Today is Flemish Community Day, and you can't properly celebrate without a customised menu for the day.
While Flemish cuisine is often reduced to boiled potatoes, sausage and cauliflower, there are several culinary gems to be discovered between the North Sea coast and the Meuse Valley.
So loosen your belts, keep the Gaviscon within reach, and join us on this culinary journey through Flanders.
Breakfast: Sweet, sweeter, sweetest
You start the day with carbs and sugar. Lots of it.
A typical Flemish breakfast consists of sweet pastries and bread. While bread is the foundation of roughly every single meal in Flanders, pastries are the star of breakfast. And for a special day like today, we're going to let those stars shine bright. There's the long Suisse, the butter pastry, the apple or apricot turnover, cream-filled croissants, and the Berlin doughnut.
But the absolute star of the show is the gevulde koffiekoek, a thin layer of puff pastry filled with custard and topped with a layer of chocolate.
Every bakery with an ounce of self-respect should have piles of cream pastries on display this morning.
If you want to keep it more sober, get yourself a pack of speculoos and a cup of coffee. Dip the speculoos briefly into the coffee and put it on a slice of bread. Give it a minute to soak, and you have a makeshift Flemish breakfast.
You mustn't dip the cookies for too long. Speculoos tends to completely disintegrate past a certain threshold for some mysterious scientific reason.
A healthy alternative is egg and soldiers. Soft-boil an egg and cut up a slice of toasted bread into thin, long slices. Peel the top of the egg and cut down to the runny yolk. Add some salt and pepper and dip the slices of bread in the yolk.
Illustrative image. Credit: Dries Buytaert
Lunch: Good, simple, sober
After a heavy breakfast, your stomach deserves a break. And if this is your first rodeo with Flemish cuisine, it might need a break.
So let's have a light lunch.
We can go for a tomato filled with North Sea shrimp. Cut a tomato roughly halfway, clean it out and fill it up with grey, peeled shrimp and a little bit of mayonnaise. Flavour with salt and pepper.
Asparagus à la Flamande is another option. The trick is to slightly undercook the asparagus in salted water, giving it a bit of bite. Served with chopped egg, melted butter and a pinch of nutmeg, it provides a perfect, light lunch option.
If you haven't had your daily share of carbs and bread after breakfast, you can also opt for a smoske.
A half-baguette with savoury spreadings, salad and a royal portion of mayonnaise, smoske is a Flemish staple for lunch-on-the-go.
Illustrative images. Credit: WikiMedia Commons
Dinner: Acquired tastes
There are many options to choose from for a Flemish dinner. Simple fries, fries with beef stew, a Juliente, which is basically fries with beef stew and additional meat. The list goes on.
While fries are the only correct answer as to what the most iconic Flemish dinner is, we will not be eating them today – at least not as a main. The versatility of fries means that they form a perfect side dish.
Instead, we're opting for either Belgian endive with ham and cheese (what French speakers call chicons au gratin) or vol-au-vent.
Belgian endive is an acquired taste. Often eaten raw, the leaves are rather bitter and not to everyone's liking. A good way to counter the bitterness is to bake them, which is exactly what we're doing tonight.
Braise the endive for ten minutes, wrap it in whole slices of ham and fill an oven dish. Cover with cheese sauce and top with grated cheese for a crispy layer. An instant classic.
Vol-au-vent is the Flemish alternative to the meat pie.
Well, it's not really Flemish. A Parisian chef accidentally invented it sometime in the 18th century when he mistook shortcrust pastry for puff pastry. When the pastry came out of the oven, it had risen to a tower. Legend says that the chef exclaimed, "It is flying", leading to its current name, "fly in the wind".
But if the French claim fries, Flanders can claim their vol-au-vent.
The hollow pastry gets filled with a chicken-mushroom stew and is served with a royal serving of – you guessed it – fries, potatoes or bread.
For dessert, you've earned something sweet. Choose between a slice of mattentaart (a curd tart) or, if you're feeling particularly patriotic, another gevulde koffiekoek. No one said celebrating Flanders had to be healthy.
Illustrative images. Credit: WikiMedia Commons
