Croquettes from the coast, caught by traditional horse fishermen: from poor man’s food to a delicacy

A drizzle blows over the beach, the waves are a bit restless. The three horses stand motionless at the waterline. Brabant draft horses, ‘Belgian tubers’, as we used to call them. High withers, stocky build, thick buttocks, long mane and poodle around the legs. They carry men with south-westers on their heads, yellow oil suits against the splashing water. A scene straight out of a painting by Anton Mauve or Hendrik Willem Mesdag on the Scheveningen beach around the beginning of the twentieth century.

But this is it now, and this is the Flemish coast near Oostduinkerke. We sit in the cart behind the horse’s butt, towards the waterline. Some horse fishermen still fish for shrimp here, as was previously common in the region. The cart is released at the waterline. A funnel-shaped dragnet measuring 7 by 10 meters is stretched behind the horse, held open with two wooden boards.

With the fisherman on its back, the horse walks up to its chest in water and drags the net, with a chain that causes the shrimps to jump out of the sand, parallel to the coast along the sandbanks. The catch is placed in the baskets on either side of the horse and then boiled in fresh water. As it has been done for hundreds of years.

The North Sea or gray shrimp ( crangon crangon in Latin, gray geirnoard in Flemish, enjoyed in Groningen) is difficult to catch today. “The water is too warm,” says Chris Vermote, who went into the sea today with his horse Floris. “Then they move to the colder water, where there is more food for them.”

There are indeed only a few shrimps in the basket, plus some crabs, mini plaice and a single slipper sole that disappears into the fisherman’s bag. “Just wait until October, then we will get an average of eight kilos of shrimp from the sea per haul. And on a heyday as much as fifty kilos.”

Keeping an old tradition alive

With a price of around twenty euros for unpeeled shrimp, that seems quite attractive. But the horse fishermen of Oostduinkerken don’t do it for the money. They are part of a group that wants to maintain an old tradition. Shrimp fishing with horses has been declared an Intangible Heritage of UNESCO. Vermote is one of about eighty horse fishermen who occasionally brave the waves. But as a hobby: in daily life he is a municipal employee, and he has to take days off for his fishing. His daughter Lien is accompanying him today, because she has time off from school. “She will also become a horse fisherman later,” Chris Vermote beams proudly.

In the fish market of nearby Nieuwpoort we eat the shrimps that have arrived fresh from the local cutters. Unpeeled, we have to remove them from the jacket ourselves. Moreover, those Belgian cutters cannot compete with the enormous consumption of shrimp along their own coast. “The entire Belgian fishing fleet – including the flatfish catch – only consists of 64 ships,” says Mike Sarrazijn, director of the fish market. “We only have four ships in Nieuwpoort, two of which are shrimp cutters that land fresh shrimp every day.” But to meet the enormous demand for shrimp, almost ten times the local catch must be imported. Most of them from the Netherlands, which often take longer to travel and are also peeled in Morocco. So really fresh?

In a paneer jacket

The culinary winner of the Flemish coast is the shrimp croquette. While we usually serve the shrimp in a glass with cocktail sauce, the Flemish serve it in a coat of breadcrumbs and the heat of the fryer. Sure, we know the shrimp croquettes from pastry chef Cees Holtkamp, ​​but he is one of the few who has taken that croquette seriously. No, then Flanders. Every self-respecting restaurant chef – and many home cooks – has his secret recipe for the very best shrimp croquette.

This year, the shrimp croquette festival was held for the third time in Ostend – the self-proclaimed shrimp croquette capital. Of course with a competition for who makes the tastiest croquette. This year the winner was Fort Napoleon, the Experience Brasserie.

From a culinary point of view, the shrimp croquette is a fairly local product. In any case, French classical cuisine has had little to do with it: their gray shrimp (crevette grise) is often served unpeeled – and sometimes eaten with the skin and hair, with a glass of sauvignon blanc. The English often put them in pots with fat (potted shrimps) and the Germans serve them on a piece of bread with a fried egg on top (krabbenbrot).

Shrimp was poor man’s food for a long time

Why do the Belgians – and to a lesser extent the Dutch – put them in croquettes? After all, they are not the inventors of the croquette, because the French already put meat in their croquettes in the eighteenth century. However, that was haute cuisine because meat was expensive. And you couldn’t say that about the North Sea shrimps. Until the twentieth century, they were considered poor man’s food, in abundance during the months when the water was cold enough.

The first Belgian to demonstrably use shrimp as a dish was the Ghent chef Cauderlier in his household cookbook from 1868 – before that time, the unsightly crustacean was apparently not an ingredient for serious chefs. Cauderlier made shrimps in ‘white sauce’ and a kind of vol-au-vent for his readers.

Rumors have it that the shrimp croquette originated on the Belgian Yser Front during the First World War. The abundant shrimp would be better preserved in the trenches if they were packed into some kind of patties. So to speak, the predecessor of the croquette. It remains unclear who invented it in its current form, but it is clear that frying is involved. And the Flemish are masters at that.

Shrimp croquette as a bestseller

From the 1950s, when the coasts of Flanders were discovered by (foreign) tourists, the shrimp boomed. First in the glass, as we do with our shrimp cocktail, then shrimp in an edible bowl – a hollowed-out tomato. But the shrimp croquette became the ultimate bestseller.

A creamy filling in a crispy crust, to which every chef on the coast gives his own secret twist. But in any case, remember shrimp stock (pulled from the head of shrimp), cayenne pepper, lemon, egg yolks, cream and flour and finely ground panko (Japanese breadcrumbs). And of course shrimp. Preferably unpeeled, but we have a hard time getting that in the Netherlands.

Moreover, peeling is a tough job: it takes a trained hand an hour to peel a kilo of shrimp, of which you are left with just over 300 grams. If you follow the recipe from Le Bassin on the Visserskaai in Ostend, you can make about twenty-five croquettes.

Of course you can serve it with fried parsley. And a glass of Rodenbach from Roeselare (1821), a red-colored beer of mixed fermentation, a so-called Flemish red brown that undergoes maturation in large wooden barrels, the so-called ‘foeders’. Beautiful depth, some acidity that gently washes over the sweetness of the shrimp.

It may still be drizzling on the Flemish coast, but the moment you bite into the shrimp croquette, the sun breaks through your mind.