Croque-monsieur: what a good one is made of, and how to order it

Overview

A croque-monsieur is a hot sandwich of white bread, cooked ham and cheese, and the thing that makes it a dish rather than a snack is what goes on the outside. The bread is buttered, the ham laid in a single fold, the cheese grated rather than sliced, and then béchamel — often enriched with cheese, which makes it a Mornay sauce — is spread across the top, more cheese scattered over that, and the whole thing put under a grill until the top blisters and browns.

Done properly the result has three textures: a crisp base where the butter met the pan, a soft steamed middle, and a blistered, salty crust. Done improperly it is a toasted cheese sandwich with a name.

The verb is croquer, to crunch, and the name is first recorded on Parisian café menus in 1910 — the date most often given, and one worth stating with the caution it deserves, since what a menu records is when a word was already current enough to print. The best contemporary evidence that the thing was ordinary by then is literary: it appears in Marcel Proust’s novel, in a volume published in 1918, ordered in a café exactly as it would be today. That is a documented sighting rather than a founding legend, which is a rare thing in food history and a more useful one.

Why the monsieur is anyone’s guess, and the confident explanations you will read — a joke about gentlemen’s clubs, a play on the crunch of a moustache — are folk etymology with nothing behind them.

It is a native dish in the sense that it was born in the city’s cafés, and it remains what a French café is fundamentally for: a plate you can order at four in the afternoon, when the kitchen is closed and the restaurant next door will not feed you until half past seven. That gap in the day is the croque-monsieur’s actual habitat and the reason it has never gone away.

What to order

The core order is un croque-monsieur, and the variations are worth knowing because they are on every board:

• Croque-madame — the same sandwich with a fried egg on top. The usual account of the name is that the egg suggests a hat; treat it as a story. Order this one if you want the yolk to run into the béchamel, which is a genuine improvement rather than a garnish.
• Croque-provençal — with tomato. Adds moisture, which the sandwich does not really need.
• Croque-norvégien — smoked salmon instead of ham, no ham, still béchamel.

Ask what cheese is used if you care: Emmental and comté are both standard, comté is nuttier and the better sandwich, and a café that uses it usually says so on the board.

What arrives alongside is a small salad, dressed, and that is not decoration — the sandwich is butter, sauce and cheese, and the vinegar in the dressing is the only acid on the plate. Eat them together.

The drink is a small beer, a glass of ordinary white, or coffee if it is genuinely mid-afternoon. A knife and fork are normal: this is not a sandwich you pick up, and the béchamel decides that for you.

If you want to judge a café before ordering, look at whether the board says maison or fait maison — house-made. Where it does, someone is making the béchamel; where it does not, a frozen square is likelier than not.

What to avoid

The industrial croque-monsieur is the one to know, because it is everywhere and it is convincing from a distance. It arrives from a freezer, is finished in a salamander grill or a microwave, and its signs are specific: a uniform pale-orange top with no blistering, a sandwich the same thickness at the edges as in the middle, and a base that is soft rather than crisp because it never touched butter in a pan. Cut into it and the cheese is a single melted slab rather than strands from grated cheese.

The second thing to watch is the sauce, or the absence of it. A great many places sell a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich under the name with no béchamel at all. It is not a variation, it is a different sandwich, and it is why so many visitors conclude the dish is overrated.

Third, a Parisian geography point: this is one of the most reliable indicators of a café’s seriousness anywhere in the city, precisely because it is cheap and nobody photographs it. On the café terraces immediately facing the great monuments, a croque-monsieur costs two to three times what it does on an ordinary residential street corner five minutes’ walk away, and it is usually the frozen one. The dish does not improve with the view.

A last, small thing: if it arrives lukewarm, send it back. The whole point is a molten interior, and a croque-monsieur that has waited under a pass for five minutes has set.

Practicalities

Reckon on roughly €8 to €14 in an ordinary café, salad included, and €16 to €22 in a brasserie with table service and a proper kitchen. Under about €7 and you are almost certainly buying the frozen square; well over €20 and you are paying for the terrace, unless the menu is doing something deliberate with the cheese.

The hour is the whole practical point. Kitchens here run to fixed service — roughly noon to two and from half past seven — and outside those windows most restaurants will not serve a meal at all. The croque-monsieur is the classic service continu dish, available all afternoon in cafés and brasseries, which makes it the answer to arriving hungry at four o’clock with everything shut.

There is no season, and what to do with that is this: it is a hot, heavy, cheese-and-butter plate, and it belongs to a cold afternoon far more than to a July one. Between November and March, eaten indoors at a small table with a coffee afterwards, it is exactly the right thing; in midsummer on a terrace it is a great deal of béchamel.

Cards are accepted essentially everywhere, contactless included, though a handful of small cafés still set a minimum of a few euro. Table service means the price on the board is the price you pay; service is included by law, and rounding up a euro or two is normal and sufficient.