Lekker Brekker Monday: Croque Monsieur, ooh la la!

A Croque Monsieur is the classic Parisian sandwich that any visitor to Paris quickly discovers. It’s a day-warming mélange of ordinary bread, jambon (ham), cheese and mustard. And it all comes together in an oozy, gooey, delicious way, if it’s done properly. But it’s how you make it that counts. 

I watched all manner of supposedly expert videos on how to make a proper Croque Monsieur, and trust me, not one of them concurs with any of the others. It’s a free-for-all. So it took some distilling before I felt I could finally write down a reasonably definitive recipe for it.

A host of recipes use slices of cheese, not grated. Many of them say you must, on pain of death, also put la béchamel on the top slice and then du fromage rȃpé (that’s the grated cheese) on that. Many more say non non non, only la fromage must be a l exterieur! 

It transpires that there are some rules:

The butter must be on the outside of the bread.

The béchamel must be smeared on the dry (inside) slice of the bread.

The Dijon mustard goes … actually, nobody seems to know where to put the mustard, but there was mustard in the Croques Monsieur I’ve eaten in Paris and it has to go somewhere so I decided that it goes right onto the dry bread before you put the béchamel there. So we have already broken one rule. I suppose you could smear it on the ham. Or incorporate it into the béchamel.

In the end, when I finally found the courage to revisit the recipe this week, after careful deliberating, the watching of many YouTube videos by a slew of experts, none of whom agreed with any of the others, and in the full knowledge that by dint of being a foreigner I was risking scorn and an armoury of pins being stuck in an army of effigies by legions of outraged les Grands-Méres (and yes, I checked the plural of Grand-Mére and that is it), the recipe on this page is the one I like to think I perfected. (My palate, which I trust with my life, loved it.)

The cheese I used was Emmental, and yes, my research did show that this is a suitable cheese for a Croque Monsieur, although Gruyère is more commonly used. In any event, they’re both Swiss. I did use two layers of la béchamel, which I admit is nontraditional and earns me extra effigy pins. Nor did I use store-bought plain South African tranches de pain. I persuaded my wife to make a simple white loaf instead, because it would (and does) look better in the pictures. But your plain old store-bought white bread is perfectly acceptable.

Ingredients

Croque Monsieur. (Photo: Louis Pieterse)