Sandwich au Roquefort
Roquefort arrives at the bread already loud, and the sandwich is an exercise in giving it room without taking the whole loaf: crumbled for sharp pockets, or forked with butter to an even coat.
Roquefort arrives at the bread already loud, and the sandwich is an exercise in giving it room without taking the whole loaf: crumbled for sharp pockets, or forked with butter to an even coat.
Roquefort cheese sandwich; strong blue.
The cheese is a 35-gram goat disc two fingers wide, so scale and ripeness decide everything. You lay the ripe puck on whole and press it until the near-liquid centre sags into the crumb.
Reblochon cheese sandwich; creamy Savoyard cheese.
A length of pane casanu draped with thin slices of Corsican dry-cured leg ham, the nustrale pig and chestnut-feed signature in every fold of the cured red lean.
A clean glassy slice of Alsatian pressed-head terrine on rye: gelatin-set picked meat with onion, parsley and vinegar built in, a cornichon alongside.
Pounti reaches the bread already finished: a cold Auvergnat terrine of chopped pork and chard, egg-bound and studded with prunes, sliced in an honest slab so the sweet-savoury swing holds.
A chicken sandwich built on Poulet de Loué, the Label Rouge free-range bird of the Sarthe. Slow-grown firmer flesh slices clean and leads; the sauce stays thin.
Pont-l'Évêque cheese on bread.
The sandwich au piment d'Espelette is organised around a spice: the mild Basque chili dusted through jambon de Bayonne and brebis cheese, threading dried-fruit warmth across every bite.
A Gare de Lyon kiosk sells a half-baguette with a centimetre slab of pâté de campagne and two cornichons in a paper twist on the side, for four euros, to commuters eating standing on the platform.
A Picardy pâté en croûte, brown disc with a dark duck oval at its centre, laid on baguette with a cornichon on the side, sliced off the round at the Amiens charcutier window.
The Sandwich au Munster on the everyday French counter is built on the pasteurised dairy round of the Alsace washed-rind cheese, milder and more uniform than its farmhouse cousin.
The Sandwich au Munster Fermier carries the raw-milk farmhouse grade of the Alsatian washed-rind cheese, stronger and less even than the dairy version, tuned wheel by wheel and scattered with cumin.
The Sandwich au Morbier carries a thin charcoal seam, a record of two milkings, into a baguette: a mild, supple Jura cheese given a plain bread treatment that lets one quiet earthy note show.
The Sandwich au Maroilles does not lay one of France's most pungent cheeses cold: it warms it into the bread until the paste turns tart and savoury, the move the region's famous cheese tart makes.
Maroilles cheese sandwich; pungent, washed-rind.
France's oily-fish sandwich: hot-smoked mackerel in firm slabs or fresh-cooked and flaked, on a buttered baguette with lemon or pickled shallot built into the bite.
The bar version of Corsica's cured loin sandwich: lonzu sliced to order off the hanging piece, eaten standing with a short pour of island red.
The Sandwich au Livarot lays Normandy's loudest washed-rind cheese, banded with five reed strips and nicknamed le Colonel, in firm slabs on a buttered baguette, the butter its only brake.
Livarot cheese sandwich; strong flavor.
The Sandwich au Langres is built on a cheese with a well in its top: a splash of Champagne into the fontaine soaks the paste, so it arrives loosened and half spread before it meets the bread.
The Franc-Comtois Christmas grade of the Morteau line, the broad smoked sausage held back from the autumn pig-killing for the December table, sliced warm onto baguette with a spoon of Puy lentils.
Generic term for any ham sandwich on French bread.