Croque Madame
● FranceThe Croque Madame is the Croque Monsieur with a hat. The original Croque Monsieur appeared on Paris café menus around 1910, a baked or pan-fried ham and Gruyère sandwich glossed with béchamel. The Madame variant, crowned with a sunny-side-up egg, supposedly resembling a woman's wide-brimmed chapeau, followed in the 1920s in the brasseries of the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The naming convention was pure Parisian humor: a Monsieur was respectable on its own, but a Madame required the elegant flourish of an egg on top. By midcentury, both sandwiches were fixtures of zinc-bar lunch menus across France, served with a small green salad and a glass of dry white wine. The Madame in particular became a marker of a serious café: a properly assembled one, with handmade béchamel and a yolk that breaks just so, signals a kitchen that cares.
In Paris, the Croque Madame is a midday institution. It is what you order when you want something more than a salad but less than a steak, substantial, satisfying, and unmistakably French. Office workers eat them at counter seats in brasseries near the Opéra and around the Marais. Tourists order them as their first proper Paris lunch. The egg is not optional decoration: cracking the yolk and letting it run into the molten cheese and béchamel is the entire point of the sandwich. A Croque Madame demands a knife and fork, a paper napkin, and ideally a view of a busy boulevard.
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Ingredients
- 2 thick slices pain de mie
- 2 slices jambon de Paris
- Grated Gruyère
- Dijon mustard
- 1 egg
- Butter
- Béchamel: butter, flour, milk, nutmeg, salt
Method
- Make a thick béchamel and stir in a handful of grated Gruyère
- Spread mustard on one slice, layer ham and cheese, then top with the second slice
- Spoon béchamel over the top of the sandwich and scatter with more Gruyère
- Bake at 200°C for 10 minutes until bubbling and golden
- Fry an egg in butter, slide it onto the hot sandwich, and serve