TIME, PLACE, HOT FAT, AND RAIN

The Dutch have not yet realized that with their stellar fried snack culture they're set for the breakfast of champions. The snackbars and fry hutches, sadly, don't open till ten o'clock at the earliest. Imagine you get up at five or six, enjoy a cup of strong coffee which perks you right up, and at that point you wish for something hearty and appetizing.

The Dutch breakfast is sandwich-like. Bread and cheese or meat. Boring. Stodge.

At seven in the morning it's raining outside, the streets of Eindhoven are filled with soggy bicyclists, some dude just tromped past wearing two raincoats and smoking a cigar -- that explains the two rain coats, as he has to go outside to smoke in this era -- there is a cluster of vegans with brainwashing pamphlets in the entrance to the trainstation, and the working men's cafe in the passage has been replaced with tofu shack, which is run by hippies.

That, more than the outcast cigar smoker, is a sign of the place.
Holland still has hippies.

What you want is deep-fried, dingus shaped, hot and juicy.

FRIKANDEL

Approximately sixty percent meat, plus spices, binders, texturizers, breaded with paneermeel (fine rusk flour) and eggwhite, deepfried till mahogany. Great with sharp mustard, although a bit of sambal would not be amiss.

Obviously this is why students in such places as Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Leiden, Nijmegen, Tilburg, and other metropoles, don't get up much before noon. The neighborhood fry-food place (frituur, friet kraam, friet kot) won't be open till then, so what's the point?

The serious student, whether male or female, requires a hearty breakfast, followed by a leisurely cup of strong coffee and a cigar on a covered terrace, to start the school day.

Why don't frituurs open at six? That would make everybody happy.
Good for both morale and productivity.


A place to smoke inside is another matter. Pneumonia rates in Northern Europe have gone through the roof since tobacco restrictions were put in place, perfectly healthy people have expired on the streets gasping because they were soaked to the bone in freezing cold, and hordes of sanctimonious non-smokers are everywhere forcing people to eat tofu.



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