1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (38 page)

Where:
In La Quinta, CA
, for Barcelona Liégeois, Figue, tel 760-698-9040,
eatfigue.com
.
Further information and recipes:
diplomatickitchen.com
(search cafe liegeois);
chefdemelogue.com
(click April Archive, find April 2013 post).

Famous for his extraordinary prowess as a detective, Hercule Poirot is also known for his fondness for hot chocolate, which he takes with brioche at breakfast. Given how finicky Agatha Christie’s Belgian hero is about food, one can only assume that, although he lives in London, he has remained loyal to the exquisite Callebaut chocolate from his homeland—made for more than 150 years in a country long noted for that elegant treat.

A favorite of pastry chefs and confectioners, Callebaut owes its deep, rich overtones to the finest grinding of selected roasted cocoa beans. The superfine grind releases layers of subtle flavors, with pure cocoa butter and a hint of natural vanilla adding harmonious undertones.

Whether you’re cooking with chocolate or just eating it, for best results you’ll want to buy it in the large professional bittersweet blocks and
knock off chunks as effectively as you can (the blocks can be hard to break). (Connoisseurs will shun Callebaut’s milk and white chocolates as the depressing interlopers they are.) Nibble away and you will be rewarded: The chocolate will begin to melt upon hitting your tongue, one of the marks of a good-quality product that has been well tempered with the right amount of cocoa butter. Lesser specimens, over-tempered to prolong shelf life, take longer to melt and one can feel a sort of skin developing on the tongue before the chocolate finally dissolves.

For the fullest and most direct experience of Callebaut’s excellence, take a cue from Poirot, whose hot chocolate is surely made from a bittersweet block melted in a double boiler with a couple of splashes of heavy sweet cream, then whisked into simmering-hot whole milk. Hold the marshmallow, but please do add the brioche.

Mail order:
World Wide Chocolate, tel 603-942-6032,
worldwidechocolate.com
(click Callebaut).
Further information and recipes:
For an almost endless array of delectable chocolate preparations,
callebaut.com
(click Recipes).
See also:
Lindt Chocolate
.

Many chefs favor dark Belgian abbey beers for beef carbonnade.

Carbonnade à la flamande
in French-speaking Belgium,
vlaamse karbonaden
in Flemish … Whichever language you’re speaking, beer is of the essence in this succulent, darkly rich and malty stew that joins meat, vegetables, and a hunk of gingerbread for a dish that is a satisfying multicourse meal in a pot.

Belgium produces an array of complex wheat-and barley-based beers, many of them sweet and some flavored with fruit, such as Kriek, with its winey overtones of sour cherries. For this stew, the wisest choice would be the dry and complex Duvel; its deeply smoky flavors mellow the meaty essence of tender beef chuck (or, for more exotic tastes, wild boar, a game meat that is much loved and well prepared in Belgium, as well as in Holland).

Cut into 2-inch cubes and dredged in flour, the meat is lightly seared in butter among softening onions and garlic, with bay leaf, thyme, and peppercorns, before simmering gently in a bath of beer and beef stock. When the meat is falling-apart soft, the stew is thickened and mellowed with a crust of spicy brown gingerbread that disintegrates in the sauce. Balancing doses of brown sugar and red wine vinegar are gradually stirred in.

Although
pommes frites
are usually served alongside the dish, mashed or boiled potatoes are more useful sops for the luscious gravy; red cabbage cooked with sour apples would also not go amiss. Obviously, beer is the thing to drink, preferably the same one used in cooking.

So beloved is this dish in the Flemish kitchen that it is difficult to imagine any so-called Belgian restaurant, anywhere in the world,
not
offering beef carbonnade on its menu. Economical and restorative—especially in winter—the stew is also a boon to the home cook as an easy-to-serve, easy-to-time company dish that lends itself especially well to advance preparation.

Where:
In Brussels
, Aux Armes de Bruxelles, tel 32/2-511-5598,
auxarmesdebruxelles.com/en
;
in the U.K.
at several locations, Belgo,
belgo-restaurants.co.uk
;
in New York
, Petite Abeille at several locations,
petiteabeille.com
; Markt, tel 212-727-3314,
marktrestaurant.com
;
in Washington, D.C.
, Belga Café, tel 202-544-0100,
belgacafe.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook
by Ruth Van Waerebeek and Maria Robbins (1996);
saveur.com
(search carbonnade flemish beef and beer stew).

Say it in Flemish (
gemberkoekjes
) or say it in French (
biscuits de gingembre
). By any name, these rectangular, crackling-thin, peppery cookies are teasingly addictive—and they’re among the very few packaged cookies that really retain crispness and freshness and seem convincingly homemade.

