I don’t know exactly when I stopped caring about video games (save the occasional evening of Rock Band, Mario Party or the original Super Smash Bros), but the time of death wasn’t far from the day I played my first German board game.

During my years as an undergrad at UC Berkeley, I developed a love for European games: Their traditional aesthetic and focus on personable, interactive play presented a welcome contrast to the increasingly immersive and disorienting feel of video games, and as a result I was drawn immediately to the local game store while my peers flocked to the next Playstation release. To be sure, video games carry with them a limitless potential for complexity, sophistication and interaction, but the tangible pleasures of plotting my next move in neatly carved wood and trading quips with my opponents across the gaming table will always be more compelling to me than participation in any kind of virtual world.

When the Examiner announced that he would be making a stop in Diamond Bar en route to his motherland of Indonesia, we decided it would be the perfect opportunity for a night of board gaming, the likes of which we hadn’t been able to enjoy since he moved to Washington, DC over a year ago. It would also be a perfect opportunity for him to introduce me to one of his favorite childhood snacks: the hagelslag sandwich, a staple sweet invented by the Dutch during the late 1930s and imported to Indonesia through the advent of Imperialism. We decided to celebrate the journey, the country and the saturated fats of the occasion by opening the Examiner’s copy of Indonesia and concocting our own rendition of chocolate sprinkles on white bread.

We decided to start with Taiwanese thick toast. The slightly rich, delightfully fluffy texture of the bread would make the perfect base for a dessert, while the thickness of the slices would prevent the sweeter ingredients from throwing the sandwich aesthetic out of balance. Without toasting the bread, The Examiner applied a generous layer of butter to one side, followed up with a moderate blanket of De Ruijter chocolate sprinkles, then sealed the sandwich with the other slice. Exhibiting a flair for elegance, he then cut the crust off of all sides and served the sandwich in bite sized cubes of luscious, buttery flavor.

Elegance is the key word for the hagelslag sandwich. Seemingly destined for the tea parties of the obscure, its combination of white bread, chocolate and pure butter allows our most essential instincts of taste to meld in a way that makes the pairing of peanut butter and jelly seem far fetched. The rich fusion of chocolate and butter resembles the simple pleasure of chocolate ice cream, while the varied texture of the sandwich tickles the roof of the mouth just once before melting together into a swirl of joy.

Being the red blooded American that I am, I decided that the next logical step of our Indonesian invasion would be making another sandwich, buttering it on the outside, and grilling it to a toasty golden brown. The flaky, feathery feeling of white bread fried in butter and the warm, half-melted mass of chocolate inside sent the texture score of the sandwich skyrocketing into regions of pleasure normally reserved for coke addicts. While the original chocolate sprinkle sandwich would make the perfect end to a nice meal, grilled hagelslag would surely make a colonial magistrate’s breakfast for anyone bold enough to deliver the goods. The next time I have friends over to carve out pieces of history through the magic of economically themed board games, I can think of no finer snack to accompany the proceedings.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 6:45 am and is filed under travel.