An antisocial Christmas, and a forage-free new year

It’s dark. It’s blustery. It’s freezing. It’s Chicago. This time of year reminds me of a cup of coffee. Coffee weather. Not quite winter yet, but summer is already something that allegedly happened months ago and may conceivably happen again in five months time, and in the meantime deep winter is looming. 

In-between weather is what it is right now. November weather. Melancholic weather. Coffee weather. I’ve always thought of coffee as a melancholic drink. Back in the old days when I could still drink coffee at night it would always be late and I would always be by myself listening to late night classical music on the radio. Or daytime coffee in a little corner cafe, staring at the wet sidewalk outside through the steamed up window. My coffee memories are always in black and white, like a New Wave French movie where even the food is in black and white. And everything is seriously, painfully, melancholic. Of course it is.

Anyway, here I am, sitting at my dining room table in Chicago, staring out the window, a steaming cup of Vienna roast in front of me, trying to remember when last I wrote a column. Probably more than a year ago. Thing is, I can’t even remember what memorable food experiences I’ve had since, if any. To clarify, I’m talking about dining out here. I don’t really want to write about my own cooking because I just kind of plod along in the kitchen, nothing spectacular. 

I find being in a fancy restaurant so annoying and stressful that I hardly notice the fussy tweezer food. I’m just too busy sulking.

Why am I writing a food column, you may ask. Justifiably so. This always happens to me. Oh god. So what the hell am I going to write about? Okay well, I did actually eat in two very very fancy restaurants during the summer and I thought both experiences sucked. The food was probably okay but I find the whole experience of being in a fancy restaurant so annoying and stressful lately that I hardly notice the fussy tweezer food. I’m just too busy sulking. 

I don’t really want to be taken on a journey when I walk into a restaurant, neither do I care all that much about the concept or philosophy behind the food. That should be between the chef and the stove, and I don’t want to know about it. So nothing to report about my dining out experiences, seeing as I can’t even remember what the hell I ate. 

I’d never cut it as a restaurant critic. I don’t know how they do it. I would never be able to sit through fancy meal after fancy meal. Not to mention having to endure food fads and high concept menus. The current trend of course is heritage grains and foraging bossies and seaweed. Heritage grains are really big. I recently read something in Eat Out suggesting rice originated in Africa. Not true. But who cares? Why is origin so important suddenly?

I like plain old fashioned home cooking, the way they cooked when jus was still called gravy.

 

And little puddles on your plate are still a thing. With a little Asian something thrown in. Oh god, I’m just so over that kind of thing; speaking of things. Life is too short and to be honest, I like plain old fashioned home cooking, the way they cooked when jus was still called gravy. And I’m really okay with not having foraged stuff on my plate.

And don’t even mention Slow Food. The Slow Food movement is for Italian intellectuals and wealthy architects sporting goofy glasses making a fetish out of “local” ingredients that normal people actually don’t have access to, and cooking them slowly, or however they cook them, but you can bet your ass it’s superior to the way you or I would cook them. It’s essentially “peasant” cooking for the elite and part of a discourse that the likes of you or me are excluded from. What is it with architects and weird glasses anyway? Never mind.

Speaking of architects, it was our turn to host last Christmas, so the whole in-law family descended upon us and of course overstayed their welcome by at least a week. Every corner of the house was occupied by an in-law with their nose deep in an electronic device, so what’s the point of even visiting? What was a miserable old grump like me to do? 

Social media has taken the fun out of being antisocial.

 

I mean good god, if we’re all going to be anti-social, let’s at least do it to each other’s faces and have some fun while we’re at it. Social media has totally taken the fun out of being anti-social. And I think social media has done the same to cooking in a way. Suddenly everyone with a phone is a Master Chef. But statistics show that people are actually cooking less, not more.

