Croissant Sandwich (Trendy)

A bakery-café sandwich starts with a serrated knife and a small noise: the shell cracks along the spine and a few flakes drop to the tray before any ham goes in. A croissant is butter-laminated dough baked until trapped steam has pushed the sheets into a hollow honeycomb, which makes the crumb light enough to sit under a slice of ham without turning heavy, and brittle enough to rain onto the front of a shirt at the first bite. Warm from a rack or a few minutes in the oven, it smells of toasted butter, and that butter does the work a spread would do on other bread, so the counter hands over ham and cheese with no mayonnaise at all. Squeezed hard, the layers collapse into a flat, greasy wad; left loose in its paper, it stays tall and sheds.

The usual American build is ham and a melting cheese, Swiss or a mild white cheddar, with crisp lettuce and sliced tomato where the counter wants some freshness. Chicken salad, turkey with Brie, and egg with bacon fill the same shell. Every one of them works only when the filling is lean and the cut is shallow: a wet tomato slice or a spoonful of loose dressing travels straight down through the layers, and within ten minutes the bottom half has gone from crisp to damp and gummy. The cheese does the structural work, melting just enough to tack the halves to the ham so nothing slides out on the first bite. Tomato goes on the ham rather than against the crumb, lettuce goes on dry, and the whole assembly is made to order because the pastry has a short window between crackle and leather.

The fast-food version runs hot and soft. A sausage patty, bacon or ham, a folded egg and a square of American cheese go into a split croissant, and the steam off the egg loosens the pastry from the inside within a minute or two. What reaches the customer has no shatter at all: a tender, buttery, faintly sweet crumb that clings to the egg and gives under the teeth like a dinner roll. Here the croissant is a soft bun with a better flavor, and its butter lands against salty sausage and processed cheese the way syrup lands against bacon. It is eaten out of a paper wrapper, in a car or at a counter, and the grease from the sausage collects in the crease of the paper while the bottom half slowly takes it up.

In the 1980s the croissant sandwich belonged to a particular kind of room. Bakery-cafés set a ham and cheese croissant beside a coffee at a small table, and one Harvard Square bakery in 1984 kept chess and Pente boards out for customers to play over lunch. The pastry gave an ordinary lunch a European look, and the fancier fillings of the day were priced to match. The sandwich suited the room because it wants about ten minutes: long enough for the cheese to soften against the layers, short enough that the shell stays crisp. The same split pastry has since taken other fillings elsewhere, pâté and pickles in a Saigon bánh mì croissant, jam and butter at breakfast, but the American café version stayed with ham, cheese and a cup of coffee.

A café that wants a croissant sandwich at noon needs croissants at dawn, and the 1980s boom ran on frozen dough. Au Bon Pain, based in Boston, used a formula developed by the French baker Gilbert Vidal in which the croissants are shaped before freezing, shipped to the outlets, then proofed and baked on the premises. A shop could bake trays through the morning with the smell of browning butter filling the room, and slice them as orders came in. The trays cooled for a few minutes so the layers could set, since a croissant split straight from the oven steams and slumps while one split after cooling keeps its edges. By lunch the day's first batch was the sandwich bread.

Origin and history

Croissants reached American sandwich counters by way of wholesale baking. Vie de France, the Virginia company described in 1984 as the country's leading croissant maker, opened its first wholesale outlets in Maryland in 1972 and added retail bakery-cafés several years before that decade closed. In 1977, French bakeries in the United States began slicing baked croissants and filling them with chicken salad, ham and cheese for lunch and takeout menus. No record names the bakery that sliced the first one. Sara Lee's frozen croissants, usually dated to 1981, then put the pastry in grocery freezers across the country.

Fast food followed. Burger King had run a breakfast menu since 1978 that matched McDonald's almost item for item, and in 1983 (one Burger King product list says 1982) it introduced the Croissan'wich, a croissant holding sausage, bacon or ham with egg and American cheese. Early television spots had a young woman in a Burger King uniform ask people on the street to compare it with the Egg McMuffin. The chain cooks its meat on flame broilers rather than flat grills, and by one account it took trial and error before it could match McDonald's breakfast sandwich. The sandwich is still on the Burger King menu.

The 1977 bakery-counter sandwich had changed a great deal by January 1984. Beyond chicken salad, ham and cheese, the fillings had grown to include salami, sausage, smoked turkey, caviar and kippers, with chocolate chips and fruit on the sweet side. Le Panier in Portland, Oregon, was selling nine kinds of croissants, Croissants USA in California and Au Croissant Chaud in Washington, D.C. were trading on the pastry too, and the grander fillings had become pricey enough to remark on. Vie de France alone counted 29 bakeries and 1,500 croissant outlets in bakeries, gourmet shops, supermarkets and restaurants by January 1984.