Sandwich au Brie

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the assembled ambassadors ran a wager to settle which European cheese ranked first, and Brie de Meaux took the field against more than fifty rivals. Talleyrand's win at table is recorded in correspondence from the congress, and the phrase le roi des fromages attaches to that day. The lunchtime sandwich is the everyday descendant of that elevation: a short baguette or one slab of pain de campagne, a wide flat wedge of room-temperature Brie laid paste-down across the crumb with the rind kept on, a walnut half or thin fig slice set beside it, and the loaf closed and eaten while the cheese is soft. The wheel does its own slow work, and the build is timed to catch it.

French law honours only two cheeses with the name. Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun have carried France's Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée since 1980, each made from raw cow's milk in its own named communes east and south-east of Paris. The plastic triangle stamped brie on a supermarket shelf is a separate object, a pasteurised, factory-stabilised wheel that wears the word but not the rules. A serious version of this sandwich is built on the appellation cheese.

What the wedge brings to the bread is set by the bloom and the butterfat. Penicillium camemberti grows across the wheel through ripening, throwing a soft white rind that ripens the paste from the outside in until the wedge is supple at the rim and just yielding at the heart.

That gradient is why the rind stays on and why a thin slice eats wrong: the paste needs depth to deliver its full lactic-mushroom register against the wheat. Butter on the bread would only fight the paste's own fat, around forty-five per cent of dry matter for Brie de Meaux, so the crumb is left bare or carries a sweet counter at most. The wedge is the one substantial element, and the bread and the sweet note are there to frame it.

Every part has a way it fails. Cut the wheel cold from the case and the paste is chalky and shut, with no mushroom note and no spread. Set the wedge under the bread instead of paste-up against the crumb and the rind insulates the cheese from the loaf, so the bite reads as two separate layers. Strip the rind for milder eaters and the cheese loses both its structure and its longest flavour. Let the wedge run fully coulant, soft right through, and the sandwich loses its shape in the hand. A strong cured meat erases the cheese; a sharp mustard does the same.

Open the loaf and the smell is gentler than a barnyard cheese, more mushroom than wash, with a low note of fresh cream beneath. The bread gives a quick dry crackle, then the wedge yields under the teeth, the rim spreading thin against the crumb while the heart holds firmer a beat longer. A walnut half breaks in with a bitter snap that the buttery paste takes up and folds back. The taste runs creamy first, mushroom-earthy at the rind, lactic and faintly sweet through the centre, and the swallow leaves the mouth coated long after the bite is gone.

Cheese counters call it the casse-croute au brie, and a Parisian wine bar at five in the afternoon will hand it back over the counter on butcher paper while you order the next glass. The honey-and-walnut version is the common one. A fig leaf laid under the wedge is the southern read for a market stall. Brie noir, the dark over-aged form, hardens into a different sandwich. The nearest relative is the smaller, faster-ripening Sandwich au Camembert, covered separately. The line worth drawing is against a flat slice of any white-rinded cheese: the real version rests on the appellation wheel and its rules, while the supermarket triangle is a different thing borrowing the name.

The Courtly Cheese

Brie predates most of the cheeses around it in French law. Charlemagne is said to have eaten it at a Brie-region monastery in 774, a story that traces to a ninth-century chronicle but cannot be verified at the level of the meal. Talleyrand's diplomatic victory in 1815 was a brief news item; it dated the cheese's reputation rather than its recipe. The legal record came much later. The French AOC for both Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun arrived by decree in 1980, fixing the milk to raw cow's milk from named departments around Seine-et-Marne, setting the wheel size, requiring the curd to be ladled by hand, and holding the wheel a minimum of eight weeks in the cellar. The European Union confirmed both as Protected Designations of Origin in 1996. A typical year yields around seven thousand tonnes of Brie de Meaux under the appellation, against several times that figure of unprotected brie sold elsewhere.

The older fact about the cheese outside France is a border rule. Under a United States Food and Drug Administration restriction in force since 1949 on imported dairy aged less than sixty days, real appellation Brie de Meaux cannot be sold legally on the American retail shelf, and the cheese American eaters call brie has been a pasteurised stabilised wheel since the 1950s.