The Ballad of Mister Crunchy, Mrs. Crunchy, and the Crunchy Horde

In Western Europe, in the land of France
There’s a strange little guy without any pants
With guts made of ham and a hat made of cheese
Crisp fried bread’s all the clothes he needs.

Crunchy, Mister Crunchy
Bread and cheese and meat,
Crunchy, Mister Crunchy
The fattest little sandwich you can eat

The French Paradox: French culture prizes good food, and the French diet is rich in saturated fats, yet the French people enjoy some of the lowest rates of obesity and heart disease in western Europe. Put more simply, hey, that guy’s eating a wheel of brie like it’s an apple, why is he so skinny?

Case in point: the Croque Monsieur and all its variants. Croque in French is a form of the verb for biting or crunching, and Monsieur is equivalent to the honorific Mister. So croque-monsieur means “Crunchy Mister” or, as I prefer, “Mister Crunchy.” It and its egg-topped variant Croque Madame (Mrs. Crunchy if you’re nasty) are both on the list this month, and I’ll cover them both here, as well as a few other variants.

The Croque Monsieur is basically a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich, like you’d find at any diner in America. Deliciously salty pork, melty cheese, bread that’s been fried in butter: crisp, gooey, salty, and fatty. That’s just not unhealthy enough for the overachieving French, though. So you fry the sandwich in butter? Well, we’ll fry both sides of each slice of bread in butter! Then we’ll douse the whole thing in a starchy, fatty sauce and put more cheese on top and broil it. And if you don’t like that, we’ll put a damn fried egg on top too, see if we don’t. It could just as easily be called Mister Crunchy-Chewy-Gooey-and-Terribly-Fattening but that would be a mouthful and probably wouldn’t translate well.

Late in August, a coworker took me to lunch at a fancier place than I’d normally go, Blackbird, as a thank you for some last-minute work I’d done for him. There was a Croque Monsieur on the menu there. It was probably the cheapest item on the menu, and even though somebody else was paying, I still had to take the opportunity to get a sneak peak at the sandwich. I didn’t get a photo, but it was piled high with house-cured ham, oozing with melted cheese and béchamel, and served with a large plate full of excellent frites. I could only finish half of it.

I guess I could have powered my way through it. A few months ago I would have. But lately I’ve been realizing that I have a pretty unhealthy lifestyle. I drink too much beer, eat too many fatty foods, and though I’m relatively active, I don’t get nearly enough exercise to make up for my wanton consumption. I just turned 45, I have high blood pressure, a sedentary job, I’m overweight and it gets harder to control my weight every year. There’s no way to turn back the clock on any of this, either. I have therefore, in short, put myself on a diet.

And just in time to encounter this family of rich and indulgent sandwiches.

I was going to need some help getting through these. As it happens, I have a family of 5 who also like to eat sandwiches, so volunteers were not hard to find.

For our first pass, I bought two different kinds of ham (Virginia and Black Forest, both sliced very thin), two different kinds of bread (French bread in a loaf form and rustic Italian bread, both from the nearby Breadsmith bakery), a big hunk of aged Gruyère cheese, and a certain brand of Dijon mustard that has imprinted itself on the American psyche through the time-honored method of supremely annoying advertisements.

The ads may have been annoying, and there may be better Dijon mustards, but this stuff is not bad. A simple sandwich of ham and good bread can be great by itself, but a touch of good Dijon can elevate it into something approaching perfection.

My first step in making a croque-monsieur was the béchamel. The ratio I use for a béchamel sauce is 1 TB butter to 1 TB flour to 1/2 cup whole milk, though I’ll usually make 3-4 times that amount in a batch. The basic procedure is to melt the butter over low heat in a sauce pan until the milk solids have just started to bubble out, then mix in the flour and cook for a couple minutes, stirring frequently–not long enough to add any color, just long enough for the fat in the butter to completely coat each and every tiny little particle of flour. A couple minutes of cooking will also help the resulting sauce to taste less like flour.

Then, after cooking the butter and flour, you add in hot milk a little at a time, stirring constantly, making sure the mixture becomes homogeneous before each subsequent addition. The sauce thickens before it thins out again and early in the process you end up stirring something that seems very much like a thick dough. Stick with it, keep stirring, keep adding milk.

