No Half-Baked Tradition

couques

Every Belgian I know wrinkles their nose at the idea of couques de Dinant. “Imagine the hardest, stalest cookie you’ve ever eaten, and then multiply it by ten,” says Amélie. “You could break your teeth on them,” adds Grand-mamy. “I never quite understood the appeal…but they always showed up around St. Nicholas’.”

Ahem. That is because they never knew. That couques de Dinant should actually be eaten (degustés) like caramels—melted slowly in the mouth, not crunched into like cookies.

So you that know next time, a couque ’s anatomy comprises three essential elements: self-rising flour, honey, and sugar. It’s the proudly not-very-evolved descendant of a formless Roman biscuit called the placenta, although, yes, modern tongues have changed. No one thinks it tastes very good anymore.

Nevertheless, many believe it’s still worth making, and indeed, couques are one of Dinant’s most famous products, of its patrimoine historique. Which is why Michel Frippiart has dedicated his life to continuing their production.

“Welcome to the nineteenth century,” says Frippiart when he opens the door to his old, drafty workshop-hangar. Frippiart is only in his seventh year of couque production, but the workshop out of which he eats, drinks and breathes couque is in its two hundred and fortieth. The Collard family, whose name is still carries, passed the métier down for seven generations before selling to Frippiart in 1998.

On the wall of his office Frippiart has thumb tacked a poster of the sign that marks Wall Street in Manhattan. Underneath is a One-Way sign, and next to it is a green traffic light. He notices me looking at it, puzzled. “That’s Belgian humor, there,” he exclaims delightedly. “Completely dotty. A total counterpoint to what we’re doing here. C’est fun, non?!” Next to the poster are a melee of wooden couque molds, the ones two centuries old depicting milkmaids and bucolic pastorals, the more recent carved with the Brussels Atomium or the emblem of the Socialist Party. I have a brief moment of identification with the couque molds, and am happy about the fact that at this moment they—cracking, old, flea-bitten —find themselves in front of me instead of Wall Street. What a weird month this is turning out to be.

Frippiart makes fifteen tons of couques a year, and if that sounds like a lot, remember that industrial cookie companies can produce volumes like that in a day (although none make couques, an exclusively artisanal product—in fact, they have only one other producer, also in Dinant, and his output is even smaller). Frippiart’s assistant Eddy mixes the flour, honey and sugar together, flattens the heap with an oversized dough roller, and using metal shapes, cuts out the contour he’s looking for. He then slaps the cutout into a mold (there are over 350—teddy bears, flower baskets, Mannekin Pis, St. Nicolas, the Daewoo logo) and presses with his fingers, hard, until you can tell from the back that the dough has squished into all of the mold’s little wooden crevices. With a practiced tap, the dough falls out of the mold into his hand, and he puts it on a floured iron sheet for the oven.

The oven at Couques V. Collard dates from the twenties and takes up a whole room. A large gas flame licks at a network of tiny metal capillaries that criss-cross the oven’s skeleton, giving its flesh and insides heat. There are three levered doors that open onto separate low, vast chambers, and lots of little vents and pulley chains and thermometers inlaid in yellow tile. The couques cook for fifteen minutes, just enough time for the honey inside to caramelize without burning, the agent responsible for the world’s couque-related broken teeth. When they come out of the oven, dark brown, they’re still flexible, but they petrify quickly. Frippiart hands me a little piece to try. At first it’s like sucking on a pebble, but as it softens it turns rubbery, then chewy, then dissolves, and the taste is old, gingerbread-y. Like a hundred-year-old Christmas in your mouth.

Who buys these? I ask Frippiart. All kinds of people, he answers, plucking at a patch on his argyle sweater. The tourists buy them to bring home as gifts. Some people decorate their kitchen with them (they last forever).  Marathon runners know they get long-lasting sugars if they suck on them. And the old Dinantais show up to the workshop and buy the broken pieces at a discount, to dunk into their coffee.

We go upstairs, where the packing goes on. Beatrice is wrapping them in plastic, tagging them, passing a hair-dryer over the plastic to eliminate the wrinkles, and putting them in boxes. The calendar on the wall announces November 2002. Beatrice is efficient, but it’s an arduous process, and the machines are old.

You know Jacques Brel, the famous singer? Frippiart asks. Of course I know Jacques Brel. My parents’ 1978 wedding invitation had a quote from one of his songs on the front.* Well, his parents make the boxes the couques used to come in. Belgium is full of coincidences like these. I marvel at the faded sixties packaging. Actually seeing it makes me realize how long these rocks have been baking, centuries, always the same. It’s kind of amazing.

Once the day’s couque–making is over, we walk to the river where, in their little store, Beatrice and Frippiart will spend the rest of the day. Tourist season is way over, but in the hour or so I spend chatting with them there a number of teenagers come in to buy a couque or two, which totally surprises me. Here I learn that there’s another category of couque-buyer: corporate. Last year GlaxoSmithKline ordered ten thousand lighthouse-shaped couques to advertise a new time-release antibiotic. Message: Patients would see the light if they waited a bit.

Corporate interests merge with small business’. Weird. We shit on Industry, but ultimately, they made it possible for Frippiart—and the Bruxellois woodcarver who made the mold—to sustain the patrimoine historique of which he is so proud. How positively postmodern.

When I came back to Charleroi I was laden with couques that Frippiart had pressed upon me despite my protests: a St. Nicholas, a cat, a bag of little cubes. My grandfather, who hadn’t eaten one since childhood, popped one in his mouth. A nostalgic smile spread across his face.  “Jean-Louis, non!” said Grand-mamy, and trailed off into a litany of mumbles about blood pressure and weight gain and broken teeth and bad taste. I winked at him. “I’ll put them in your office,” I whispered. He grinned and nodded back.

Glace a la couque de Dinant
1 dl lait
200 g couque
150 g sucre sz
150 g tremoline (sucre inverti)
10 jaunes d’oeufs

1. Faire chauffer lait et couque. 
2. Faire melange avec sucre, tremoline et jaunes jusqu’a l’obtention d’un ruban.
3. Incorporer le lait, cuire a 70* C.
4. Laisser refroidir, turbiner.

 Couque de Dinant ice cream.
1 dl milk
200 g couque 
150 g sugar
150 g simple syrup (sugar-saturated water)
10 egg yolks 

1. Heat milk and couque.
2. Mix sugar, simple syrup, and yolks until a ribbon is created.
3. Incorporate the milk, cook at 70* C.
4. Let cool, then proceed to make ice cream.

* Jacques Brel quote from my parents’ 1978 wedding invitation, which I just saw for the first time last week, along with their wedding pictures:

Nous forcerons nos yeux a ne jamais rien voir
Que la chose jolie qui vit en chaque chose.
Nous forcerons nos yeux a n’etre qu’un espoir
Qu’a deux nous offrirons comme on offer une rose.

We will force our eyes never to see
Anything but the beautiful that lives in each thing.
We will force our eyes to be but a hope
That together we will offer like we offer a rose.