cook for a large circle of friends. Her home was in a rural area, but her social milieu was bohemian and worldly. She has led a gregarious life full of friends and entertaining, all on an extremely tight budget. Buying or bartering what she needed from her neighbours, she adapted traditional recipes to her taste, and brought her own creative flair to the process. She was a middle child of Marie, but while Marie was the consummate countrywoman, Jeanne was utterly convinced, from her earliest years, that she was never meant for the country life, and did everything in her power to set herself apart from the other village girls. Creative in every aspect of her life (particularly at getting her sisters to do her share of the farm chores), she somehow always managed to turn herself out in smart frocks, with her hair fashionably coiffed, more often than not set off by a hat of her own design. But like so many young people who rebel against their circumstances in life, she made plenty of mistakes before she got where she wanted to go.
Jeanne was nineteen when she married a local boy, probably thinking of it as a first step toward independence. But she had three children before she realized that she was more trapped in her small village than ever before. Divorce was the only way out. But in the 1930s, divorce was shocking and rare even among cosmopolites. In a small, rural, tradition-bound Catholic village, it was an unpardonable offence, and she found herself almost completely ostracized. Her children were taken away from her to be raised by her husband's family. The effect of this treatment, though, was far from chastening; indeed, it was positively liberating, for it removed the social ties that had always constrained her.
WE EAT THREE TIMES A DAY, SO WE'D BETTER TRY TO MAKE A FEAST OF IT EVERY TIME
She left the village and went out on her own as a modiste – designing hats for wealthy, fashionable women. Against all odds, she became a success. And she was not completely alone. Her daughter Anny (my mother), who was as independent-minded as Jeanne, went to live with her.
Eventually, in her early thirties, Jeanne settled in St. Martens Latem, a lovely Flemish village nestled cozily on the banks of the Leie river on the outskirts of Ghent. The area had always been famous for the beauty of its pastoral landscape. Ironically, it was not so different from the very village she had fled, but – and this was very important – at the time that Jeanne moved there, it was already quite famous as an artists' colony. Most of the artists were neither famous nor rich (although some of them would become so later on), but they lived a wonderful, spirited life filled with shared interests and camaraderie in surroundings of great physical beauty. It was a style that Jeanne found much to her liking, and it was here at last that she found friends for a lifetime.
Jeanne had always been interested in painting and not long after she moved to St. Martens Latem, she met and began studying with Leon Desmet. Desmet, a master printer and painter's painter, had a considerable reputation among the cognoscenti, but he had never been discovered by the world at large, and far from famous, he was also far from financially secure. Yet by all accounts, he was a truly charismatic man of enormous joie de vivre, endless optimism, and tremendous generosity to his large circle of friends and admirers. Jeanne and Leon Desmet became great friends. She often modelled for his paintings and they frequently entertained their many friends together. On his deathbed he appointed her the guardian of his work and asked her to see that it was preserved. To this end she turned his house and studio into a museum to preserve and show his work.
Jeanne has a real gift for hospitality, and in those days, her house was always full of hungry artists, friends, and visitors from town. She was proud of her culinary abilities and loved to emerge from the kitchen with something wonderful, which looked as good as it tasted. But she was never the kind of woman to spend all day in the kitchen. Her specialities were simple dishes, quickly prepared, and soups and stews that could be made ahead and reheated when necessary. For Jeanne, a meal was and remains an occasion for great conversation among friends and colleagues – a stimulant for the wonderful flow of words and ideas that to her are as nourishing and necessary as the food itself.
Lavish hospitality and generosity were the very heart and soul of her attitude toward cooking. Her particular genius was for living like a lord on a beggar's purse – a feat made possible by the bounty of the countryside, which provided her with rabbit, deer, and pheasant from the fields and vast quantities of eel and other freshwater fish from the river. But whatever she cooked, the portions were always big and hearty, and there was always enough for a few last-minute guests.
As a little girl I was enchanted by my glamorous grandmother. When I read about Cinderella, the fairy godmother had my grandmother's face. She has always been a woman of great elegance and style, and today, in her eighties, she is as chic as ever. She is an exquisitely cultivated woman who pays the most critical and discerning attention to every detail.
To me she has always been an inspiration – a woman who could do anything and everything and always had a good time doing it. There were no chores in her life. Cooking was not a job but a source of pleasure and enjoyment, a necessary part of life. Her gardening was filled with joy and beauty. Her painting was a natural part of her life, and she set up her easel in any room she happened to be occupying, so that her kitchen always smelled of simmering soups and stews, herbs, spices, flowers, and paints. She taught me that hospitality should be a natural part of everyday life, and it is a lesson that has gained many lifelong friends all over the world.
ANNY
My mother, Anny, is very much an urban woman. She has lived her entire adult life in the medieval city of Ghent and is married to an urbane and cultivated man. My father, a serious gourmet and wine connoisseur, is a lawyer and judge by profession. She has entertained his clients and visitors from all over the world and is without a doubt a sophisticate in many ways. Yet, as is often the case, certain undeniable traits that skipped the second generation have reasserted themselves in the third. Despite the urban trappings and her free-spirited style, Anny's life more closely resembles that of her grandmother, Marie, than that of her mother. Her life revolves around her family and is devoted entirely to their well-being.
Quite apart from her children (my sister, my brother, and me), my mother took care of a veritable menagerie of animals. All through my childhood, our house was home to an amazing collection of pets. There were dogs and cats, of course, but Mother also collected stray wild animals with the passion of a Dr. Doolittle. There were endless convalescent birds with broken wings, dozens of wee cowering motherless baby mice, several foul-mouthed parrots; a succession of rabbits (all named Prutske), and a boisterous and uninhibited monkey named King Louis, who terrorized and ruled our household for four years.
Instead of a farm, my mother manages an immense, old twenty-room town house dating back to the early 1800s. But my mother's true talent lies in the preparation of the day's meals. Daily she launches on a shopping expedition that takes her into the social heart of the town – the marketplace. While gathering news, trading jokes, and indulging in small gossip, she searches out and buys the freshest and best ingredients available from the Belgian countryside.
In a nation whose shoppers almost universally pride themselves on being demanding and particular, my mother's reputation among farmers and shopkeepers is pre-eminent. She is a striking sight as she sets out on foot each day accompanied by her two large dogs and often, in days past, with King Louis the monkey, astride one of the dogs. With a huge rucksack on her back, she makes her way to the centre of Ghent and the old market square. She flits from one to another choosing her vegetables as carefully as the diamond merchants in Antwerp choose their stones. Having selected her produce, she heads for the shops – this bakery has the best bread, that butcher has the best meat, and the best mustard is found in that shop. (Yes, there is a shop devoted exclusively to mustard, and it has been there since 1700.)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Taste of Belgium"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Ruth Van Waerebeek.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
EUROPE'S BEST KEPT SECRET,
APPETISERS, SALADS AND SMALL PLATES,
SOUPS,
FISH AND SHELLFISH,
POULTRY AND GAME,
MEAT,
COOKING WITH BEER,
VEGETABLE AND FRUIT SIDE DISHES,
POTATOES,
WAFFLES, PANCAKES AND BREADS,
DESSERTS,
BASICS,