Once all the milk is added, it’s time for the seasoning (though you can conceivably add some earlier, your aromatics will fare better at this point)–I like a mixture of salt, white and/or black pepper, and bay leaf at a minimum. Garlic, shallots, other herbs–all are fair game. Nutmeg is also crucial, but I add it in right at the end. I stir the sauce over very low heat until it thickens, then grate some nutmeg over it, kill the heat and hold it. As long as I stir it every couple of minutes, it won’t develop a skin and will be ready to use when I need it.

As for the Gruyère, I shredded it. Working with sliced cheese is easier but it’s all going to end up melting anyway.

I buttered one side of each slice of bread, then, while slowly toasting that side on the griddle, I buttered the other side as well.

Once the bread was toasted on on side, it was time to assemble. I flipped each slice of bread, then, while the freshly-toasted side was still hot, added the shredded Gruyère to each slice so that started melting in place. I put a few ounces of ham on one slice for each sandwich, spreading Dijon mustard over the top. Then I inverted the other slice, cheese and all, over the top, finishing both slices of bread on the griddle until they were nicely crisp and golden brown. I used Black Forest ham on the French bread and Virginia ham on the Italian bread.

At this point it’s just a grilled ham and cheese–a good, fancy grilled ham and cheese, but nothing more. I spread a couple tablespoons of the béchamel over the top of each sandwich, making sure to cover the bread completely, as any that’s uncovered will burn under the broiler. Then I sprinkled some more Gruyère on top and finished it under the broiler. This a croque-monsieur.

I split these sandwiches into 4 pieces each–they were enormous–and shared them with Mindy, Damian, and Max. Mindy also shared hers with Ian, who said that it only tasted “kind of bad” which is high praise from someone whose idea of a great meal is a PBJ and breakfast cereal. Between the two different versions, we all preferred the Black Forest ham–that little bit of caramelized sweetness to the meat gave it an edge over the more straight-up salty Virginia ham. Opinions were divided on the bread, but I preferred the rustic Italian loaf. Incidentally, some recipes for croque-monsieurs say to cut the crusts off the bread, but then what is the point of buying such a beautiful, crusty loaf? Isn’t this thing supposed to be crunchy?

Inside the sandwich, the gooey melted cheese and the juices of the ham had done their magical tango, but with the bread crisply griddled, it had not gotten soggy as a result. The top slice may have soaked in a bit of the béchamel, but had not given way completely. Texturally, the sandwich is an engineering marvel, with alternating strata of gooey and crunchy that were maintained even when finishing a refrigerated half-sandwich the next day.

Now Mister Crunchy had a lovely wife
His partner, friend, his love, his life
Their family grew to five in all
With three strong sons, from tall to small.

And Mrs. Crunchy was the family’s rock
She kept things running like a well-tuned clock
With an egg up top like a lady’s hat
–or at least the sandwich books all say that.

Crunchy, Mrs. Crunchy
Don’t see a hat at all,
Crunchy, Mrs. Crunchy
Pretty sure it’s anatomical

So we’ve got an extremely rich sandwich here. This is not health food. We should probably stop there, right? Wrong. We’re French, let’s put a fried egg on top and make it even richer!

For this version, I used a combination of the Black Forest and Virginia hams on the rustic Italian bread. Due to the size and shape of the bread (and because I’m a big dork who wanted to make a dumb joke) I decided to use 2 eggs, and fried them sunny-side up. I went a little easy on the Dijon mustard this time but shouldn’t have bothered, as the richness of the egg yolk combined with the already rich ham-and-cheese-and-béchamel mixture needed all the pungency and acidity the mustard could bring it.

Still, a nice gushing egg yolk is a nice improvement to almost any sandwich, and this one was incredible. I shared it with Damian, who is much better at cooking eggs sunny-side-up than I am.

See the Crunchy’s eldest and you’ll be impressed,
The body of a Viking with a mind for chess,
Though he’s quiet, he’s quick with a joke or bluff
Looks a lot like dad but made of different stuff

There are so many variants to the croque-monsieur that I could have tried, but I had a limited amount of time, money, and effort I could spend on these and frankly, the two I’d already had were killing my diet. So I settled on three that looked both delicious and easy to pull off.

