Tag: sausage

Amsterdam #3: Adventures in Croquettes

The last time I was in Amsterdam, I made quite a few great food discoveries. This time…I guess there was no more to discover?

My eating despair could be summarized in my last dinner. I was staying at the Lloyd Hotel. The menu is very straightforward (see Post #1): headings for ‘Eggs’ and ‘Fried’, with one- or two-word descriptors. I used to rail against overwritten menus, but now I see they’re useful for stimulating the appetite.

I ordered “arugula salad” and “sweetbreads.” The waiter cocked his head slightly, then nodded and walked off. A bit later, the salad arrived. Two minutes later, along came a small plate with two croquettes.

I’ll pause here to explain croquettes (kroketten) a little bit. They’re wads of really thick white sauce with some unidentified bits of meat, shaped into a bloated-Vienna-sausage form, then rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried. Kids and old people put two of them on a fluffy white roll and call it a sandwich. I’ve had good ones, and I’ve had horrifying ones.

Last spring, I noticed the Spanish eat them too. I assumed they were a French thing. But I met a French woman on this trip who shuddered at the mere mention and said that in France, croquette means ‘dog biscuit.’ I surmise the kroket–croqueta link was forged back when Spain ruled the Netherlands. Maybe the various Old Master painters who went to Spain to pain for the court brought the fried nuggets back? Gastro-historians, please investigate.

So I thought these croquettes I received with my salad were some kind of comped appetizer, even though the Dutch don’t play that game. I ate them, and waited. And waited. Eventually, I realized I was full anyway, and hauled myself off to bed to digest.

I would write some funny kicker here, but it seems more accurate to leave it as is, on that fairly dismal note.

Six utterly uninspiring words:

Sausages in the train station HEMA. Are these meant to be brought as hostess gifts? This particular type of sausage was memorialized on a postage stamp recently, by the way.

Well, at least the liquorice isn’t a total loss. Hey–what?!

Earlier:
Amsterdam #1: Photos
Amsterdam #2: Two Examples of Dutch Literalism

RG goes XXX! ¡Solo Adultos!

So I was reading this Mexican porn comic book that Tamara picked up at Hidalgo Grocery. To learn vocabulary, of course.

See, I allegedly speak a number of languages, but when it comes down to nitty-gritty street-level communication, I suck. This is because I’ve learned all of them in the classroom, and very little on the streets, and never, ever between the sheets. Oh, to have the filthy Syrian colloquial mouth of Adrienne, to have the wisdom of Maureen, who started Arabic tutoring with the specific goal of learning how to gossip, or even just to have the extemporizing talent of Tamara, who can entertain a party with a bawdy sentence memorized from the Italian phrasebook.

Instead. I’ve busied myself with verb conjugations and nuances of the subjunctive. I only happen to know that kut means “cunt” in Dutch because it’s printed in the newspaper, often in the compound word kuttelikkertje, which is the word for a lap dog. Generally, I conduct myself with utter decorum and grammatical propriety in Arabic, French, and Dutch–but that also means I don’t talk nearly as much as I’d like to.

A few years ago, I vowed it would be different with Spanish. It’s the only language I feel I have a cultural edge with, some innate instinct for, having grown up in New Mexico, where all my grade-school teachers spoke Spanish and it was a required class in sixth grade.

But I didn’t learn crucial words for genitales there, of course, nor did I learn them in Instituto Cervantes classes in Cairo, or in chipper expat immersion courses in Merida, or any of the other places I’ve studied Spanish over the years.

It’s too late for me to have a passionate fling with the guy who brings the umbrella drinks at the Tulum resort, or a coffee-break canoodle with the hot manager at Pret a Manger.

So that’s why I’m reading Mexican porn comics. And the reason I’m telling you this on my food-ish blog is that these are the words I learned today:

papayita: Imagine this fruit cut in half…
chorizo: Sausage. Duh.
aguacates maduros: Not a slang term per se, but a metaphor for the state of the aroused husband’s testicles: like “ripe avocados”

Hot, no? Grocery shopping in Mexico will never be the same…

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