The latter toasts the bread first, then adds the ham, cheese and bechamel all at once (he also leave it as an open sandwich – a croque rarebit, if you will – an accepted variation, perhaps, but too cheesy for my liking). Saveur and Jamie magazine both opt for the grill, Saveur cleverly giving the ham and cheese-topped bread an initial blast of heat to melt the Gruyère before adding the second piece of bread and the bechamel sauce. Julia is in the frying camp while Raymond fries briefly and then finishes his wholemeal croque off in a hot oven for 5 minutes to melt the cheese (not a use of electricity I can stomach for a sandwich). Larousse explains that the croque is browned on both sides "either in butter in a frying pan or under the grill". Although, it must be admitted, it's a pretty high bar: toasted cheese and ham will always be delicious. Julia and Raymond Blanc don't bother with bechamel at all, and their sandwiches seem rather dull and dry in comparison. The egg yolk they beat in as well is overkill though: let's be honest: this is not a dish that needs any added richness. Jamie magazine opts for a very simple, cheese-free version to top the croque, saving the Gruyère for the filling, while Saveur magazine not only uses it in the sauce as well as the filling, but sticks in some heretical parmesan for good measure.Īlthough I find the plain bechamel a bit boring, I much prefer the sweeter Gruyère-only version from the Waitrose website to Saveur's salty sauce. Of course, there is one thing that sets the croque apart from other great cheese and ham toasted sandwiches, namely that it sometimes (although not always) arrives at the table drowned in golden and bubbling bechamel sauce. A good quality white sandwich loaf should do the trick. That said, it needs to be strong enough to stand up to the weight of melted cheese, so no cheap stuff here. In Jamie magazine, meanwhile, Rebecca Rauter specifies crusty bread which, although it would be my preference for any other toasted cheese sandwich, seems in direct contradiction of the spirit of this particular version: Larousse is very clear that crusts must be cut off, which implies, to me at least, that the bread shouldn't be too chewy. Raymond Blanc comes up with the idea of using wholemeal bread, which I've never seen in France, but I think it makes the croque taste depressingly worthy – this should be white bread territory. The sugary flavour and cotton wool-like texture have never seemed a happy choice to me however, so I'm open to suggestions. Despite its status as a bona fide French cliche, the croque monsieur is made with a distinctly British-looking tin-baked loaf – in my experience, soft, sweet pain de mie is the most usual choice in the sandwich's home country. Photograph: Felicity CloakeĪs this is a sandwich, it makes sense to start with bread. Larousse prefers to credit the sandwich to a cafe on the grand Boulevard des Capucines in Paris – but neglects to mention that it also features ever so briefly in the second volume of Proust's à la recherche de temps perdu, possibly because in common with many they never made it past the first chapter. Let's be frank: it's not up there with tournedos rossini, or even a croquembouche: indeed, the croque creation myth suggests it's the fortuitous result of workmen leaving their cheese and ham sandwiches next to a hot radiator all morning, and then discovering they rather enjoyed the result. Even Larousse Gastronomique, never shy of celebrating Gallic culinary achievement, admits the famous croque is nothing more than a "hot sandwich, made of 2 slices of buttered bread with the crusts removed, filled with thin slices of Gruyère cheese and a slice of lean ham." T he croque monsieur is a dish so iconically, ridiculously French that it's one of the first items of vocabulary that many aspiring linguists learn (trust the French to give the cheese and ham toastie a fancy name and pretend they invented it).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |