Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

3. The Flavor of the Place: Eating and Drinking in Payottenland

58 The Flavor of the Place Eating and Drinking in Payottenland tim waterman In the time before the reign of products that are sorted, graded, carved, prepackaged, and packaged in an anonymous form where only the generic name attests their original nature, everything had flavour because everything was dangerous. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol The beauty that we see in the vernacular landscape is the image of our common humanity: hard work, stubborn hope, and mutual forbearance striving to be love. I believe that a landscape which makes these qualities manifest is one that can be called beautiful. John Brinckerhoff Jackson Belgium: Flanders and Payottenland The popular image of Flanders is of a flat and somewhat bland landscape. The north of Flanders does little to belie this stereotype . Driving south from Dunkirk, there is little topography, and what little exists is usually the result of human intervention rather than geology. The landscape also flattens out visually into the distance . Objects near and far are juxtaposed against one another Chapter Three The Flavor of the Place 59 without depth or perspective, like cut-out scenery sliding across a stage set. Flanders is famous for its towers and belfries, which gain some of their imposing nature through contrast with the low landscape. As one approaches Brussels, though, a more voluptuous landscape grows from little ripples into hills, with small towns grouped around churches, tree-lined roads, and tidy hedgerows. It is a cozy landscape with only the barest of hints that the dark forest of the Ardennes and the rusted heavy industry of Wallonia lies beyond. This area, to the west and southwest of Brussels, is an area known as Payottenland, and the coziness one sees in the approach is qualified, compromised by numerous tensions, psychological and political, that at times inscribe themselves onto the landscape. Payottenland is part of the province of Flemish Brabant, and it is inhabited by both Flemish and Walloons. Belgium is not one nation, but two: Flanders to the north and francophone Wallonia to the south. Payottenland lies on the fault line between the two. This fracture is a tectonic divide of language and culture, and its extreme and constant pressure inevitably results in seismic events in politics and prejudice. The big earthquakes are felt across Belgium and in the halls of its government, while the tremors are much smaller and the damage local: shattered glass, a lick of flame, a shadow disappearing into night. Payottenland also sits on another kind of divide, and one equally difficult to define, that of the urban fringe. It is the interface between urban and rural, a seemingly haphazard assemblage of housing, industry, and open fields. It is transected by infrastructure leading into Brussels: roads, railway tracks, power lines, canals, and the lugubrious River Senne. In this densely settled part of Europe—and Flanders has been incredibly dense since the Middle Ages—one urban fringe can often seem to blend seamlessly into the next. Despite, or perhaps because of all this, Belgians have made a virtue of the uneventful and ordinary. This is a landscape that is comfortable rather than inspirational, often pretty but rarely beautiful. Its deficits are measured mainly as pragmatic necessities, not as compromises or intrusions. 60 Learning to Taste The historic village life in the area would have been much the same as in many areas of Europe: an agrarian existence, shaped by the relationship between fields, home, market, and church. Flemish villages, as so many elsewhere, were traditionally centered around a church, which usually sits even now just opposite a café. Roads and paths lead out radially from the church. The congregation was composed of those who lived within walking distance of the center, and thus was the community defined. The radial routes into the church would have passed farms, which, like miniature castles, formed a sort of defended enclave with the house, barn, and outbuilding ranged around a yard. Farm buildings looked inward to the courtyard rather than out to the landscape, with their backs resolutely set against winds, rains, and adversity. Belgian life is still very much an interior one, focused on the creature comforts of the home and the pleasures of the table. It is still possible to find these patterns imprinted upon Payottenland . On a map, village cores are a dense knot of streets clustered around an often awkwardly, organically trapezoidal church square. Radial routes may still...