Part 2 of 2. Read Part 1 here.
When in Brugge, rent a bike.
Actually, I'm adopting this policy for every bicycle-friendly town I visit from now on. We took the train from the little town of Ieper to the larger historic town of Brugge. We rented bicycles at the train station and I bought a pocket map of the city for 50 cents. Zipping around the picturesque city on a two wheeler was pure bliss. No industrial strength Houdini chains necessary -- the rental bikes came with locks that just locked the back wheel with a lever pull and a key. Bike parking was available everywhere. There are very few cars in the scenic city center. As Maya said, Brugge, Ieper, and all the surrounding villages in Heuvelland are so cute, they look like they're made of chocolate.
The city center is shaped like an egg. You can ride down the knobbly cobblestone streets and along pristine blue-green canals in a few hours, easily escaping the tourist traffic jams of the southwest corner of the city. There are plenty of churches with rococo pulpits and stained glass, if that's you're thing. I was perfectly happy just following the charming little rows of houses down litter free paths, marveling at how well kept all the flower boxes in the windows were.
And, of course, I was food hunting. When we first got to the Markt, the town's touristy center, I joined the long lines at the frites stands. But then I realized that eating frites from a frites stand in the Markt is kind of like eating a $3 dirty dog from a cart in Times Square -- maybe iconic, but probably not what the locals do.
My first stop was a cute little tea room up Vlaamingstraat whose name I neglected to write down -- Servado van Markem or something. You can almost see the name on the napkin in the picture. Brugge has tons of cute little tea room/patisseries in the less touristy northern part of the city. They're excellent for noshing, map examining pit stops, and using the loo. My dessert was pretty fantastic -- it's called a "soleil", and it had a liqueur soaked cake layer on the bottom, topped with whole raspberries, raspberry puree, a substantial whipped cream head and a bruleed meringue flower on top. Scrumptious with the pot of darjeeling, and a perfectly civilized way to spend an afternoon alone.
When in a foreign land, it's good to talk to complete strangers with enormous knives.
Riding east on Langestraat, I came across an adorable little butcher shop with knee-high statues of a cow and a pig just outside the door. I parked my bike just outside the shop and walked in, not really knowing what I was going to say if the woman behind the counter didn't speak English. (In general, people spoke English quite well; despite being close to the border of France, even our attempts at French often received responses in English.)
I picked up a jar of mustard and placed it on the counter, eyeing the neat displays -- crystal clear jellied chicken, bright red sausage links air drying in the back, a refrigerator case full of salamis and cured pork and tube meats of many varieties, pretty little roasted hens, tasty looking head cheese with rosy hunks of flesh magically suspended in gel.
"Do you speak English?" I asked the youngish woman behind the counter.
"A little bit," she replied.
"Which of these are Belgian cheeses?" I asked.
"All of them." I chose the brugsche blomme, a semi-soft, melty and mild cheese with a white bloomy rind and gentle tang.
I asked about a freshly grilled pile of white sausages that a young male butcher had just brought out of the kitchen. "Gebakken witte wurst. Do you want to try it?" he asked enthusiastically. He sliced a tip off one of the still warm sausages and handed it to me. The springy casing gave way to the smooth, fine white meat, with little bits of green onion and an ephemeral spice top note.
"It's delicious! What's in it?" I asked.
"Three kilos white chicken, three kilos white...pig, white pig, two kilos...fat? Fat!" he smiled.
"I'll take one." The lady wrapped the sausage in the same pink and white checked paper lined with plastic that encased my brugsche blomme. She began to ring up my purchases when I noticed a few adorable ribbon accessorized jars at the counter.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Advokaat! You don't know advokaat? It is...eh...eggs, and sugar, and alcohol. But don't eat it all or you will be drunk! You want to try?"
The man went back into the kitchen and returned with a large, nearly empty jar of the viscous yellow liquid and a coffee spoon.
"There's no milk in it?"
"No milk," he beamed, "Just eggs, sugar, and alcohol. We eat it on birthdays, with a spoon, or over ice cream." It was rich and creamy, with a texture like condensed milk, but with the sharp sweetness of some kind of alcohol.
"I'll take two. No, three." I drank in the little shop scene as she added up all of my little receipts in her head. "May I take a picture?"
