Croque-Auvergnat

A wheel of Cantal weighs upward of forty kilos and ages in a stone cellar until its paste turns from butter-pale to a tangy gold, and a slab cut off it is what rebuilds this sandwich in the image of the Massif Central. The croque-auvergnat is the toasted, sauce-bound ham-and-cheese of the brasserie made over with the dairy of the volcanic uplands: the firm mountain cheese in place of the Alpine one, a rougher regional ham in place of the pale Paris kind, the béchamel and the broiler left exactly where they were. Everything that changes, changes toward weight. The Auvergne is a country of cattle and stone cellars, and its version of the dish tastes of that.

The cheese is the entire argument. Cantal entre-deux is a pressed cow's-milk cheese, aged four to eight months, firmer than the Alpine melters and sharper as the wheel matures. It melts slowly. It browns in patches rather than in an even sheet. It pulls the sandwich toward the tang of a cellar instead of the sweetness of a mountain pasture. Swap that slab for a crumbled vein of Bleu d'Auvergne and the dish tilts further still, the blue's salt and pepper flooding the bind, and a cook who wants the heat to flow more freely reaches instead for a washed-rind Saint-Nectaire from the same plateaus. Three regional cheeses, one frame, and the choice among them is the dish.

Each cheese brings its own way of failing the build. Cantal sweats its fat before it flows if the broiler is too fierce, so the top has to take its time under a gentler heat or it greases rather than gratinés. A blue laid on too thick swamps the ham and the bread both, turning a savoury sandwich into a salt lick, which is why it goes in as a streak rather than a slab. The béchamel has to be stiffer than a Parisian croque wants, because a loose sauce slides out from under a dense cheese the moment the heat lets go. And the soft white sandwich loaf the brasserie reaches for buckles under all this weight, so a closer-crumbed country bread with a real crust does the load-bearing the pain de mie cannot.

It comes to the table too hot to lift, the top blistered in dark patches where the Cantal caught, the smell sharp and faintly farmyard against the toasted-bread warmth rising off the plate. Cut in and the inside is dense and molten at once, the cheese reading tangier and chewier than a gruyère croque ever does, the ham a smoky salt beneath it where a regional cure replaced the gentle boiled one. A forkful of the blue version arrives with a sting that catches the back of the throat, peppery and sharp through the soft sauce. The crust at the rim holds firm against the knife while the centre gives, and the whole thing eats heavy and hot, a sit-down plate that wants a glass of Auvergne red poured next to it.

The Auvergne writes its cheeses onto everything, and this sandwich is one more line in that hand. The same Cantal and Saint-Nectaire that go into the aligot and the truffade, the cheese-and-potato dishes of the uplands, go here onto bread and under a grill. A brasserie in Clermont-Ferrand or Aurillac chalks it on the slate beside those plates, and a diner ordering it is choosing the local cheese over the standard one the way a Lyonnais chooses a saucisson by its maker. The cheeses come down each autumn from the burons, the stone summer huts of the high estives where the herds graze, and a sandwich built on them carries that mountain-restaurant register the region keeps across its whole table.

The regional croques run a small disciplined set, each named for the cheese it carries. The croque-savoyard takes reblochon and pulls the dish toward the Alps; the croque-bleu leans on the blue alone; a croque-forestier folds in mushrooms; a croque-provençal adds tomato and herbs. The plain croque-monsieur, built on jambon de Paris and a sliceable gruyère bound in béchamel, is the parent these all descend from rather than a sibling of the auvergnat in particular. What the auvergnat proves, against that parent, is that the frame holds a far heavier and tangier cheese than the Paris original assumes, and that a regional swap can be a blunt one and still work.

The Cheeses of the Massif Central

The frame this sandwich reworks has a paper trail the regional version does not. A grilled ham-and-cheese bound with white sauce turns up under the name croque-monsieur in a Paris sporting paper, La Revue Athlétique, in 1891, and appears on the menu of a café on the Boulevard des Capucines around 1910; Proust dropped one into his novel by 1918, trusting every reader to know it. The auvergnat is a later regional dressing of that established dish, undated and uncredited, the work of cooks putting the cheese they had to hand onto a format the whole country already ate.

Its cheeses are the old part. Cantal ranks among the most ancient cheeses of France, named in Pliny the Elder's first-century survey of the cheeses Rome prized and made still from the milk of Salers cattle on the volcanic plateaus around the town that gives the breed its name; its appellation was confirmed under French law in 1956 and carried to the European protected-origin register in 1996. The blue is younger and has a name attached. Bleu d'Auvergne was developed around 1845 by a Cantal cheesemaker, Antoine Roussel, who seeded his wheels with the mould of rye bread to draw the veins, and the cheese took its own AOC on the seventh of March, 1975.

Roussel's method passed into the documented record because he wrote down what he did, which the croque's inventor never managed. He pierced his curds with a needle to let air reach the mould and run the blue veins through the paste, a technique he demonstrated through the 1850s and that the makers of the Massif Central use on the wheels they sell today. The sandwich keeps no inventor and no date; the blue that streaks its heaviest version was traced to one cheesemaker's cellar in the Cantal in 1845.