You have to love a city that's got a street named after butter. I've just returned from a vacation in Belgium and although I'd be
lying if I said I didn't fully enjoy each and every cookie and waffle I ate as I wandered from store to store along the narrow cobble-stone street radiating off Brussels'
Grand Place, truth be told, I was just as taken by the sign displaying the street's name:
Rue au beurre/Boterstraat. Since for historical reasons roughly half the city's population speaks French and the other half Dutch (or, more precisely, the dialect of Dutch known as Flemish), signs are in both languages, as are the chalkboard menus that restaurants use to entice hungry passers-by. The dish that epitomizes Belgian cuisine is known as both
moules-frites and
mosselen-friet. If there's a contender for the national dish, it's got to be Belgium's answer to
boeuf bourgignon—but the dish appears variously as
carbonnade de boeuf à la Flamande and as
Vlaamse stoverij.
Of course I know that, on the one hand, it's simply a matter of two names for the same thing. What the Dutch call boter, mosselen, and stoverij, the French call beurre, moules, and carbonnade. On the other hand, translations of food names aren't as straightforward as you might think. If they were, why would we so automatically prefer the French names to the Dutch ones? Beurre has a panache that boter can never hope to match. But here's the rub: our English food words are much closer to the Dutch ones than to the French. We put butter on our bread just as they spread boter on their brood, and although a soupe de poisson may sound tastier than a vissoep, the vis in the soep is a lot more recognizable to us English-speakers (especially once you hear it pronounced) than poisson is.
So why are we so quick to prefer beurre and poisson? And why do we know Brussels' chief tourist destination—that central square surrounded by ornately decorated and steeply gabled guildhalls—as the Grand Place, rather than as the Grote Markt?
Because we speakers of Germanic languages (which include English and Dutch, not to mention German, Norwegian, and Swedish) have been led to believe that if it's French, it's got to be more sophisticated. Just think about the world of fashion and cosmetics; the same aura hovers over French food names as well. But do champignons a l'escargot really taste better than paddestoelen met slakkenboter? They're both just mushrooms with snail butter after all. And are crêpes really so superior to pannekoeken? Or have we just been taken in by self-proclaimed Gallic resonance?
Admittedly not as elegant as a mille-feuille, it's the chewy waffles with their not-so-hidden nuggets of pearl sugar I'm still
dreaming of. And that's
wafel, not
gaufre.
