Pistolet

A Dutch baker's pistolet comes out of the oven with a lengthwise slit that has opened into a pale seam, and the crust sings for a minute or two on the rack, a faint ticking as it cools and crazes. The roll is oblong, about the length of a hand, with a shell thin enough to shatter under a thumb and a crumb inside that is white, open, and nearly weightless. Nothing in it but wheat flour, water, yeast and salt, plus steam in the oven to thin the crust and lift the loaf. At the counter it sits in a basket beside the softer rolls, and anyone who wants a broodje with some resistance in it points at this one.

Cut along its natural seam, the pistolet opens like a book. The slit gives a clean hinge, so a slice of oude kaas or a leaf of ham lies flat against the crumb and the top half closes over it without tearing. The first bite is loud. Bits of crust flake onto the plate, the filling slides a little against the slick inside, and cold butter, if there is any, melts only where the crumb touches it. Leave it wrapped in paper for an hour and the shell goes leathery and chewy, which is why a pistolet bought at ten tastes best at noon and is a different roll by three.

Dutch shops fill it in the full range of the broodjesbar: filet americain with raw onion, brie with walnuts, tuna salad, smoked salmon with cream cheese, a slice of rare roast beef with remoulade. The broodje gezond, with its ham, cheese, egg, tomato, cucumber and cress, is often built on one, and a supermarket recipe from Albert Heijn pairs it with peanut butter, raw vegetables and a fried egg. The crisp shell suits wet salads and mustard better than a soft roll does, because it keeps a distinct edge against the dressing for the length of a lunch break. A kadetje, the soft creased roll that the pistolet displaced in much of Flanders, takes the same fillings and gives way sooner.

Across the border the same word names a different roll. In Brussels the pistolet is round and puffy, with a slit down the middle and a crust that should crackle, and it is the bread of the Sunday breakfast table, bought warm from the corner baker and eaten with butter and jam. The traditional version rests for about twelve hours and is shaped with a small stick pressed across the dough, which is what makes the deep central crease. In Antwerp, an older Dutch-language account has the round roll as a pistolee and the long one as a broeike, so the two shapes shared a region before they split between two countries.

Filled, the Brussels pistolet takes local ingredients. Slow Food's Ark of Taste lists cervelas and boudin, Ardennes ham, Herve cheese, Ghent mustard, pickles and mayonnaise, brown shrimp, farm butter, and red Flemish beef, with kipkap, potjesvlees and the blood sausage called bloempanch among the more regional options. A Brussels shop called Pistolet Original, on Rue Joseph Stevens near the Sablon, pairs roast beef with horseradish sauce and bloempanch with sliced apple, and has invited Belgian chefs to design their own fillings. The roll holds up to all of it because the crumb is nearly empty and the crust does the structural work, a thin shell carrying a heavy filling.

Bakeries sort pistolets by crust and topping, and the Dutch-language word list is long: butter pistolets, coarse ones, the keizerpistolet, the plaatpistolet baked on a flat tray, the tijgerke and the vloerke, plus versions dusted with poppy seed, sesame or mixed grain. The differences come down to crust thickness and hardness, how airy the crumb is, and what sits on top. Large bakeries cut the dough into equal pieces and ball them by machine, small ones shape by hand, and in either case the burst of steam in the oven decides whether the shell cracks into thin shards or only crisps.

Origin and history

Nobody recorded who baked the first pistolet, and the word's meaning is disputed. One account derives it from the Latin pistor, miller and later baker, as a diminutive. Another says that in the seventeenth century the rolls cost nearly a pistole, the gold coin, but a pistole was worth ten or eleven livres, an implausible price for bread. The philologist Maurice Piron linked the roll, the weapon, and the coin through the idea of smallness, and that reading needs the least explaining.

Dutch-language dictionary accounts date the word to Brussels in 1837, and the roll itself passed through several centuries of changing form before it reached the shape with a slit down the middle. Out of that Brussels start the name spread into Flemish and Dutch bakeries. In the south of Flanders it displaced the kadetje, an older creased roll that survives in the Netherlands as the soft round one, so a Dutch bakery basket holds two rolls that once shared a crease and now differ in crust.

Only a few Brussels bakers still follow the traditional method, with the twelve-hour rise and local fillings, and on a Sunday morning their rolls go from the oven into paper bags at the counter, still warm enough to fog the paper. They bake in the city whose pistolet the French poet Gérard de Nerval is recorded praising in 1852, fifteen years after the word's earliest dictionary date.