Suikerbonen: Belgian Birth Food
Sugar beans or chocolate / almond pastilles to commemorate a new baby
Most cultures commemorate momentous occasions such as birth with a special food. A Flemish food for the arrival of a newborn is "suikerbonen" or "sugar beans.
In Belgium birth announcements go in the mail the day the baby is born, so that visitors can still catch the new parents and their newborn in the maternity ward. There they are typically welcomed with a small, decorated package of "suikerbonen", or "sugar beans".
No, they are not beans, but almond-shaped "pastilles" filled with almonds or dark chocolate - this is, after all, Belgium we're talking about - coated with a thin, hard layer of sugar.
The chocolate filling is probably a Belgian adaptation. The original suikerbonen, or "dragees" in French, have almonds inside. They were supposedly invented in the beginning of the 13th century, when a French pharmacist coated the best almonds he could find with a hardened layer of honey.
Just like sugared lemons and candied coriander and ginger, they were consumed as digestives. Only in the 17th century did the dragee shake the pretext of medicine and become a candy. Historically, the most famous dragees are those of Verdun in France.
In Belgium, in the recent past, suikerbonen were exclusively given by the godfather and godmother at the baptism of the child. A surprising amount of Belgian children do still get baptized (a staggering 64%, this in a country where, according to the European Values Study of 1999-2000, less than 7 % of the population regularly goes to mass), but it is predicted that these numbers will fall sharply over the next decades.
It won't matter to the tradition of giving suikerbonen, which has already extricated itself from its old association with baptism. This makes the gift of suikerbonen an instance of a food tradition that will have survived the demise of the occasion it was meant to celebrate.
The suikerbonen are layered with white, pink or blue sugar, though nowadays you can find them in all kinds of colours. The receptacles they come in vary widely as well: from small cardboard boxes or cotton bags to stuffed or porcelain animals, with all kinds of ribbons and bows, bells and whistles.
You can let the candy shop put the packets together, but many people do it themselves in the last weeks of the pregnancy. This is an occasion in its own right: literally kilograms of suikerbonen are bought, and the mother-to-be and her family and friends sit around the table and fill the boxes, tie the ribbons, and occasionally, just occasionally, have a little taste...
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