#56: I dream of Dierendonck
On being a bad vegetarian and window licking at the forbidden butchers
I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my Brussels Notes newsletter (you can subscribe here). This week I’m talking about the guilt of being a recidivist meat eater and the most dangerous shop window in Brussels!
Rue Sainte Catherine is a dangerous street for a struggling vegetarian. Especially one who’s left it late to have his lunch. I hate fish, so it’s easy enough for me to resist the siren’s call of the duelling oyster stands at the end of the street. But my resolve is less steadfast when it comes to the lure of a good butcher’s. And Dierendonck’s, a couple of doors down from Mer du Nord, is probably the best butcher’s in Brussels. At least, it has the most alluring window display, though it’s the smell that gets me first. Especially when I’m walking past it with an empty stomach, as I did the other day. Herbal, spicy, and meaty, a gamey sort of rot, a mixture of aromas that makes me think of sawdust, even though the red tiles on the shop floor are spotless.
It’s the same smell that used to hang over the place when it was still the downtown outpost of Irish butcher Jack O’Shea. He made good sausages back then, thick as two fingers and stained ruby red by a glass or two of Guinness, and the smell of the place would climb into my nostrils the minute I walked through the door. O’Shea’s is long gone now, his overstretched empire having collapsed before the pandemic. And my use for his sausages is gone too, having made the decision to give up meat during the pandemic.
But I’m still drawn to Dierendonck’s whenever I’m on Rue Sainte Catherine, even if it has nothing to offer me any more. And it’s the window more than the smell which keeps me lingering at the threshold, with its bountiful cornucopia of dead flesh. A tableau vivant - tableau mourant? - of jaundiced, bald poussins, thickly glazed worstenbroodjes, greasy chicken livers, fiery coils of merguez, glistening lamb kebabs green with salsa verde, and decaying haunches hanging on hooks from the ceiling. It’s a delirious sight, especially when I’ve not yet eaten. I take it in and I don’t just feel hunger. I feel longing, lustful almost. And other emotions too; shame, and something like regret. Or is it loss?
We gave up meat because we couldn’t continue to accommodate the cognitive dissonance of eating it while simultaneously worrying about the animal welfare and environmental impacts of industrial slaughter. But when I look at the rabbit carcasses in the window at Dierendonck’s, splayed and flayed and top of the other, their torsos a carved open maw of gristle and burgundy flesh, I don’t think of the horrors these animals must have faced in their short lives. I think instead of the time we bought a rabbit, or it might have been a hare, from the local game butchers near our house. When I got the carcass home I enjoyed the theatre of carving the limbs from the torso and horrified but curious reactions of the children.
When I look at the pale, lardy pork bellies in the window, I don't think of the grotesque conditions in which pigs are housed. I think of the Christmas, the last Christmas before we gave up meat, when I cycled with the kids to the butcher’s opposite the abattoir for a slab of pork which we brought home, stuffed with sage and fennel, and rolled up into a brittle, gooey festive porchetta. Standing outside of Dierendonck’s makes me feel like a bad vegetarian, because it reminds me of all the times I’ve transgressed, when I’ve fallen off the wagon. At the last football match of the season, our usual hotdog stand outside the stadium had run out of wieners, so one of the children had to make do with a dumpy Brazilian chicken croquette. Which, after two bites, they said was not for them. And because the only thing I hate more than animal exploitation is food waste (the shadow of my mother, threatening wooden spoon in hand, still looms large over my eating habits) and because I was hungry, I ate it. And it was delicious.
It’s a little embarrassing to feel a sense of loss or regret about the fact that I don’t eat meat any more. I mean, the whole culinary machismo around eating meat is patently ridiculous. But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that in my weaker moments I’d kill for another pork and Guinness sausage. If I want to be good but still satisfy the craving for animal flesh, my only resort is the methadone of the food world - meat substitutes. We have them in our fridge because they are a necessary accommodation for the young and picky eaters in the house, and they are the closest we can get to the convenient fallback of a meat-centric family dinner.
But god are they unsatisfying. I so wished they tasted as good as the window at Dierendonck’s looks. But looking is as far as it goes for me. On days like these, with an unhappy empty stomach that has still not yet fully accepted the new dispensation, standing outside the butcher’s is a trial by temptation. It’s all I can do to drag myself away and keep walking up Rue Sainte Catherine.
That is one hell of a struggle! I never experienced this myself, though I have been a vegetarian for 20+ years. Maybe it's because I started at 18-19y and I never really learned to cook meat, so I don't have all these fond meat memories you describe. Certainly I was never "window-licking" at butchers. Still I gave up some of my favorite boyhood foods (roasted chicken, sole) and I can relate to your loss and mourning. Food preferences have very deep roots in us. But you made the right decision, and it will save your children from the same struggle, since the family food culture they will think fondly of, will be a vegetarian one.