Back when I learned to cook (not from my mom, by the way, she hated cooking), recipes were hard to come by. I’m talking late seventies here. Cookbooks were scarce. I knew some privileged people who travelled overseas and came back with swanky leather jackets, fancy shoes and sometimes, cookbooks. Not me. I had to try to borrow scarce cookbooks and then copy the recipes in longhand. There was no other way to find out about foreign cooking, except to travel, which I couldn’t afford. Being knowledgeable about food meant something back then because one had to make a huge effort. It was fun. It was special. In a way it was also an elitist kind of thing. Now it’s just part of the noise.

Where was I? Okay so there I was knocking around the house, wallowing in my black mood when I suddenly had a brilliant idea. I’d just that morning read a review of my favourite artist, Anselm Kiefer, who was having a retrospective in Rotterdam. And my son Willem (feeling equally despondent and trying not to knock into me as we were rattling about the house) is studying architecture and would love all the innovative new architecture and urban design in Rotterdam. And Antwerp, just down the road with all its Art Deco buildings?

Willem loves Art Deco. Come on, art, architecture, Antwerp, Rotterdam, what’s not to like about my brilliant idea? Except it’s in Northern Europe in the middle of winter, my wife Jill pointed out when I mentioned my brilliant plan. She has a way of cocking her eyebrow that makes me feel that I should just cut the crap and crawl back under my rock. But hell, I’m an Afrikaans boy from the wrong side of Pretoria with a thick skin so it just bounced off me. And to clinch the deal, flights and accommodation turned out to be dirt cheap, so two days later Willem and I were on the train on our way to the airport. 

We landed in Amsterdam at six in the morning on New Year’s day, and Schiphol Airport was totally desolate. We were the only people in the immigration line, the sleepy official glaring at us with suspicion when we stated “vacation” as the purpose of our visit. It’s the middle of the bloody winter. Vacation? Cocked an eyebrow at me. Second time in days. This is becoming a habit with people, I thought to myself. I politely pointed out that we were from Chicago where it actually gets really cold. Ah, yes, okay, so after a sympathetic glance, he waved us through. 

Next we found ourselves on a two-hour ride to Antwerp, on a train that was mostly empty. The conductor kept walking through our deserted carriage and warning us not to leave our bags in the luggage rack above our seats because gypsies go around the carriages stealing luggage from naive witless tourists, such as ourselves. And we kept reassuring him that we would secure our luggage the moment we spotted shady types sporting eye patches, earrings and bandanas or whatever Gypsies wore sneaking into our empty carriage. He would then give us a dark “don’t say I didn’t warn you” look and skulked off muttering things about stupid American tourists. Willem sounds American because he is American, after all. Twenty minutes later he would be back, pointing at our luggage in the luggage rack, nodding darkly. Well, we made it to Antwerp, our luggage intact.

That was the good news. The bad news was that at noon on New Year’s day in Antwerp everything was closed. Restaurants, supermarkets, everything. And it was freezing and drizzling ice. Our little rental apartment right by the State Theatre of Flanders was cute, though, with a tiny little kitchen and a two-burner stove top. No oven. I have a thing about cooking when we travel because I find browsing around and cooking stuff from unpretentious local supermarkets is the best way to understand a foreign city. 

Anyway, that’s my idea of local food, not quite high cuisine style “locally sourced”, but plenty local for me. Having access to a kitchen when traveling also saves money because if I cook breakfast and dinner, lunch is the only meal we eat out. An added bonus, mind you, is that I can’t stand eating breakfast out. Seeing a bunch of bleary eyed people masticating and slurping coffee first thing in the morning just doesn’t do it for me. Problem was, said supermarkets were closed on New Year’s so we spent our first day surviving on beer and bar snacks. Can’t have everything, right?

For Art Deco architecture, try Transvaal Straat. Yes, there is still a Transvaal Straat in Antwerp.

