CUT THE RIBBON, LE CROQUE-MONSIEUR!

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Editorial Staff

Be ready because this Cut The Ribbon is yummy. It’s about the Croque-Monsieur (aka, the Crunch Mister)! If you put grilled ham and cheese (Emmental or Gruyère) together, add some béchamel sauce and use good and soft bread, the result is a typical French sandwich. There’s not a name to whom this invention can be appointed to, there’s rather a place. In fact, this particular sandwich’s first recorded appearance happened in a Parisian café of Boulevard de Capucines 1 in 1910. A croque-monsieur served with a fried egg or poached egg on top would be later known as a croque-madame (but this is another story). In times the croque monsieur would have different names: in English ham and cheese toast in America, the Monte Cristo or in Spain the bikini! The origins of the word, however, remains unknown, the most common being a joke that the meat inside the sandwich was human flesh. The croque-monsieur would even become such a hit that even Marcel Proust mentioned it in “In the shadow of young girls in flower” in 1919 : “Now , coming out of the concert, as , by taking the path that goes to the hotel , we stopped for a moment on the dike my grandmother and me to exchange a few words with Madame de Villeparisis which announced that she had ordered for us at the hotel croque -monsieur and eggs and cream … “. Aren’t you hungry yet? We are!