The Boulevard Saint-Michel croque monsieur
Ham and cheese under a soft blanket of béchamel, no crusts to fight
Scales up slice by slice. Make two in the same dish if you are cooking for someone else.
A croque monsieur earns its place here because it is close to a savoury custard of cheese and ham holding a soft crustless sandwich together, and there is barely a mouthful of resistance in it. Take the crusts off, trim every scrap of fat from the ham, and let a quick béchamel do the work that a thick layer of cheese usually does in the classic version. A scrape of smooth Dijon in the sauce keeps it from tasting flat. Grill it gently rather than hard, so the top turns glossy and pale gold rather than crisp at the edges. What you want off the grill is something you could eat with a spoon if you had to, not a sandwich you have to bite through.
From the chronicle · Paris, May 1968
In May 1968 I was washing dishes in a café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, on the wrong side of the barricades from the point of view of the police, seven months into a new city and a new name, which was the ordinary condition of half the people in that kitchen. The students came in grey with tear gas and wanted to talk and could not eat. Gas does that. It empties the stomach on the boulevard and leaves it, for a day or two, unwilling to take anything with an edge to it. So the owner took the crusts off, which he had never done in his life, spooned the béchamel over the whole sandwich rather than the top, and put it under a slow grill so the cheese melted through without a hard corner anywhere. They ate them with a spoon between arguments. One afternoon a small man in a raincoat came down the boulevard towards the Sorbonne with a crowd walking backwards in front of him. He had once asked me a great many questions, a long time ago and a long way off. He passed the window without a second look, which is the correct way to treat a dishwasher, and I went back to the sink.
The people, places and dates are real. The meal and the conversation are not. Read more about the chronicle.
Ingredients
Contains: Gluten, Milk, Mustard
- 15 gunsalted butter
- 15 gplain white flour
- 200 mlwhole milk
- 1 tspsmooth Dijon mustard
- salt
- 2 slicewhite bread, crusts removed
- 2 slicegood ham, trimmed of all fat and gristle
- 50 gGruyère or Cheddar, grated, a third for the middle, the rest for the top
Method
Melt the butter in a small pan over a medium heat. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly, until it smells biscuity but has not coloured.
Take the pan off the heat and whisk in the milk a splash at a time until smooth, then return to the heat and cook, whisking, until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 4 minutes. Stir in the mustard and a pinch of salt.
Lay the bread slices on a baking tray. Spread a thin layer of the béchamel over each slice, then lay the ham over one slice and scatter over a third of the cheese. Close the sandwich.
Spoon the remaining béchamel over the top of the sandwich until it is fully covered, then scatter over the rest of the cheese.
Grill under a medium grill, not the highest setting, until the cheese has melted and turned golden in patches and the sandwich is hot all the way through, about 5 to 6 minutes. Move it further from the heat if the top starts to colour faster than the middle heats through.
Rest for a minute, cut in half and eat with a fork while it is hot.
Watch-points
- Take every scrap of crust off the bread.
- Trim all the fat and gristle from the ham before it goes in.
- Grill it gently so the cheese melts through without the edges turning hard or crisp. The point is a soft bite all the way round.
Some hospitals allow a grating of nutmeg in the béchamel. The leaflet this book follows does not. Leave it out if you have been told to.
Make it more nourishing
- Use 70 g of cheese instead of 50 g, half in the middle and half on top.
- Melt an extra knob of butter, about 10 g, into the finished béchamel.
- Stir a tablespoon of skimmed milk powder into the milk before you make the sauce.
Swaps
- Instead of ham, use flaked hot-smoked salmon or shredded poached chicken
- the béchamel and cheese carry either just as well
- Instead of smooth Dijon mustard, use a smooth English mustard, used sparingly
- a sharper stand-in if that is what you have
The foods in this recipe
Each of these has a page of its own, with how to prepare it and where hospitals differ.