Tweet11-12-2009 om 01:37 by Sueli Brodin

One day my son Tim told me a joke he had heard at school:

A Dutchman, a German and a Belgian are taking their lunch break together. They open their lunch boxes and let out a big sigh of disappointment:
- “Oh no, says the Dutchman, I’m so fed up with the same cheese sandwich every day! If I get another cheese sandwich tomorrow, I’ll jump off the roof!
- “Oh no, says the German, I’m so fed up with the same ham sandwich every day! If I get another ham sandwich tomorrow, I’ll jump off the roof!
- “Oh no, says the Belgian, I’m so fed up with the same peanut butter sandwich every day! If I get another peanut butter sandwich tomorrow, I’ll jump off the roof!

The following day, they meet again for lunch, open their lunch boxes, see the same sandwiches… and all jump off the roof.

At their funeral, their wives are in tears:
- “Oh it’s my fault, cries the Dutch woman, my husband told me that he didn’t want any cheese sandwich anymore but I forgot it!”
- “Oh it’s my fault, cries the German woman, my husband told me that he didn’t want any ham sandwich anymore but I forgot it!”
- “I don’t understand what happened, cries the Belgian woman, my husband always prepared his own sandwiches!”

To me, this story is telling of the love-hate relationship Dutch people seem to have with the bread sandwiches they commonly eat for lunch.

I spend at least 20 minutes every day - except on the weekend - preparing lunch boxes for my three children and husband. This means that I need to make sure to always buy enough bread and fillings, such as ham, peanut butter, cheese, or chocolate paste, jam, honey. My husband likes butter on his bread but my children don’t, so I also need to make sure not to mix up the sandwiches and lunch boxes, as it has happened a few times. And I always add some fruit in my children’s lunch boxes. The only fancy thing about the sandwiches is that I choose a tasty multi-cereal type of bread, instead the regular whole wheat kind (“volkorenbrood”), which my husband finds “dry and hard to swallow”.

My children regularly tell me that some of their comrades don’t eat their bread at school. They say that some of them even throw their sandwiches away straight into the garbage bin, “because they don’t like bread”.



One day I read a column in Dagblad De Limburger titled “School has started again!” It described the trail of small plastic bags with bread sandwiches that could be found on the bike paths leading to the various schools in Maastricht and that had been deliberately thrown away by children who preferred to buy fast food instead. When I commented upon the article with my mother in law, who lives in Dordrecht and eats bread sandwiches for lunch every day – on a plate, with knife and fork -, I expected her to share my shocked reaction, but she only smiled at my naiveté instead: “Well, this is hardly anything new, you know … and what can you expect anyway Sueli, because who wouldn’t prefer a delicious warm croquette to a boring bread sandwich?”

“So why on earth do Dutch people keep eating bread sandwiches when no one actually seems to like them?” I would often ask myself, while preparing my children’s and husband’s lunch boxes in the morning.



I recently raised the topic with a good friend from Limburg, who enlightened me on the matter.

“It’s not about the Dutch bread, Sueli,” he said, “which often tastes like rubber and can’t compete with your French baguette… It’s about what we put on it, the topping… what we call “het beleg”. And I can tell you that here in Limburg, contrarily to other parts of the Netherlands, we add a lot of “beleg” on our bread, especially when we eat it at home. In fact the traditional Limburg sandwich ("Limburgse boterham") consists of a slice of white bread, covered with “appelstroop” [a thick apple syrup spread] from Canisius [a famous Limburg apple syrup producer], on top of which we add a slice of “zwartbrood” (rye bread), with perhaps some butter or margarine on it, and then “het beleg”, which can be some “preskop” [Limburg meat specialty] with a bit of mustard, or luncheon meat, various sorts of paté or even a fried egg.”

It was an astonishing description, which made me realise once again how much I still need to learn about the region I’ve been living in for the past 15 years.

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