 

Of course, surviving on beer in Belgium is not exactly a problem. If you think the Czechs are beer obsessed, you obviously haven’t been to Belgium. And I must say, Belgian beer surpasses any beer I’ve tasted anywhere on my travels. It’s just in another league altogether. At home I’m not much of a beer drinker although there are excellent beers available in Chicago. I’d much rather settle for a whiskey or a glass of red wine. But in Antwerp I couldn’t help myself, and I wasn’t the only one. Everybody drank beer. It’s just what they do there. You drink beer. Good thing Antwerp is a walking city so people tend to walk off all the beer. 

So Willem and I settled into a routine of wandering around in the freezing drizzle looking at art and architecture for a few hours or until our noses started turning blue, then we would find a cozy pub to rest our feet, dry out and enjoy a glass of beer. (Hint; for Art Deco architecture, try Transvaal Straat. Yes, there is still a Transvaal Straat in Antwerp.) Willem totally fell in love with Lambic Kriek, or cherry ale, which was on tap everywhere, even the Art Museum cafeteria. 

Actually, I rarely saw anyone drinking bottled beer. Typically, most of the beer is on tap and unbelievably fresh. My favorite was De Koninck, called Bolleke by the locals, referring to the spherical glass it is always served in and sort of the iconic beer of Antwerp. If you walk into a pub and ask for a beer you’ll get a Bolleke. Unfortunately it’s not readily available outside Belgium. Actually, fresh Lambic on tap is also nearly impossible to find outside Belgium. Perhaps that’s why those Belgian beers taste so wonderful, they’re always on tap and fresh. Bottled Lambic is available in America but once you’ve tasted it on tap in Belgium, it’s just not the same thing.

Left: Willem with the famous Antwerp Bolleke. Right: Transvaal Straat, Antwerp. (Photos: Chris Pretorius)

As fantastic as the beer was, the supermarkets were a total letdown. There were four within walking distance of our apartment and they all kind of sucked. Most of the meat was frozen and the so-called fresh meat was all plastic wrapped and looking pathetically grey and dismal. Same with the wilted, bruised fruit and vegetables, all wrapped in plastic. Those four basically accounted for all the supermarkets in Antwerp Central, and a lot of people live in the Central area. Did they have a secret source that I was unaware of? Perhaps they all went out foraging for tasty weeds on the banks of the river Scheldt and hunted squirrels? Did they just not care about cooking with decent ingredients? Unless they didn’t actually cook from scratch all that often? What was I missing? Maybe all the better supermarkets were in the suburbs? 

Left: Our apartment and convenient local, Antwerp. Right: The writer casting a sceptical eye over the meat section, Antwerp. (Photos: Chris Pretorius)

So I just had to make do with what was on hand, and it still was a hell of a lot cheaper and more relaxing than eating out every night, and perfectly tasty. Like camping cooking, when even canned baked beans and Bully Beef heated over a gas flame can taste sublime. And it’s quite cozy cooking in a tiny strange kitchen in a tiny strange apartment in a strange city after a long cold wet day. A shot of whiskey or two helps, of course. There was actually a fancy butcher in the city centre but the meat didn’t look all that spectacular to a South African Mid-Westerner, and it was also outrageously expensive. So I thought screw it, I’ll stick to little plastic packets of grey meat — plus, after all, the whole point was not going fancy, wasn’t it? We survived.

Unfortunately the supermarkets in Rotterdam were not much better. They may have even been worse. Don’t these Low Country dwellers have any tastebuds? I mean, what the hell. And we got off to a bad start because little did I know that Rotterdam supermarkets, and I mean all of them, don’t accept American Express, Visa or Mastercard. The only card they accepted was some local card that I’d never heard of. So cash only. Of course I didn’t have enough cash on me. Now I’ve been to Amsterdam many times and I really don’t remember it being an issue there, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, which is quite possible. So there we were at the checkout counter, an impatient line of customers behind us and no way to pay. Of course the ATM in the supermarket also rejected my credit card. Why wouldn’t it?

So after the staff reassured us that they would hold our groceries we went scouring the windy icy streets looking for an ATM that would accept a normal credit card. The first two we found were out of order, of course, so by the time we got back to the supermarket they were about to close and of course nobody had any knowledge of the groceries they had promised to set aside for us. So we went charging through the isles, grabbing stuff at random and just made it before they closed down the checkouts. Huffing and out of breath, I was like, okay, here’s cash. What you wanted, isn’t it? You like cash? Well here it is. Cash. Take it. Nice cash. Take your cash. Here’s cash, go for it! Cashy cashy! I was feeling a little pissy, to say the least.

On the bright side, among the things I grabbed in my mad dash down the isles were a packet of lightly smoked eel and a bottle of Oude Jenever, or old Dutch gin. Suddenly things were looking up again. Our tiny new apartment was in the centre of Rotterdam, perfectly cute with a tiny kitchen, possibly even tinier than the one in Antwerp. I was becoming quite the gourmet chef on two burner stove tops, packaged colourless sorry looking meat, wilted bruised vegetables and all. And definitely the Jenever helped. 

Americans just don’t eat eel. They don’t eat mackerel either, apparently it’s too fishy. Of course it’s fishy. It’s a bloody fish.

But back to the eel. To Willem’s dismay, I had it for breakfast the next morning and it was delicious. Finished the whole packet. He wouldn’t come near it, or me, for that matter. He gets that same look that his mother gets when she thinks I’m being icky yucky and distasteful. Oh well. Fact is, I have a thing about eel. I love it. (I’m salivating just writing this. Torture.) And you can’t get it in America. Americans just don’t eat it. Like mackerel. They don’t eat mackerel either, apparently it’s too fishy. Of course it’s fishy. It’s a bloody fish. Anyway, I’m not talking about sushi eel. I’m talking about the eel you get in Holland and along the Baltic coast of Germany. So the next morning I dragged him back to our least favorite supermarket in the world and the scene of my tantrum the night before and bought enough eel to last me for the rest of our stay, icky yucky or not. Paid for in bloody cash, of course.

Our first stop in Rotterdam was the Markthal, the huge new covered market that has become the centrepiece of Rotterdam. And it certainly proclaims itself as ICONIC CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE the moment you turn the corner from the station and clap eyes on it. It kind of demands astonishment and awe. Statement architecture by celebrity architects. A little spitefully, I wondered if the architects were members of the Slow Food movement and wore goofy spectacles. 

Cheese stall in outdoor market, Rotterdam. (Photo: Chris Pretorius)

Inside, it was cavernous, to say the least. It reminded me of a headline I once saw in The Onion, the former Chicago satirical newspaper: “Stoner architect designs all-foyer mansion”. There were at least 30 fancy boutique cheese counters, all selling young Gouda and aged Gouda. I love Gouda, but how many stalls can you cram into one space, all selling exactly the same thing, young Gouda and old Gouda? And there were again as many boutique merchants selling Jonge Jenever and Oude Jenever with a few boutique charcuterie stalls thrown in, probably to break the monotony. After a few minutes Willem nudged me in the ribs. “I’ve seen enough”, he muttered. We headed outside to the square where the open air-market and the real action was.

And action there certainly was. Stall after stall crammed with fresh fish, meat and vegetables. And cheese, of course — it is Holland after all. It dawned on me that this was obviously where the good citizens of Rotterdam stocked up on their fresh produce, not in the dismal supermarkets, like they’ve done for centuries. And it was jam-packed. One could hardly move. So they build this multimillion-dollar showpiece Markthal as an indoor market because of the winter weather, then they stock it with boutique vendors and all the real people are actually just outside the front door in the cold weather shopping in the outdoor market. Go figure. 

Anyway, I was really tempted to start filling my backpack but then realised that lugging a backpack crammed full of fresh fish and meat for the rest of the day around art galleries was probably not a good idea. So I had to content

Paling (eel) for breakfast. (Photo: Chris Pretorius)

with stuffing my face with paling (eel) broodjes. Willem was not quite up to trying the raw paling yet so I convinced him to try a haring broodje, which he loved, to his astonishment. 

