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Bruges, the chocolate city
Bruges maintains the very highest culinary standards. The city boasts dozens of excellent restaurants, trendy lunch addresses, fun coffee bars – and a local population famed for its love of the good-life and its high levels of expectation! All year round the rich aroma of chocolate wafts through the World Heritage city and countless creative confectioners make hundreds of kilograms of the city’s most famous chocolate, the ‘Brugsch Swaentje’ (Bruges Swan). And if your sweet tooth is still not satisfied, why not try a visit to the chocolate museum Choco-Story or pop in for a meal at one of the many restaurants where chocolate is cleverly worked into a whole variety of different recipes.
The Bruges Swan (Brugsch Swaentje)
The story of the city
chocolate
As befits a chocolate city of high standing, Bruges is proud to boast its own official city chocolate, the Bruges swan (Brugsch Swaentje). The exact recipe remains a secret, but amongst the key ingredients are almond paste, ‘gruut’ (a local type of spiced flour) and ‘kletskoppen’ (a local Bruges biscuit). Hardly surprising that this essentially local combination should most appeal to the taste buds of the city’s inhabitants! Since its first creation in January 2006, the Bruges swan has been sold in the shops of the city’s officially recognised confectioners, all of whom are members of the Bruges Chocolate Guild. The chocolate itself might be relatively young, but the legend on which it is based is centuries old. At the end of the 15th century, the oppressed people of Bruges rose in revolt against the unpopular Emperor Maximilian of Austria. They captured Maximilian and imprisoned him in the Craenenburg House on the Market Square, together with his equally unpopular adviser, Pieter Lanckhals. Lanckhals was condemned to death and Maximilian was forced to watch the execution. The Emperor eventually escaped and later took his revenge: he decreed that ‘until the end of time’ the city should be required at its own expense to keep swans on all its lakes and canals. And why swans? Because swans have long necks – and the Dutch for ‘long neck’ is ‘lange hals’ – or ‘lanckhals’! And so a city legend was born
You can find out more information about the confectioners and chocolate sellers of Bruges on www.brugsechocoladegilde.be
