Belgian specialties.

The Belgian sweet-making tradition shares a border with the Dutch one and almost no products with it. The Netherlands built a confectionery culture around licorice; Belgium built one around chocolate. The Netherlands codified its sweets into a set of national habits — hagelslag at breakfast, drop in the office bowl, kruidnoten in November — that show very little regional variation; Belgium's sweets remain stubbornly local, and the cuberdon, the babelutte, and the speculoos all carry the address of their origin in their identity in a way that few Dutch sweets do.

What the two countries share is a four-hundred-year industrial overlap with the sugar trade — Antwerp was once Europe's principal refining centre — and a willingness to treat confectionery as a serious commercial subject. Belgium's contribution to the global sweet vocabulary, the Neuhaus praline of 1912, has no real Dutch counterpart. Conversely, the Belgian shopper who wants a bag of dubbelzoute drop will, in most cities, have to go to a Dutch import shop.

The four entries collected here cover the central pillars: the cuberdon nose-cone of Ghent, the babelutte caramel of the Flemish coast, the praline industry that begins with Neuhaus, and the speculoos koek that has become Belgium's most exported confection through Lotus Biscoff. Several other Belgian sweets — manons, palets, callets — fall outside the scope of a candy reference and properly belong to the chocolate trade.