On top, or on the side
The ones you will find at a frietkot in Flanders, plus a couple that live in our fridge. In rough order of how often I order them, which is not the same as how good they are.
Two sauces on one cone is allowed. Three is showing off.
All 15 sauces
Ask for friet met and this is what you get; nobody asks which sauce. Belgian mayonnaise is thicker and yellower than the jars I grew up with, with more egg in it, and there are actual rules about how much oil and yolk a sauce needs before it may call itself mayonnaise. I make it by hand about once a month, when I feel I have earned it. How.
Mayonnaise with tomato and a little sweet pepper. Pinkish orange, mild, slightly sweet. It is what I order when I can’t decide, which is most of the time. Bart says it is the sauce for people who can’t decide. He is right and I don’t care.
Mayonnaise with chilli paste stirred in, something along the lines of harissa or sambal. Orange-red, properly warm at the back of the throat, but less fierce than the name. Good with a frikandel. Teenagers order it to prove things.
The gravy from stoofvlees, beef stewed for hours in brown beer with onions and a slice of bread spread with mustard. Ladled hot over the fries, often with a few strings of meat in it. The bottom of the cone goes soft and that is the point. My favourite thing on this whole site. My pot.
Mayonnaise with chopped gherkin, capers, onion and herbs. Mostly for fish, and for people who find plain mayo too plain. Rik puts it on everything between May and September and has never explained why.
Mayonnaise and ketchup, sometimes with a splash of something stronger. Pink. It is the sauce from a prawn cocktail, which explains the name and nothing else.
Yellow, with curry and onion in it and a sweetness that sneaks up on you. It came over the border from the Netherlands and now every frituur I know has it. I resisted for years. I have stopped resisting.
The sauce that goes with filet américain, the raw minced steak people eat on bread here: mayonnaise with mustard, a little tomato, capers and a few drops of Worcestershire. On fries it is a sort of grown-up cocktail sauce.
Not the warm butter sauce from a steak restaurant. The frituur kind is cold, mayonnaise-based, with tarragon and a sharp edge. It is good. Don’t tell a chef.
Garlic sauce, white, sometimes made with yoghurt. Strong enough that you meet it again on your own breath the next morning. Better on a kebab than on fries, in my opinion, which is not a popular opinion in this house.
Mayonnaise with little pieces of pineapple and a pinch of curry. I have had it twice, to be fair to it. Both times I wished I had ordered andalouse.
Just called curry. Red, sweet, gently spiced. It belongs on the frikandel more than on the fries, though nobody will stop you. Easy to mix up with the yellow curry sauces; I still do it.
The chunky yellow mustard relish with bits of cauliflower and gherkin in it, close to piccalilli. Sharp and crunchy. Very good with a cervela. I did not expect to like it.
Warm peanut sauce, the thick sweet Dutch-Indonesian kind. Not every frituur does it. Ask for it on the side or the fries drown.
Yes, people do. Mostly children and visiting relatives from Stockport.
Nothing like that here. Try fewer letters, or pick “All”.
It keeps two days in the fridge, covered. That’s not a problem in this house.
Brown a kilo of beef cheek or stewing beef in butter, in batches, properly dark. Soften three sliced onions in the same pan. Put the meat back with two bottles of brown Flemish beer, a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, a spoon of brown sugar or apple syrup and a splash of vinegar.
Spread a slice of bread thickly with mustard and lay it on top, mustard side down. It melts into the sauce and thickens it. Lid on, lowest heat, three hours or so, a stir now and then. The sauce should coat a spoon. Whatever gravy is left goes in the freezer for Tuesdays.
Sauce goes on top unless you ask for it apart, and then it comes in a little tub on the side. On top is better for the first half of the cone; apart is better for the second half. There is no winning.
Stoofvleessaus on top, always. It is meant to soak in. Rik and I agree on this and on very little else.
