While I hold Britain's culinary masterpieces close to my heart - Angel Delight, bread and butter pudding, Marmite - there's no denying that our biggest contribution to world cuisine is demonstrating how many different vegetables can be boiled for a long time.
Now of course I live in continental Europe, and French-speaking Europe at that! The French, as we know, gave the world all the meals, and the Belgians followed this up by inventing chocolate. Or, at least, stealing it from Africa. The gastronomique delights awaiting me here would surely be endless.
Two such marvels entered my consciousness and then my mouth this week. The first was a packet of crisps. Like all right-thinking people, salt and vinegar has always been the best, closely followed by prawn cocktail and the more left-field tomato ketchup. But as Pete and I stood at the tram stop today, our eyes were drawn to a billboard for frites-flavoured crisps! Yes, crisps that taste like chips! Or chips that taste like fries, for my American readers.
What's more, they come in two varieties - frites with mayo, and frites with Andalouse (a classic Belgian spicy mayo). What's even more, Pete and I picked up packets of both at our local supermarket!
A special tasting was arranged, around the kitchen table. Results were...intriguing. The mayo one did taste like mayo, in that comfortingly fatty way, but given both a crisp and a chip share the common progenitor of a potato, it's hard to tell whether one tastes like the other or simply is the other. A question for the philosophers there.
To wash down these sauteed sensations I was lucky enough to see a bottle of Belgian beer I fancied (those supermarket geniuses placing beer opposite crisps on the same aisle). Made by a local brewery called Brewksel, this was a fine, crisp, unfiltered wheat beer apparently improved by the addition of brussels sprouts. Sprouts have been in Europe since the 5th Century (see comment about boiling vegetables to death, above) but started being produced around here in the 13th, hence the geographical name (though, naturally, within city limits we just call them sprouts). Could someone have actually turned this long-despised mini cabbage into a delicious brew?
No, not really. If it didn't have it on the label I'd not have guessed brussels had come anywhere near this Brussels beer. Perhaps there was slightly more farting than usual after I'd consumed it, but other than that - or because of it - I won't be returning for a second bottle.
So that's one hit and one miss for Belgian high cuisine so far! Next on the Davies tasting menu: the Lunchwaf.
The promise.
The reality!
Whatever they tasted like, there was no question about whether Pete would finish them.
And some things are just too awful to contemplate.
