Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
Hors d'oeuvre
A carefully prepared and fittingly revered asparagus adorns the cover of this book. Adriaen Coorte's raw asparagus from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam accompany this foreword. White asparagus grow underground and thus in the dark, so that they stay white. Green asparagus are cultivated above ground. Rub two asparagus stalks together. If they make a chirping or squeaking sound, they're fresh. Fresh asparagus can also be recognised by its fine white colour, its tip is firm to the touch, the base of the stem is not woody and does not yield when pinched. The stems of green asparagus are not fleshy but they retain a fresh tenderness. Le bon Dieu est dans le détail.
Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are. According to the cliché Flanders is torn between sensuality and mysticism, dithers between fat and piety: it masks its angst with Breugelian guzzling and desperately fills the emptiness of existence with the materiality of food. It's all very well to say that in Flanders people devote a great deal of attention to eating well. You'll find good restaurants everywhere in the world, but culinary culture is measured by the average quality of all that's on offer.
Then again, the Netherlands is said to have been long devoid of any real culinary culture. Was it a Calvinist contempt for the body, that eventually led to the rissole in the automat, the greasy simplicity of the meatball? After the Second World War and its notorious hunger winter the Netherlands was branded a culinary desert. ‘The smell of boiled sprouts’ evokes all that is petit bourgeois, greasy gravy and gruel the depressing back kitchen. Luckily there was always the Indonesian rijsttafel. By now, though, that desert really has been made to blossom. These days the Dutch are enjoying their food more and more, and it plays an increasingly important part in their lives.
If cooking and eating don't yet quite rate as art, art has always fed on food; so in this yearbook you will find pillars plastered with ham; an installation that consists of newly crossbred kinds of chicken; a work of art that consists of ...smells and a machine which replicates the process of digestion in the human body. Think of them as amuse-gueules.
For the thirteenth time this yearbook offers you, along with the themed section on eating and drinking, an hors d'oeuvre. To stay with the eating metaphor, then, the essays by Ian Buruma and Martin Conway are about problems of digestion: how is Belgium digesting the collaboration that went on in World War II, and how did the young Buruma and the country where he grew up digest the Holocaust?
Also on the menu are Utrecht, the Dutch trade union movement and a war photo from Kosovo. And how does America go down in the Netherlands? Eat your fill from the laden tables of the Low Countries, and for dessert take another look at Coorte's asparagus: he is fascinated by surfaces, by shining, glistening skin. His asparagus stems, rudely torn from the dark earth, have resolved to stay together, like treetrunks floating downstream, like papyrus scrolls from the Library of Alexandria - and like the articles from this yearbook.
We wish you a tasty and spicy Low Countries and good digestion for body and soul, for heart and mind. And for the drinkers among you a glass of the noble barley brew (from Heineken to Duvel and Geuze): Santé, proost, prosit, here's to you, iechyd da, sláinte, cheers.
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