Wednesday Dinner

This beauty is Carl Marletti's interpretation of the classic Mont Blanc, which is a pastry of magisterial proportions of crème de marron. Angelina's look like spaghetti. If you're curious, I highly suggest clicking through Le Figaro's gallery of how those little monsters are made. You don't need to know French to drool at pictures, and maybe you'll even be inspired for Halloween next year.

Carl's--we're on a first name basis--look like sophistication incarnate. It's a very non-traditional Mont Blanc that sort of puts together all of the disparate parts (vanilla cream, chestnuts, some kind of pastry base) into a beautiful machine. Chestnut paste becomes chestnut mousse. Vanilla pastry cream becomes crème légère. A meringue base becomes a noisette biscuit.

It is modern art's answer to pastry.

I was loathe to cut into the beautiful exterior and ruin the powdered perfection, but I set about doing so with scientific precision. To appreciate all of the elements playing off one another, I delicately cut away a bite-size cross-section. It was sublime. But I didn't let it get to my head, no, lacking all but a lab coat and glasses, I proceeded to try each layer individually, pausing to slowly savor each one. 

The white creme legere, flecked with vanilla seeds, like heavenly clouds sailing onto my palate from Madagascar.

The impossibly light chestnut fluff of the middle, in which bits of perfectly candied chestnuts were hidden like little nutty bombs, like a minefield of marvels, if you will.

The crunchy contrast of the thin noisette base.

This is where I stop believing in science, right about the moment where heaven is reflected in the tiny morsel of silver foil crowning Carl's God's gift to man.

Mercifully I thought to save a bite until I'd finished writing this post.

Sweet Antwerp

Ha! And you thought I had gone all cultured on you. No, no, rest assured, I remain an equally avid sampler of desserts as of beers and ballets (new concept bar?). To return briefly to Belgium: On our last evening in Antwerp, our hosts whisked us very quickly on our bicycles to Goossens, the oldest bakery in the city, before it closed for the night. Despite my hosts' reassurances that I should see it in the morning, when the queue for mattentaarts stretches around the block, I was still might impressed by what they had on offer at seven in the evening, and with a side of the Belgian chocolates--each variety of which, naturally, we simply had to sample--I had little to complain about.

Lurking in the background of that picture are the famous Antwerpse Handjes, which take their name and shape from a charming folktale:


Once upon a time near the river Scheldt, there lived a big mean giant named Antigoon. Quite the savvy businessman, he charged every traveler wanting to cross his river, and when they refused, he cut off one of their hands and tossed it in the water. Thankfully for all the non-ambidextrous concerned, the brave Brabo arrived on the scene, Roman hero of admirable qualities but less than enviable name. In a rather literal interpretation of the golden rule, Brabo cut off Antigoon's own hand and flung it into the river, and thus Antwerp was born, its name derived from the Dutch phrase describing this delightful tradition: hand + werpen.

In hindsight, I actually took a picture of a little statue illustrating this tale, although I didn't think this was the stuff of which architectural embellishments are made. It looks like Brabo is waving. Bravo, Brabo! Now put that hand away, you sick man.

Rather than biting off the fingers of an Antwerp Hand--it's just a plain sable cookie, after all, and we're no cannibals--Sara and I decided to split a hand-sandwich, which is probably not the real name for that plate of chocolate-covered hands with chocolate fondant squished between them.

Lest you think I am neglecting completely the traditional pastries of Belgium, our hosts surprised us on Sunday morning with a plate of those very same mattentaarts we'd heard so lovingly praised the night before. And we didn't even have to queue! Although technically, only pastries made in the East Flanders city of Geraardsbergen can hold that name, since this baby is protected by UNESCO. Yes. Much like the lauded French dinner, this curd-filled puff pastry is part of Belgium's national heritage. And after having (a fake) one, I can totally get behind that. Especially since now I can justify taking another trip to Belgium to taste the real deal. Since we inhaled them too quickly to photograph, at left is Wikipedia's take on mattentaarts, although I'm not sure you should accompany them with a side of beer. Then again, everything comes with a side of beer and frites in Belgium, so who am I to judge.


