Sandwich Nantais

What makes a sandwich nantais nantais is the shelf it reaches for, because the form itself is just bread around a filling. The honest version draws on the Cure Nantais, the soft washed-rind cow's-milk cheese of the country around Nantes, supple and gently pungent, laid down a split baguette or a crusted regional loaf with a thin film of butter underneath. The cheese gives the sandwich its center; the bread gives it a frame brisk enough to carry a soft wet filling. Built that way it tastes of the Pays Nantais, the Loire-and-Atlantic corner where the cheese is made and the wine it answers to is poured.

The clearest argument for what the sandwich nantais actually is comes not from a recipe text but from a shop counter. At Maison Bordier's fromagerie in Pornic, the Atlantic resort town southwest of Nantes where the Cure Nantais has been made since 1985, the dairy's own sandwiches pair the cheese with Bordier's hand-worked flavored butters on bread, assembled a few meters from the copper vats where the wheels are made. Jean-Yves Bordier, the Saint-Malo butter-maker who became the cheese's custodian when he took over the Pornic site, applies to the sandwich the same logic as to the cheese: as few ingredients as hold together, each one from as close to the dairy as possible. That proximity is what sets the nantais build apart from a generic French fromage sandwich. The cheese, the butter, the bread, and the geography all come from the same radius.

The cheese sets the constraints, and they are specific. Cure Nantais is soft enough to spread under pressure and assertive enough to lead a sandwich on its own, with a washed orange rind that carries a yeasty, faintly barnyard smell over a mild milky paste. That softness needs a firm crust over a close crumb to stand against it, because a slack loaf simply dissolves beneath the cheese and arrives as a damp parcel. It wants restraint around it too: a second loud ingredient turns the build muddy, and the cheese is loud enough already. Cut too young it is chalky at the core and gives none of the cream the bite needs; cut too ripe the rind runs and the paste soaks the crumb through. The butter is there only to carry the cheese's salt into the wheat, not to add a flavor of its own.

The register the sandwich belongs to is the lean one. Nantes is a Muscadet city, and Muscadet is a dry, brisk, faintly saline white that the region drinks young and cold with oysters and with this cheese; the sandwich built in its shadow follows the same instinct, made to be eaten fresh and cool rather than warm and heavy. Where a slice of regional cured pork joins the cheese for weight, it is kept thin and barely dressed so the bread still holds. The version that works keeps the component count low and is eaten soon after it is made, before the soft cheese or a damp filling has had time to work into the crumb.

Lift a fresh one and the rind comes up first, a low pungent washed-cheese smell over the wheat of the crust. The crust breaks dry and a little sharp under the teeth, then the paste arrives soft and cool and creamy, milder on the tongue than the rind led you to expect, faintly earthy where the washed rind meets the bread. The butter reads as salt more than as fat. If cured pork is in there it comes through behind the cheese, firm and salted, a counterweight to the cream. It eats clean and brisk and a little rustic, a cool sandwich for a warm market morning rather than a rich one for a cold day.

The cheese the record can name

The sandwich nantais cannot be dated or attributed, because it is a loose regional label rather than a single recorded dish; no menu, cookbook, or maker fixed it as one named build. What the record can name precisely is the cheese the honest version is built on. The Cure Nantais was created in 1880 at Saint-Julien-de-Concelles, a village in the Loire vineyards just east of Nantes, where a local farmer named Pierre Hivert made it on the advice of a priest.

Hivert first called the cheese le Regal des Gourmets; within a few years it had been renamed le Cure Nantais in tribute to the curé, the priest of the story, who in the most-repeated account was a clergyman sheltering in the region during the upheavals of the French Revolution and the years after. The Hivert family made the cheese at Saint-Julien-de-Concelles for four generations, collecting competition medals and turning it into one of the recognized products of Nantes gastronomy, washed every two days with brine or Muscadet and aged on spruce boards.

In 1987 the Hivert family ceded the brand to Georges Parola, a cheese merchant from Pornic, the small Atlantic resort town southwest of Nantes where the Cure Nantais is still made today in copper vats from raw morning milk. The dish that bears the city's name stays uncodified and undated; the cheese that anchors it carries a firm date, a named farmer, and a continuous line from an 1880 Loire village to a present-day dairy on the Atlantic coast.