A babelutte is a long, firm, chewy butter caramel from West Flanders. Think of a Flemish relative of butterscotch, flavoured with brown sugar (Belgian vergeoise), candy syrup or honey, and butter. It is one of the classic sweets of the Belgian coast. Shops in seaside towns from Knokke-Heist and Blankenberge to Oostende, Nieuwpoort and De Panne sell it, as do shops inland in Bruges and Veurne. For many Flemish and Dutch families it is the taste of a summer holiday by the sea.
If you are looking for a "Flemish caramel candy", this is the one most often meant. It is a firm stick that softens slowly in the mouth. It is not a soft toffee or a fudge, and it is not a hard boiled sweet either.
Origins
Sources disagree about where the babelutte began, which is common for regional sweets. English-language references place its origin in Veurne, in the Westhoek corner of West Flanders, in the nineteenth century. They tell of a couple who made the caramel and sold it to tourists on the beaches. The coastal shop chain Moeder Babelutte traces its own story to Heist, to a woman called Rosalie Desmedt in the mid-nineteenth century. Young customers knew her as Mère or Moeder ("Mother") Babelutte. The business was revived in 1970 and is still run by the same family. Both stories place the sweet on or near the West Flemish coast in the 1800s, when the beach resorts were growing.
A related caramel, the babelutte de Lille, is made across the border in French Flanders, a reminder that the confectionery of the old County of Flanders does not stop at the modern border.
The name
Nobody knows for certain where the name comes from. A popular explanation links it to Flemish babbelen ("to chatter"), sometimes combined with uit ("over, finished"). The joke is that a mouthful of sticky caramel stops you talking. A second theory points to the Picard dialect word babbelle ("chatty"). Moeder Babelutte's version is that children mispronounced babbelaar, the Flemish word for a butter caramel. Babbelaar is still used for similar butter candies. All three explanations are plausible, and none is proven.
Ingredients and texture
The core of a babelutte is a cooked mixture of sugar syrup and butter. Brown sugar or candy syrup gives it the deep, slightly burnt caramel flavour, and some makers add honey. The cooked mass is shaped into elongated pieces and wrapped individually. The colour is golden to amber-brown. The texture is firm and slowly chewy, with a strong butter flavour. Recipes vary from maker to maker, and the old babelutten were described as shapeless lumps wrapped in plain paper rather than the neat sticks sold today.
Babelutten are usually sold in bags or decorative tins, which are popular souvenirs. Many coastal sweet shops sell them alongside other seaside confectionery.
As a holiday sweet
The babelutte belongs to the small family of European seaside sweets that are bought mainly as a souvenir of a trip to the coast. Seaside rock in Britain and the berlingot of France are other examples. Flemish adults tend to remember it from childhood holidays at the coast rather than eat it regularly. That link to the seaside holiday has helped keep a small, traditional product in business while many other local sweets disappeared.
Of the Belgian sweets on this site, the babelutte is closest to the cuberdon of Ghent: both are strongly regional and both are associated with particular towns. The difference is shelf life. A cuberdon goes off within weeks, but a well-wrapped butter caramel keeps for a long time, so babelutten travel home in suitcases far more easily.