The croque norvégien (Crunchy Norwegian) replaces the ham in a croque-monsieur with smoked salmon. Though I thought gravlax would be more Nordic, I picked up a smoked Alaskan Sockeye salmon filet, which was hot-smoked and flakier than I expected. Still, I figured would still make a good sandwich, and I was right. Though less salty than ham, the salmon was smoky and juicy and had plenty of flavor. The flakiness of the salmon allowed the cheese to melt through and integrate more fully with the meat, making for a more homogenous sandwich filling, and the earthiness of the cheese played well with the brininess of the fish.

Damian and I were the only two who tried this sandwich, and I think he was as pleased with it as I was.

The remainder of the filet went into a fantastic spread with cream cheese, Greek yogurt, lemon zest and green onions, that I fully expect will have been utterly consumed by my children by the time I get home today.

Their middle son is a handsome child
With an eye that sparkles and a friendly smile
He’s a hot tomato, all the ladies shout
But he better do his homework or he can’t go out

The croque provençal (Crunchy… person from Provence?) is basically the same as a croque monsieur but with tomatoes added. Normally the tomatoes go inside but I figured, if we can put the egg on top of the croque-madame, why not put the tomatoes on top of the croque provençal?

Furthermore, if we put the tomatoes on top, why not finish them under the broiler?

Even furthermore, if we broil the tomatoes, why not season them with at least a rudimentary mix of herbes de Provence? See what I did there?

So after initially broiling the béchamel & cheese, I added two slices of some farmer’s market beefsteak tomatoes (September is the time of the tomato. Stop what you are doing and go eat one), seasoned with sea salt, fresh-cracked black pepper, minced garlic, and a mix of thyme, oregano, and rosemary, then put the sandwich back under the broiler for a few more minutes.

Just look at those tomatoes. If I could have fit this whole sandwich in my diet-shrunken stomach, I would have. The tomato adds a salad piece the other sandwiches have been missing, and with the garlic-and-herb combo and brief cooking under the broiler, the result had definite pizza-like aspects. If you can wrap your head around the idea of a ham-and-Gruyère pizza, which as of now I definitely can.

I did not share this sandwich. Instead we ate BLTs with the rest of these tomatoes because September, and I took most of it with me to work the next day for lunch. It was just as good the next day.

But the youngest is crazy!
A master of farts!
A lovable rascal!
But the smell’s off the charts!
He bounces off couches,
Bounces off walls,
Escapes from the bathtub when his mother calls!

The croque auvergnat (Crunchy Stinky Cheese, I’m pretty sure) is a variant of the croque-monsieur that simply replaces the Gruyère cheese with a Bleu d’Auvergne. Auvergne blue cheese is a mild blue, but that’s a relative term when it comes to such a divisive, strong flavor. I’m a huge fan of blue cheeses, and while this one doesn’t have the tongue-on-a-9V-battery kick of a Roquefort or the huge aroma of a Stilton, it is salty and pungent and quite strong and should probably be used sparingly. So of course I split a half pound of it between 2 sandwiches.

You can see a bit of the cheese’s mold vein structure oozing out the side of the sandwich here. I have no idea who originally thought it would be a good idea to eat something that looks so terrible, but the history and prehistory of humanity seems to have been a series of happy accidents like this. Of course for every happy accident there were probably thousands of horrific and ugly ones, but hey! At least we get to eat delicious cheeses.

As for this sandwich, it was, as you might expect, overwhelming. I loved it. Max loved it. Damian was not a fan as he does not like blue cheese. Mindy took one bite and pushed hers away. Ian didn’t bother trying it. Even a relatively mild blue cheese turns out to be divisive in a sandwich.

Crunchy! The Family Crunchy
You guys taste really great,
Crunchy! The Family Crunchy
I think I will explode from all I ate

I’m not French, and I don’t have whatever magical gene it is that makes them able to eat like this, at least, not without blowing up like Violet Beauregarde (minus the blue). A year of overindulging in sandwiches has taken its toll on me, and my resulting diet means that I’ve been spending more calories on these sandwiches than I should have. The good news though is that apart from an overindulgent birthday, I’ve been largely successful in my recent weight loss. The bad news is, these things are a caloric overload and a dieter’s nightmare, indulgent and difficult to justify if you value your health.

Eat every last one you can, if you get a chance. Especially the croque provençal, I’ve been dreaming about it. Come on, dooooo it.

 

Just ask yourself: What Would Bilbo Do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF5ROpjRAU