Right, but, since I can't walk into a bakery and only get a cookie, we also got a cake to share after dinner. I won't tell you at what hour we ultimately ate dessert, after wobbling back home on our bicycles after the beer tour I posted about earlier. And I can't testify to the particularly Belgian qualities of the cake we picked out, as bananas don't grow in Flanders, but the marzipan encircling it is pretty authentic. And besides, who really cares about authenticity when you've just come back from a night spent tasting a dozen beers to find this little beauty waiting for you on the kitchen table?

Belgium, you rock. I rest my cake.

A Night at the Ballet

The building of the Opéra Garnier is baroque enough to cow anyone afraid of crown moldings into submission. If you're allergic to gilt--or bourgeous guilt--this is not the place for you. Get out. Or the ushers will chase you out with their €12 programs.

I, however, was cordially led to the velvet chair waiting for me in loge n° 20 and tried not to fall out of it looking at the ceiling, which was painted by Chagall. The elderly couple in front of me were reading the newspaper, as though going to the Opéra were a regular Tuesday night occurrence.

Unlike them, however, my understanding of ballet is composed of vivid sequences from Black Swan and dim memories of performing pliés in Madame Meacock's kindergarten dance class. I also regularly mix up dressage vocabulary with ballet vocabulary, which is bad because ballerinas are not horses. I don't think I've ever sat through a ballet in its entirety. Now that I have, I don't think I want to see another, at least not a traditional one.

We're somewhere between Mother Russia, a Turkish harem, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, although La Source is ostensibly supposed to take place in a desert. My understanding of the plot is a little less clear. Pretty ballerinas tiptoe in clouds of Swarovski crystals and tulle. A regiment of fur hats marches across the stage with an enormous Japanese lantern that opens up to reveal a Turkish princess. Sparkly blue men wearing paint instead of costumes kick up their heels. Puck runs in from Athens and wreaks glittery green havoc. Sad Ballerina is sad because Poor Hunter We're Supposed to Like Because He Hasn't Enough Euros to Buy New Clothes loves Japanese Lantern Girl and not her, even though Japanese Lantern Girl had him strung up in tassels and left him for dead. Sad Ballerina dies so that Japanese Lantern can buy Poor Hunter a new coat. Also, fights that leave me unconvinced of the pirouette as a viable form of combat.

In general, I think I'm just unconvinced by ballet. I feel like I'm missing the language necessary to understand the gestures of the body on stage, so it just seems false to me. Too rehearsed to be passionate, too formal to be innovative, too gestured to be credible. It's insufficiently extreme: I want it to be either so abstracted that every scene is a tableau of pure form, movement so divorced from reality as to be symbolism. Failing that, it should at least tell a convincing story, but in this case, at least, it was far too simplistic to be enjoyable. There are no justifications given for why one sparkly young ballerina deserves my sympathies, or the love of the young hunter, over another. Our sympathies are intended to fall according to wilted old tropes: the poor hunter must be good because he's poor. So instead of being psychologically rich, in this ballet, characters are defined by singular traits, some of which I find repulsive, and the ballerinas didn't dance with their partners so much as get carried around like objects (or lanterns).

What I did like: every single dance with Puck in it, the sparkly little green guy, because he and his cohorts practically bounced off the stage, they were so effervescent. And the visuals; the whole spectacle was an exemplar of visual cohesion. I wish I could have taken pictures of the stage--the decoration was truly excellent. They managed to fill up this cavernous black space with enormous tassels, falling in tangles from the ceiling or twisted together into trees. The tassel motif was even repeated in the headdresses of the traveling handmaidens, whose wardrobes I would have very much liked to steal. Although I think there was enough brocade on stage to upholster Versailles.

CUL354: Belgisch Bier

This is what you'd call an appetizer in Belgium. Granted, it's not served at the same restaurant where one eats dinner, but what're you going to do when the table you've booked isn't free for another ten minutes? Go to a bar, obviously.

It's only fair to start with the De Koninck on the left, as it's brewed right in Antwerp. The beer is so ubiquitous in the city that even the glass it's served in has a nickname; if you order a bolleke, that there on the left is exactly what you'll get. I'm pretty sure it's also cheaper than water.

