The creation of a national identity and cuisine

Appears in
Dark Rye and Honey Cake: Festival baking from the heart of the Low Countries
Dark Rye and Honey Cake

By Regula Ysewijn

Published 2023

  • About
To legitimise Belgium’s independence from the Netherlands, but especially from France, Belgium needed a collective past.
The greatest common memory is the ‘Battle of the Golden Spurs’, which happened in 1302: also known as ‘that time we beat the French oppressor’. The reality is that it wasn’t history that taught me about this, it was literature. Even my school used the story created in literature and not the history books to teach us about our history. Tricky business.

Hendrik Conscience wrote The Lion of Flanders, a romanticised tale about the Battle of the Golden Spurs. He wrote it in 1838 at a time when newly founded Belgium was looking for its identity. An identity, cultural or culinary, is something we as humans seem to need as much as the air we breathe.