Belgium has been called a nation of gourmands rather than gourmets: a country, in other words, where "big cuisine" comes before "fine cuisine". It has been said that Belgium serves food of French quality in German quantities.[1]
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Fries, deep-fried chipped potatos, are very popular in Belgium. In Belgium you can buy fries in special places called "friteries" (Wallonia and Brussels) or "frietkot"/ "fritkot" / "frituur" (Brussels and Flanders). They are served with a large variety of sauces and eaten either on their own or in the company of other snacks as fricandelle or burgers. Traditionally, they are served in a "cornet de frites", a conic white piece of cardboard then wrapped in a piece of paper, with a good spoonful of sauce on the top. With the fries they serve many traditional fastfood products, such as frikandel, gehaktbal or kroket.
Friteries and other fast-food establishments tend to offer a number of different sauces for the fries and meats. In addition to ketchup and mayonnaise, it is common to offer many others, with popular options including .[2]
These sauces are generally also available in supermarkets. Occasionally hot sauces are offered by friteries, including hollandaise sauce, sauce provençale, Béarnaise sauce or even a splash carbonade flamande stew from an ever-bubbling pot, in the spirit of British "Chips and Gravy".
Another Belgian speciality is beer.[1] For a comparatively small country, Belgium produces a very large number of beers in a range of different styles – in fact, it has more distinct types of beer per head than anywhere else in the world. Almost every style of beer has its own particular, uniquely shaped glass or other drinking-vessel.
A number of traditional Belgian dishes use beer as an ingredient. One is Carbonade (French: the Flemish term is stoofvlees or stoverij), a stew of beef cooked in beer, similar to Boeuf bourguignon. The beer used is typically the regional speciality — lambic in Brussels, De Koninck in Antwerp, and so on — so that the taste of the dish varies. Another is rabbit in gueuze. In't Spinnekopke, Brussels, and Den Dyver, Bruges are famed for their beer cookery.
The varied nature of Belgian beers makes it possible to match them against each course of a meal, for instance:
Belgium is commonly known for its chocolate. Belgian chocolate is considered to be the gourmet standard by which all other chocolate confections are measured. Even the Swiss, known for their own high quality chocolate, imported the basic recipe from French and Belgian chocolatiers. What makes Belgian chocolate unique is the quality of ingredients (many aspects of its composition are regulated by law) and an almost adherence to Old World manufacturing techniques. Even in today's world of automation and mass production, most Belgian chocolate is still made by hand in small shops using original equipment. In fact, these small chocolate outlets are a popular draw for tourists visiting Belgium today.
Seafood pralines are popular with tourists and are sold all over Belgium. Chocolaterie Guylian for instance, makes the pralines according to the recipe from the company’s founding father Guy Foubert who created it in the Sixties. Today the praliné is still made to this same secret recipe, in the age-old traditional manner. This is a clear example that is typical for Belgian Chocolates.
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