Our Man in the Provinces Is Looking for Merguez Sausages
He ate out several times a week, always on the lookout for the tastiest herring, most fun wine, juiciest hamburger or best meat thermometer. But six months ago, journalist Marcel Langedijk left Amsterdam. Too dirty, too expensive, too many wheeled suitcases. Now he lives with his wife and daughter in the Provinces. Is it bearable there for a lover of good food and drink? This time: on a food safari at the butcher’s.
The towering butcher didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. His look was enough. It said: ‘We’re not in the big city here, sir, so just talk normally. With your beard.’ After that look, he repeated, slightly amused, what I had just asked him for: ‘Merguez sausages…’
With something garlicky on the side
Then he turned around, walked to another display case and lifted out a tray of merguez sausages with his almost unnaturally large hands. They gleamed and were exactly the right length, thickness and colour. Okay, it was nine in the morning, but a bunch of merguez sausages for breakfast suddenly seemed like an excellent idea. On a white bread roll. With something garlicky on the side. Or simply a lick of butter. Or just plain. ‘Look,’ the butcher boomed with a cheeky wink, ‘lamb sausages. Do you mean those?’
Yes, those were the ones I meant. I involuntarily winked back, still half-lost in thought about what I was going to do with them.
Meat paradise
It had to do with the appearance of this butcher’s shop. I didn’t expect such a meat paradise in our new city – well, town. I had stumbled across the shop by chance on one of my first excursions of discovery and noticed that it triggered an exaggerated sense of wonder in me, garnished with a little happiness and youthful enthusiasm. A butcher. And not some village butcher in a white apron covered in bloodstains – nothing wrong with that, but that’s a story for another time – but a bona fide delicatessen! Just here, right in our new little town.
It’s incredibly arrogant and metropolitan to think that way (because why couldn’t such a butcher’s shop exist outside the big city?), but bear with me. I’ve only just moved here; I still need to get Amsterdam out of my pores. I mean, I still lock up my bike with three locks, much to the amusement of my new fellow townspeople.
Display cases full of designer meat
The employees greeted me kindly when I entered through the sliding doors into what would become my new meat Valhalla. They wore black hipster aprons, had tattoos or man buns, and were busy. With the meals for the delicatessen section (a delicatessen section!), slicing cold cuts, restocking the wines, olive oil, snacks, toast, spreads and dips. The display cases were also packed with designer meat. Regional beef, Black Angus, LIVAR, Overijssel free-range pork, farm chicken. And merguez sausages. Which they prefer to simply call lamb sausages here, but I can tell from everything that I have absolutely no problem with that.
Also craving lamb sausages from the provinces? You can find them at Lantinga or at Woldstraat 61-65, Meppel.
Marcel Langedijk loves eating, drinking and writing. Among others, he writes for LINDA., Margriet and JFK, and also creates books, including Gelukkig Hebben We De Foto’s Nog, The Dad and Gordon, Biografie Van Een Entertainer.
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