A sandwich with a French education

So what is that Sandwich anyways?

The Croque Monsieur: you’ve probably seen it listed here and there on certain menus during breakfast or lunch hours, maybe unsure of the pronunciation. Or perhaps you’ve caught a glance of it on a passing by plate and thought, “What was that sandwich thing that just passed by?” Possibly, even, the Croque Monsieur has been explained to you by a friend or a family member simply as a ham sandwich – which it is, but also so much more!

To understand the Croque Monsieur, we have to time travel back to its birth place: Parisian cafés in the early years of the 20th century. Perhaps only the Eiffel Tower is a greater symbol of Paris than the café. Social, intellectual, and culinary hubs that have existed for centuries, the oldest open café, called Café Procope, dates all the way back to 1686. It is here, in the cafés, that the Croque Monsieur was born.

There is a small legend that the sandwich was accidentally created when French workers left their lunch boxes on hot radiators, returning to melted cheese all over their ham and baguettes. However, it was on the small chalkboard snack menus displayed in the cafés that the Croque Monsieur really caught on in the early 1900’s. The perfect mid-morning snack or afternoon addition to an aperitif, the sandwich makes its first published appearance in the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in 1918.

So what exactly is it?

Croque Monsieur roughly translates to “crunchy mister,” and is in fact a grilled or fried ham and cheese sandwich. But the key ingredient that separates it from other ham sandwiches is the Béchamel sauce – one of the mother sauces of French and Italian cuisine – which is made from a roux (a mixture of butter and flour) and milk. Its sister sandwich is the Croque Madame, which is a Croque Monsieur served with a poached or lightly fried egg on top.

Like certain cultural customs, variations of the sandwich have been adopted by other countries. For example, the tosti in the Netherlands is a small grilled cheese with ham served as a small snack, or the Monte Crisco in the United States is a ham and cheese dipped in egg and fried. However, the true Croque Monsieur has hit an international wave of popularity recently and has been appearing in its original form in restaurants across the world.

Trivia

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