Okay, I’m not a sandwich person. American sandwiches, actually not only American sandwiches, are typically so over-stuffed with multiple ingredients and way too many condiments that the jumble of flavours cancel each other out and you end up with a tasteless unappetising mush. The exception is the Dutch broodje, and I must admit, a Parisian ham sandwich. Good ham, good bread and good butter. Done. Divine simplicity. Anything more, and it becomes something else that I’m not interested in.

A broodje being prepared, Rotterdam outdoor market. (Photo: Chris Pretorius)

Mind you, perhaps I should add the plain old boerewors roll to this list. It qualifies. After quite a few broodjes we emerged from between the market stalls and there was a cozy bar right in front of us, the warm yellow glow inside beckoning us to rest our feet and wash down the broodjes with some cold Dutch beer. Bliss.

The weather didn’t let up and we spent the rest of our time happily strolling the cold dark streets, a cranky old boy from the wrong side of Pretoria and my son, an inner city Chicago boy. We even got to see the Anselm Kiefer show, which was actually in The Hague, only about a 30-minute train ride from Rotterdam. The Kiefer show was the only major thing we did. The rest of the time we basically wandered around aimlessly, which is how I like to travel. No agenda. Also, if you can stand the weather, winter is a great time to travel because there wasn’t a tourist in sight. 

I don’t like walking around feeling like I’m trailing mud all over someone’s precious carpet, which is how Paris makes me feel.

Rotterdam was great, but I’ve really developed a soft spot for Antwerp over the years. It’s such a low-key city with a huge cultural heritage that rivals or even surpasses Paris, minus the attitude. Antwerp was where the Northern Renaissance was born. Paris is designed to intimidate, to exclude. It goes out of its way to make you feel that you’re not Parisian. You can probably tell I’m not a fan. I don’t like walking around feeling like I’m trailing mud all over someone’s precious carpet, which is how Paris makes me feel. They make good ham sandwiches though, I’ll give them that. Antwerp is much more my kind of city.

Speaking of my kind of city, back in Chicago when I got off the train from the airport I was in for a rude awakening. It was -25°C and I had only my European winter coat. No wonder the Dutch immigration dude gave us such a pitiful look. By the time I walked the few blocks home from the station I was about to go into hypothermic shock, not to mention frostbite because I also didn’t take any mittens with me to Europe. Home sweet home.

So. No more high-end cuisine for me, if I can help it. No more dining in places that call gravy jus and mention onion marmalade on the menu. High-end cuisine has become something of a spectator sport, and I’m definitely not a sports fan. The dinners I cooked on our trip were far from spectacular.

On the other hand, cooking with Willem on two burner stoves for a few weeks in a tiny kitchen was memorable, much more so than a few-hundred-dollar fancy meal by an award-winning chef. We were bonding and cooking together. Sort of, more like I was cooking and he was telling me what to do. 

But what mattered to me was that Willem cared. Isn’t that what cooking is all about, or should be all about?

Post script

Meanwhile, back home, the temperature gauge speaks for itself and, right, Hugo, descendent of Cerberus, jealously guards the stove. (Photos: Chris Pretorius)

In case you wondered what happened to Hugo The Bad Dog, descendant of Cerberus, guardian of the underworld, well, he’s still here and he still takes up position guarding the oven every night right before I start cooking. Jill thinks it’s really sweet. Me, I just trip over him a few times every night, cursing and hoping that I won’t end up with my sorry ass on the kitchen floor. I’ve tried tricking him by wandering into the kitchen going la de da and pretending to open the fridge, then making a sudden dash for the stove, to no avail. By the time I make it to the stove, he’s on his spot, challenging me with those malevolent little doggy eyes of his. Oh well. At least his presence prevents me from lapsing into cooking high cuisine. What can I do, he’s got my number. DM