Belgdar

For a Jew, I have no Jewdar. For a native New Yorker and longtime student of French, I have no gaydar. What I do have, however, is Belgdar.

This afternoon, I decided to make the best of needing to go allll the way to Rite-Aid (success, at last!), up the various hills on the bike, and stop by Bon Appetit, which is in the same mawl as the Rite-Aid, to get more Dutch sprinkles, maybe check out the Passendale selection.

And sure enough, at the cheese counter, I see a man who I immediately put together must be the Belgian responsible for the pervasive Belgian-ness of the ostensibly Franco-gourmet establishment. Was it the glasses? The accent? The proximity of Passendale? Whatever the case, I figured if anyone in any shop in the U.S. would know where to find Sirop de Liège, the elusive Belgian syrup Jo and I are always bringing back in our luggage, this was the guy.

He of course knew immediately what I was talking about, and they'd apparently stocked it there for years, but it's no longer exported to the U.S. What they have now, he explained, is the Dutch version, which instead of being apple and pear, is just pear. There was something in his tone that told me that the Dutch version would be adequate but a disappointment. This, in turn, confirmed for me that the establishment's Low Countries influence is indeed Belgian, rather than Dutch. Further confirmation. Further still.

There is probably no skill in this world more useless than the ability to spot a Belgian, and please, save the cracks about getting a PhD in the humanities. But this is, it seems, a skill I have.

A failure as a Parisian

During my sortie temporaire from the library, I managed to:

-Eat two (Passendale!) sandwiches - the lunch I'd packed - one on a bench, one while walking down the street.
-Drink a café de la semaine (aka drip coffee) from Starbucks, also while walking down the street, although not at the same time as eating the sandwich.
-Purchase John Frieda anti-frizz conditioner, as opposed to something medicinal-sounding from the pharmacy.
-Not use even close to the entire two hours allotted for a sortie temporaire for my lunch.

Passendale

I just got back from vacation, first a week with Jo in the five-star Parisian hotel known as the dorm, then a weekend trip to visit his family in the country with no government but seriously amazing bread. Bread so delicious that Jo's mother packed me some to bring back to Paris. Yes, it's that good.

If you like food, I highly suggest finding a significant other from or a job in Belgium. Family gatherings center around pie and, of course, chocolate. No kitchen is complete without a deep fryer. Coffee comes with at least a chocolate if not also a cookie. And, when you walk into a supermarket at 11:30am, you're greeted with Leffe and Maredsous representatives offering tastes of their beers. This following a week of steak (more on that for another post) and I'm starting to see the appeal of those celebrity detox juice diets. Or more accurately, I now see the months of bread and cheese, pasta and bags of Florette arugula before me as refreshing, not dreary and repetitive. This is, I think, the best result of a culinary vacation, the sense of joy at having eaten well, paired with the sense of relief one's stomach feels at a return to the basics.

My favorite food in Belgium, as everyone seems to find amusing, is a cheese called Passendale. The name sounds Welsh to me, but is apparently a town with significance in Belgian history. And with its very own cheese museum. (Slight NSFWness on one of the cheese museum pages, because European websites can have random topless women, even websites for cheese museums, apparently.) Passendale can be purchased from an actual kaaswinkel, but I'm (more than) content with the sliced, packaged kaas, and see no need to cultivate fancier or schmancier tastes. What is Passendale? It's a bland yet delicious, rubbery in a good way kind of cheese with small holes, but not quite like Swiss cheese, either. It seems to be completely unavailable in Paris; my one attempt at getting a cheese that at least looked like it ended, as cheese purchases rarely do for me, with my throwing it out. Wikipedia, however, claims France is positively swimming in the stuff. (I'm now curious about Tilsit - I always go for the weirder cheeses, and need to move on to exploring the less moldy varieties.) And the website of a nearby upscale cheese shop seems, if not to have Passendale, to at least acknowledge its existence. Sacrilege or not, my quest for non-French cheese in France shall continue.