"Yes." I snapped this shot of the lady butcher as she began to help a local who had walked in.
The man called his wife, a dark haired version of the woman who first helped me, and I got a snapshot of the two of them with their enormous knife.
I thanked everyone profusely, segregated my hot sausage away from the cheese and little jars of advokaat in my shoulder bag and went outside to unlock my bike. As I tried to figure out where I would go next, the dark haired woman motioned for me to come back inside the store. I leaned my bike up against the glass window again and walked back in.
"Would you like to see the shop?" the butcher asked.
But of course I wanted to see the shop! The dark haired lady told me that they make most of the tube meats and sausages shown in the display, using an enormous grinding machine with the circumference of a card table. They let me poke around in the back room, where two giggling teenage girls were skewering white meat chicken kabobs and vegetables. And I craned my neck to peek into the room in the far back, where a private party was enjoying a feast. I had a flash fantasy where I was one of those cardigan-wearing old men, living a charmed life in Brugge, holding a small catered dinner party for my 80th birthday behind the butcher shop, and spooning advokaat over ice cream.
I asked for some advice on where to go next and introduced myself. Nancy Dobbels, the kind-eyed first lady I spoke with, laughed and said, "I'm the big boss, but I don't have anything to say." The adorable couple were Nancy's sister Claudine Dobbels and her husband Philip Van de Voorde. I hope that someday I can return on an assignment for Saveur or Gourmet and get the whole story behind the butcher sisters and their dreamy little shop.
Slagerij De Leeuwebrug
Langestraat 61
8000 Brugge
050/34.08.91
"KWALITEITSPRODUCTEN!" says the flyer.
Fair food is fair food everywhere in the world.
With its bumper cars, kiddie rides, and try-your-luck-sucka games, the fair across the street from my Ieper hotel was like a Belgian San Gennaro festival. Except that in the morning, there was no trash ANYWHERE. Clean as a whistle. Total Stepford Festival.
The food, however, was very familiar -- carbs and grease, carbs and grease. I can't say the frites were any better than, say, a newspaper cone of chips at a chip shop in London, or even a paper cone with curry sauce from Pommes Frites on 2nd Ave. in the East Village, but maybe I shouldn't judge Belgian frites by the example I got from the local street fair. But I don't have the metabolism or the constitution to be sampling frites all over the country.
I liked the Brussel waffel (pictured), which was lovely, airy and crisp, despite being totally asphyxiated by a blanket of powdered sugar. The suiker waffel was much heavier than I had expected, made with dense, layered pastry dough with a crisp shell of caramelized sugar -- nice, but not for me.
At the folk festival, I tried a hotcake (zoete ovenkoeken), puffed and baked in a wood fired oven, smeared with butter and a tablespoon of grainy brown sugar. It was really nourishing and yummy, something you imagine a Dickens pauper would love to warm his hands and gullet with, though it could have used a bit of salt.
Fair food name that takes the cake (ahem), however, is oliebollen -- that which we call zeppolli, by any other name would still be greasebomb heartstoppers. But I like how oliebollen is just a dyslexic reading away from "oily balls".
I am totally only 4 degrees of separation from Condi Rice.
I sat next to a political counselor who's about to start working at the embassy in Morocco on the flight back to JFK. He told me that the Helmand, that great Afghan restaurant I went to in Baltimore, is owned by Hamid Karzai's brother, whom he knows, because he used to be Hamid Karzai's counterpart on an assignment in Pakistan back in the day. (Aren't you intrigued? I was. My plane buddy also had a long salt and pepper scraggly beard and was reading Learn Arabic in 10 minutes a day.)
Ganda ham is maybe more common than its nomenclature might lead you to believe.
When I first started using Google, the first site that came up was for Ganda was a Belgian ham that shared my name. I sent the company an email that said, Hey, your name's Ganda, my name's Ganda. How about sending me a promotional t-shirt? And they actually did send me a cap, a t-shirt, and a sample of their ham. Sadly, I forgot about the ham until well after its expiration date. I still haven't tried Ganda ham, but you can try the Ganda ham sandwich at pretty much any Panos, a Belgian chain at all the train stations that seems to be their Au Bon Pain. I like that I'm in the "Tasty" section.
