There is a secret truth known to only a very few elite travelers that one of, if the most, exciting aspects of visiting a new area is to be found in scoping out, locating and wandering the aisles of the native grocery stores.
Who among us hasn’t approached that one supermall in Belgium with goose bumps, knowing full well of the orgy of chocolate filling an entire aisle, most of it cheaper than a grab bag of stale candy corns back at Becker’s.
How about sniffing your way through the dairy coolers in a French superstore?
Exploring the hanging ham racks in Spain’s finer food shops?
Pinching the plump offerings in Italian vegetable markets?
Bathing in the yeasty heat of a German bakery as you finger the warm pretzels you just bought?
Plumbing the briny depths of Sweden’s fish and porn bunkers? Okay, I didn’t go to Sweden, but my wife and daughter did, and although they never said anything about a fish and porn bunker, I am 50-60% sure that they have them. Maybe not together, and maybe not in the same store, but they have them. You know the Swedes.
In Holland, the big excitement for my family was brown sugar.
Brown sugar is not common in Germany. Oh, they have a kind of sugar you can buy, and it’s brown all right, but it’s crystalline and granular, like the snow conditions at a cheap downhill ski resort in March when the snow machines are running full time. We needed the kind of brown sugar that is fine and tiny grained, but clumps together like wet sand. This is the kind of sugar you would need also if you were hoping to enjoy a mess of Chocolate Chip Banana Bran Muffins or Chocolate Chip cookies.
You might also be saddened to learn that Germany is equally deficient in chocolate chips as well, although that is not the same kind of hardship. A highly acceptable response to chocolate chip deficit is to buy one of those dark Euro chocolate bars, chop it up roughly, eat the hunter’s portion, then throw the rest into your batter as if it was a bag of President’s Choice semi-sweet and you’re all set.
But without brown sugar, you might as well not even bother.
The Dutch, however, they understand a Canadian family’s needs.
We learned this on the way home from England.
Passing through a town called Venlo on the Hollish-Germish border, I remember Mark telling me that, under dire circumstances along the lines of a canned pork and bean craving or a deep yearning for prepackaged foods (not popular in The Germ), a trip to Venlo’s mall sized grocery store was much in order.
And having just been in England for two weeks, I had an itch for peanut butter.
If you lived in the greater Dusseldorf area, peanut butter was not easy to get in reasonable quantities.
There was, in the average food shop, a small jar, slightly larger than a urine sample container, although much more appealing.
As you know, the average European considers peanut butter grotesque, a vile epitome of all that is wrong with America, not including the President. Laden with icing sugar, sweeter than I like it, those tiny sample jars were also expensive, and buying it guaranteed a cashier would give you the hairy eyeball.
Would the Dutch, famed for their tolerant society, stock their shelves with the stuff? Would they have it in containers large enough to cover more than one slice of toast per jar?
The answer was yes.
But that was not the most fascinating aspect of our excursion into Venlo’s enormous grocery mall.
It was the candy.
I have put a lot of different things in my mouth.
When I was four, I picked up old cigarette butts that the teenage neighbor kid just dumped out on the freshly oiled gravel of John Street, and then I smoked them. Well, pretended to.
When I was nine, I tried to live off the land like the natives and eat the soft bark inside a birch tree. And the curled up green disk in the bottom of a dandelion puff. And grass. And a lot of not particularly tasty things that grew in and around my yard.
When I was fourteen, I got half of Catherine’s A.B.C. gum (not really caring whether or not it still had any flavor left) at twelve thirty five and chewed it until three o’clock, feeling increasingly a most likely one-sided intimate connection with Catherine with every chew.
When I was twenty one, I ate sea urchin sushi (heinous, don’t even bother).
But I can’t remember putting much of anything in my mouth that was as offensive to the inside of my mouth as the triple extra super salted whatever else they were called drupjes masquerading as candy.
Drupjes (pretend it rhymes with puppies but WAY less cute and not nearly as tasty) are supposed to be a treat. They’re sold everywhere Dutch people could potentially gather, and come in a myriad number of shapes, sizes and formulations. For no reason I can come up with, these drupjes are sold in the candy sections of stores, right beside edible products such as chocolate and gumballs. Most of the drup that I have seen look like the petrified droppings of some small woodland creature. If only they tasted as good.
Do you know that feeling just before you throw up where your mouth is awash in a sudden rush of saliva much more viscous and plentiful than normal? That’s the feeling of having one of these drupjes in your mouth, only you have to imagine a chewing tobacco/anise flavoured salt lick accompaniment to this pre-vomit. You simply can’t spit the triple salted ones out fast enough to mitigate the havoc they are capable of wreaking on the tender interior of the human face.
It’s true that most drupjes aren’t that brutal, they’re just nasty and somewhat nauseating. Some are okay, but nowhere near flavourful, and then there are a bunch more that aren’t really that awful, and they could almost be construed as being vaguely similar to candy, assuming you really, really like black licorice.
We made a wide berth around the drup (I had so utterly frightened the children that they held their noses as we ran past the bulk candies) on our way to the general area of the cookies, where I imagined fingering a huge variety of spekulaas and butter cookies. There on the top shelf was something called stroopwaffel.
I took that name to be a reference to both syrup and waffles. Each cookie was a thin disk of very dense, almost unbearably sweet caramel honeyish syrup that is thick and viscous and locked into a latticework layer of wafers. This thick syrup can be seen semi-hardened on the sides of the cookies in the package, like darkened amber, sweetly free of the petrified husks of prehistoric insects, waiting to be softened with the correct application of heat.
We had to buy them in order to find out.
After loading up our poor little Ford Fiesta with bag after bag of Dutch booty, we screamed back to Meerbusch and lit up the tea pot.
Using her great knowledge of science and vectors and stuff, my wife had correctly calculated that each stroopwaffel was the perfect size to be place across the top of an average sized teacup.
Under the cookie, powerful Bernoulli currents of heated air flow upward where they are trapped under the dense wafers, unable to escape.
The cookie very quickly begins to sag with the weight of the syrup as it liquefies, and if you were an adult, you would immediately lunge at the cookie and find out how fricking delicious are. If you were a child, you would sit and watch as the cookie sags until it falls apart in your tea and becomes a gooey mess.
After you eat a stroopwaffel, there follows a vague feeling of unease.
Is it a sugar mad craving for another cookie, or is it a hot rush of glucose driven nausea?
There is only ever one way to find out.
Luckily, Holland is only forty minutes away.
delicious stroopwaffely goodness
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