Sandwich au Maroilles

The smell reaches the table before the plate does. Maroilles is a brick-shaped washed-rind cheese from the Nord, scrubbed and brushed with brine over five weeks or more until the rind turns a deep orange-red and the paste underneath goes glossy and soft. The aroma it gives off is ammoniac, barnyard, almost beefy, strong enough that a cut wheel fills a kitchen. Laid cold and thick on bread it defeats most palates. So the common sandwich does not lay it cold. It warms the cheese into a split crusted loaf over a base of butter until the paste slumps and binds to the crumb, the same move the region's own cheese tart makes.

Heat is the whole technique, and it works because warmth changes what the rind does. Cold, Maroilles is one relentless note of pungency. Warmed through, the ammoniac edge of the washed rind softens and the paste reads roasted and savoury, the way the cheese behaves baked into a tarte au Maroilles. Spread it across the bread. Set the butter underneath as the counterweight. Bring the heat up gently and the cheese turns molten and tart. Push it too far and the paste breaks into oil and the salt comes back hard. Done right, a loud cheese arrives deep, melted, and workable.

Each component fails in its own way. Too much cheese and even melted it swamps the bread; too little and the bread tastes only of butter. A loaf with a weak crust is the worst error, because the filling is soft, hot, and structureless, and a soft loaf collapses into it. The butter underneath cannot be skipped: without it the molten cheese sits in scorched pockets instead of running evenly across the crumb. And the cheese has to be warm rather than hot when it reaches the mouth, because too much heat strips the savour back to sharp ammonia.

Open the warm loaf and the steam carries the smell up first, softened now, more roasted than raw. The crust gives with a dry crack; the cheese behind it is molten and faintly tart, clinging to the bread in a slack glossy layer. It is warm against the lip rather than scalding. The paste coats the tongue, the salt of the rind arrives a beat behind, and the butter underneath keeps the whole bite from turning dry. In the cafes of the Avesnois it comes with a glass of the local farmhouse beer, which cuts the fat and stands up to the cheese where a delicate wine would vanish under it.

Variations stay close to the regional habit. A few thin slices of cured ham folded under the melted cheese give the pungency a partner, the working build of the Nord coalfields. A scrape of beer-glazed onion against the paste pushes a sweet, bitter note into the savour. A younger, milder Maroilles melted in pulls the sandwich down a register for anyone the full strength defeats. The closest sibling is the Sandwich au Munster, another orange washed-rind cheese with a forceful rind; Munster is rounder and more supple, and is as often eaten cold as warm, where Maroilles in a sandwich nearly always wants the heat.

Origin and history

Maroilles takes its name from the village of Maroilles in the Avesnois, where an abbey was founded in the 7th century. The cheese is tied to that abbey: the monks made it, and a popular account dates the first wheel to a monk in the year 962, though that figure is tradition rather than documented fact.

The earliest hard record is a charter of the year 1010, which lists the cheese, then called craquegnon, among the goods owed to the abbot as a tithe. Production grew under Enguerrand, a bishop of Cambrai, and the cheese took the village's name. For centuries the abbey guarded the craft before it spread to the surrounding farms of the Thierache.

The modern protections came late, and they bind the cheese to the Avesnois and the Thierache and its milk to the herds of that country. France awarded Maroilles an Appellation d'Origine Controlee in 1976. The European Union added a Protected Designation of Origin in 1996.