Moving on in our lineup, there are two obviously Trappist ales on the table, sandwiching the Geuze in the middle, but the Orval on the right is secretly also produced by monks of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which becomes progressively more difficult to pronounce with each beer. They're a Roman Catholic order of contemplative monks who follow the Rule of St Benedict. This is important, because Chapter the 48th states that "for then are they monks in truth, if they live by the work of their hands." Which, in Belgium and the Netherlands at least, has mercifully been interpreted to mean that they should put their hands to work brewing beer.

There are only seven Trappist abbeys left of the original eight that formed the International Trappist Association, six of which are located in Belgium. All of them produce ales, which are labeled either by name (single / dubbel / tripel), label/cap color, number, or some combination of both. It is my contention that these abbeys produce the Holy Trinity of beer, and that the tripel is God. This is what Wikipedia has to say about the Rochefort 10, that dark beauty second from the right: "The alcohol profile [11.3% ABV] is a major component in the flavour of this rich ale. It is very similar to 6 and 8, but has much more of everything." Favorite beer. I rest my case.

Our final specimen is the gueuze, something I'd never heard of before my Belgian host put one in front of me. "You either love it or hate it," he said, which led me to immediately think of Marmite (which, funnily enough, is actually made from a beer by-product). Geuze is beer made from other beers: young and old lambic beers are blended together in harmony and then left to bicker for a second fermentation. It's got kind of a sour taste, a little less sweet than Breton cider and a hell of a lot less sweet than Trappist ales. For some reason it's affectionately referred to as "Brussells Champagne"--to trick the poor tourists?--and is sometimes served in the appropriate bottle. Add some sour cherries to the mix before you bottle a geuze and you have kriek, which is given the less affectionately referred to as "Belgian lemonade."

There's an expression in Belgium that there's no such thing as drinking too much, only drinking too quickly. So we were a bit more than ten minutes in getting back to the restaurant, and since we had to do all of two blocks of walking, we had to fortify ourselves with another beer with dinner. To help with digestion. Because we had a lot to digest.

This, uh, might be as good a time as any to make the rather obvious announcement that I'm eating meat now.

I won't go into all of the vagaries of why I've made this decision, but suffice it to say that it's much easier for my host family. I started rather tentatively with chicken, moved my way into little nibbles of sausage, and graduated completely during my trip in Antwerp to the big girl's table. Between the seven of us at dinner, we had the following: beef, young deer (above), wild boar (below), rabbit, and the infamous blood sausage (right). I tried them all, even the last one, and it wasn't so bad, mixed up with apple sauce. But the dish I ordered, rabbit stew, was by far the best one. The owner of the leg that gracefully adorned my plate was probably related to the bunny whose picture I took the day before.




Dining in Belgium, it turns out, has a rather chiasmatic structure: you start with beer, you have beer with some other things, and then you have some more beer. So after piling seven people onto five bicycles and picking up a waif looking for a hostel, we found ourselves in another bar. It was kind of a wreck, this bar--fake plants festooning the ceiling, a decorative witch on a broomstick flying between dangling cardboard cutouts of various beer bottles--but their menu is unbelievable. An inch of double-sided A4 sheets with a table of names. Aged beers, including one from 1987 (below, right) that I got to taste. Beers listed for 265 euros. And the barmaid's pretty cute, too.

The whole reason we came here is that wooden crate wedged into that leaning tower of booze. See those dark, unmarked black bottles? High in the mountains that house the Westvleteren Brewery, ten Trappist monks brew this mythic beer. To get your grimy hands on a crate of bottles, you have to call the abbey on their dedicated beer phone, during a designated two-week window. You take your beat-up little Peugot up the mountain at the specified hour and are given one crate per license plate number, per phone number. And then you try not to drink it all on the way down, because it is that. good. Legend has it that during the years it hasn't placed in the world beer championships, it's been because when the time rolled around for submissions, the monks shrugged their shoulders and insisted the beer wasn't ready.

Thankfully it was ready for us, and that little bottle cap is now merrily perched on my desk.