What do people in Belgium eat in a day?
Belgians eat bread for breakfast, often with chocolate spread or flakes, a sandwich or soup at lunch and a warm dinner from about 18:30. Fries from the frituur, mussels, waffles, chocolate and beer are part of everyday life.
Typical dishes and their calories
Breakfast
Breakfast is sliced bread with butter and cheese, ham, jam, chocolate spread, speculoos spread or chocolate flakes, with coffee. On Sunday morning many families buy pistolets, round crusty white rolls, at the bakery, along with koffiekoeken, Belgian pastries such as a croissant at about 250 kcal.
Lunch
Lunch is usually between 12:00 and 13:00 and often simple: a filled roll from the sandwich shop and a bowl of soup. A popular filling is filet américain, raw minced beef mixed with mayonnaise, mustard and capers. Many restaurants serve a dagschotel or plat du jour, a set dish of the day at a fixed price.
Dinner
At home dinner is around 18:00 to 19:00, in restaurants from about 19:30. Stoofvlees or carbonnade flamande, beef stewed in dark beer with onions and mustard, comes with fries, and so do mussels cooked with white wine and celery, a pot of about 270 kcal, eaten from mid July to April. Ghent is known for waterzooi, a creamy stew of chicken or fish.
Starters
Garnaalkroketten, croquettes filled with tiny grey North Sea shrimp, are served with lemon and fried parsley, about 330 kcal for two. Tomate crevette, a hollowed tomato filled with grey shrimp and mayonnaise, is the summer version. At home a bowl of soup often comes first, and tomato soup with small meatballs is a family favourite.
Desserts
Belgium has two waffles: the Brussels waffle is light, rectangular and dusted with powdered sugar, the Liège waffle is dense with crunchy pearl sugar, about 310 kcal. Dame blanche is vanilla ice cream with warm chocolate sauce. The praline, a filled chocolate, was first made in Brussels by Jean Neuhaus in 1912, and a speculoos biscuit comes with almost every coffee.
Drinks
Belgian beer culture has been on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage since 2016, and each beer is poured into its own glass. A 25 cl pils is the everyday glass, while Trappist and abbey beers are stronger, often 8 to 10 percent. Coffee usually comes with a biscuit, and in Hasselt people drink jenever, a juniper spirit.
Street food
Belgium has about 5,000 frituren or friteries, and one in five Belgians eats fries at least once a week. The fries are cooked twice, often in beef fat, and served in a paper cone with mayonnaise or one of a dozen other sauces. A mitraillette is half a baguette with meat, fries and sauce, and in Brussels stalls sell caricoles, hot sea snails in broth.
Normal there, odd elsewhere
Fries come with mayonnaise, not ketchup, and they also come with mussels and with stew. Adults happily put chocolate flakes on their bread, and filet américain in a sandwich is raw beef. Mussels are skipped in May and June, before the new season starts, and bars try hard never to pour a beer into another brewery's glass.