The pungent cookies’ high quality speaks to the company behind them: Jules Destrooper NV, also bakers of other
klein koekjes
—small cakes, some waffled, others mellowed with almonds or cinnamon, but none quite as special as these gingery, parchment-thin wafers. Spices were apparently an obsession of the company’s founder, who traveled to Africa and the Far East gathering exotic spices to enhance his baking hobby before opening his first biscuiterie in 1886. Among ingredients such as flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, salt, and ginger extract, these fragile cookies develop their nicely stinging, peppery essence from high-quality powdered ginger zapped with flecks of jewellike, pale golden candied ginger root.

As difficult as it is to keep from eating every ginger thin in sight once that fetching blue-and-white box has been opened (encouraged, no doubt, by the skinny cookies’ attractively low calorie count), it’s a good idea to reserve a few. It would be a shame not to have any left for nibbling with a cup of hot tea, or to crumble over vanilla ice cream. Those
given to cookie construction might consider carefully spreading the thins with the merest veneer of whipped cream cheese or soft lemon curd. Or, the experimentally inclined could serve a few alongside a bowl of thick and creamy pea soup that just might profit from a spark of ginger and a subtly sweet crispness.

Mail order:
amazon.com (search jules destrooper ginger thins).
Tip:
Like all packaged butter cookies, gemberkoekjes taste best after being unwrapped and left to sit on a plate for about ten minutes before they are eaten.

Endives baked with ham and cheese.

Americans call it endive, Europeans say chicory. In French it’s
chicorée de Bruxelles
, and in Flanders it is
witloof
, or “white leaf.” Whatever it is called, the ivory stalk is generally thought of as Belgian, although it’s now grown in many other places using a technique that’s been in practice since Roman times, when white was considered a premium color for food.

To this day, to enhance the endive’s pale hue and satiny sheen, farmers plant its young roots in cellar-caves, or under coverings of sand, soil, or cardboard. The idea, as with white asparagus (see
listing
), is to prevent light from reaching the leaves, lest they turn green as chlorophyll develops. Apparently, the trick was rediscovered by accident in 1830 in Belgium, when the director of a botanical garden uncovered forgotten roots that had sprouted yellow-tipped leaves.

Some of us know endive leaves, with their gently bitter flavor and mildly crisp texture, mainly as a raw component in our salad bowls, but in many parts of Europe they are braised, sautéed, or baked. Among the most elegant preparations may be the French-Belgian dish
endive au jambon sauce Mornay.
Dabbed with butter and baked under parchment until they begin to soften, the split endive sheaves are then wrapped in ham—preferably the mildly salty, meaty product from Ardennes in Belgium. Laid out in a gratin dish, the wrapped endives are topped with a rich Mornay sauce, which combines cream, egg yolks, and Gruyère and Parmesan cheeses, then all is glazed to molten gold under the broiler.

Further information and recipes:
The French Chef Cookbook
by Julia Child (2002);
memoriediangelina.com
(search chicons au gratin).
Tip:
When purchasing endives, look for firm, solid sheaves with bottoms that are white and firm, not damp, soft, or brown. Trim the leaves close to serving time, as the edges will brown where they have been cut.

Some consider moules frites to be Belgium’s national dish.

To anyone unfamiliar with Belgium’s elegant French-informed cuisine, the phrase
moules frites
might raise expectations of fried mussels. But the
frites
here refers to the accompanying slender, crunchy, golden-brown
pommes frites
—the true French fries for which Belgium is famed. As for the mussels, the shiny, purple-black, oblong bivalves with a toothsome, chewy meat and a salty-sea flavor are simmered up in a bath of white wine or one of the distinctive Belgian wheat beers, seasoned with shallots, garlic, and parsley in the style of the French
moules marinières.

Long a mainstay of French cuisine—mussels have been gathered on the French bay of l’Aiguillon since at least 1235—in France they are employed in countless ways both homey and haute. But it is the neighboring Belgians who have elevated mussel-eating to an art form. Their access to a corner of the ice-cold North Sea means a harvest of the freshest, most flavorful mussels, and their unparalled frites are thrice-fried to a state of crunchy perfection in fresh vegetable oil. Traditionally served in grease-absorbing paper cones, they are dipped into a pungent, lemon-and-mustard-zapped mayonnaise (a big surprise to ketchup lovers) for a dripping, slurping, utterly delicious affair.

Possibilities abound here, and the original moules marinières is only the beginning. Now mussels are steamed in broths that are curried, tomato based, or even infused with Southeast Asian flavors of lemongrass, cilantro, and Thai basil. Despite many successful creative efforts, the original truly remains the best.