Tartine au Fromage

At seven in the evening a wedge comes out of the cheese drawer, a knife trails it to the board, and a slice of yesterday's country loaf gets a cool layer of it pressed flat to the crust. That is the cheese tartine in its plain cold form: one piece of bread, cheese laid on top and nothing over it, eaten at the apéritif hour or in the lull of a working noon. The cheese is never taken to a flame here. It arrives at the temperature of the room, sliced or spread by hand, and the slice is a way to eat the cheese course standing up rather than a dish a kitchen fires to order. France has a hundred cheeses and this is the slice that hands one of them a piece of bread.

Which cheese you reach for decides everything else. A young goat's cheese spreads. A whipped fromage frais spreads. A spoonful of fresh brebis spreads, smoothing to the edges like a thicker butter with the crumb showing through underneath. A wedge of aged Comté does not. The firm cheeses come off the wire in slabs and sit on the bread in flat planes, denser and chewier in the mouth, asking for a sturdier slice beneath them, and the soft ones melt into the crumb almost the moment they land. The choice of cheese is the choice of sandwich, made at the drawer before a knife touches the bread.

A single cold slice has its own ways of going wrong, and most of them are about the bread tiring under a weight it has to hold without a partner. Cut the slice too thin and a dense aged cheese folds it in half on the way to the mouth. Cut it too thick and the bread crowds out the cheese it was supposed to carry. Spread a wet fresh cheese on and walk away, and within the hour the moisture has crept into the crumb and softened the slice to a damp thing. A scrape of butter against the bread first holds that moisture off, the way it does on a breakfast tartine, and a close-crumbed pain de campagne with a real crust gives a hard cheese something to push against instead of buckling beneath it.

Lean over one as it is built and the smell is the cheese itself, nutty off an aged wedge or barnyard-sharp and lactic off a fresh goat's round, with the cool dry scent of day-old crust under it. The first bite is the crust cracking dry, then the give of the bread, then the cheese arriving at blood temperature rather than hot, its fat coating the tongue without any of the browned bitterness heat would have added. A hard cheese breaks against the teeth in firm flakes; a soft one drags across the palate and clings. A few walnuts crushed on top snap between the molars, and one grind of black pepper lands sharp at the finish, the whole slice eaten cool and slow with a glass beside it.

This is the slice the apéro and the goûter live on, not the breakfast table where the jam tartines sit, and it is read by the company it keeps. A board of them goes out before dinner with an olive and a glass of white; one of them is a child's four o'clock with a square of chocolate alongside for contrast. A French cook buys for it by name at the fromagerie counter, asking for a fresh chèvre to spread or a hard tomme to slice, the same cheese they would set out whole on a board, here married to bread in advance. Order a sandwich au fromage at a boulangerie and you get a baguette length closed over Emmental and butter, a different and portable thing; the open slice stays at home, on a plate, eaten with the hands at a table.

The variants are small changes rung on a cold open slice. A drizzle of honey over a blue turns it sweet; a fan of radish or a few cornichons cuts a rich one; a grind of pepper or a pinch of herbs is as far as most go before the cheese is buried. Run the same slice under a broiler until the top blisters and it stops being this dish and becomes the hot gratinéed tartine instead, a plate fired and rushed out rather than a cold one assembled at leisure. Close a second slice over it and you have a cheese sandwich, no longer open. The honest nearest relative is the plain buttered tartine the whole family grows from, the cheese slice being only that base with the cheese course laid on.

The Open Slice of Cheese

No cook invented the slice of bread with cheese on it, and no year opens its history, because cheese set on bread is about as old as the two of them sharing a table. The word tartine is the datable part: it descends from the Old French tarte and meant a thin slice of bread spread with something, butter or honey or cheese, long before any café gave a hot version a fancier name. The cold cheese slice is simply the plainest thing a household does with a wedge from the drawer and the end of a loaf, the cheese course pressed onto bread instead of carried to it on a board.

What carries real dates is the cheese the slice happens to hold. France protects more than forty cheeses by appellation, and several are old enough to anchor the slice to deep time through their own paperwork. Roquefort was the first, handed a parliamentary monopoly on the name by a royal charter of Charles VI in 1411 and made the first French cheese under modern appellation law in 1925. A young chèvre spread on bread or a slab of that ewe's-milk blue carries centuries the slice itself cannot claim. The open tartine keeps no birthday; the wedge on top very often does.

The cheese course it grows out of has a fixed place in the French meal, and that place is written down. The open cheese tartine is that course handed a slice of bread, eaten standing before the meal rather than seated at its end. The rule it draws on was set in print by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the lawyer-gourmand of Belley, whose 1825 Physiologie du goût laid down that a dessert without cheese is a beauty short an eye, and the slice of bread under a wedge is the plainest plate that rule has ever been served on.