By Francesco Bianchini
On Place Colette in Paris, across from the Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre metro entrance, with its glass beaded canopy, sits Le Nemours—probably our introduction to the croque-madame. A Parisian brasserie can’t be mistaken for anything else: a breath of Belle Époque, high ceilings, tall windows, mirrors and brass everywhere, and waiters in long white aprons down to their ankles.
Sidewalk cafè elegance, Parisian style
During the winter months that we lived in Paris some years ago, we’d sit on replicas of old Drucker chairs from the turn of the last century—plastic in place of bi-color rattan, aluminum made to look like bamboo—arranged around round, brass-rimmed tables, under glass-and-cast-iron globe lanterns. On a sunny January morning, just a bit of warmth was enough to draw us to the arcades beneath the heat lamps. We’d choose that café after a morning at the Louvre, where I had an annual pass, or perhaps just before a matinée at the Comédie-Française, across the square.
Jour de marché, Sarlat-la-Canéda
For lunch in Sarlat, Dan and I would often settle for the same, served with French fries, a few lettuce leaves, and a quarter-liter of rosé at the Brasserie L’Entracte on the main square. We lived for eight years in the capital of the Périgord Noir, amongst the slate roofs and ochre limestone turrets, and our ritual was so consistent that the owner—a small, cheerful Portuguese man—would shout our order to the kitchen as soon as he saw us coming toward his shaded terrace. Then he’d shake our hands and lead us to a table with an elaborate pantomime of searching for the best one: not wobbly, not too sunny, not too close to the incessant foot traffic.
Irregular customer, L’Entracte
On market days—when the brasserie sat pressed against the overflowing stalls of Swiss chard, carrots, celery root, and the endless rows of foie gras jars and tins of confit—tables were long gone well before noon. Yet monsieur Manuel would still bark a few orders to his staff and somehow find us a seat. We never booked a table: it was always a last-minute decision, when it was too late to cook or there was nothing edible in the fridge. We’d leave our house, just a few steps behind city hall, and make our way to L’Entracte, already savoring the rustic bread puffed up with its melted filling, sealed on top with grated cheese, and crowned with a fried egg glowing like a setting sun. The basket of fries, and above all the sting of Dijon mustard, completed the picture.
From our room with a view
‘We’re so predictable,’ I’d say to Manuel when he arrived with the tray. But he’d protest vigorously, pressing a hand to my shoulder to reassure us. He valued his regulars, who gave him far fewer headaches than the tourists, often arriving with too many children, too many dogs, too many requests in unintelligible languages.
Unlike in the Book of Genesis, the feminine variation of the croque monsieur—the croque-madame—has the addition of an egg, and is not a subtraction but an augmentation of the masculine archetype: a grilled sandwich of ham and Gruyère cheese, with or without béchamel. The name, ‘bite the gentleman’ and later ‘bite the lady’ supposedly originated from a jest by the owner of the first bistro to serve it, who hinted that it just might be filled with human flesh.
The humble yet noble French classic
While Proust is at the seaside with his grandmother in the fictional town of Balbec, he relates that one of her friends—met on the pier—announces that she has ordered a croque-monsieur and eggs with cream for their hotel snack. Thus, the dish, only a few years old at the time, found its way into literature.
My life in France is dotted with croque-madames: low-effort, highly rewarding meals, affordable, available at any hour, yet strangely nonexistent outside national borders. The concept is simple: in a brasserie—originally a place to drink beer—you should always be able to have a bite (croquer) at any time.
Wandering through flea markets, a croque-madame always sees us through the lunch hour with a kind of utilitarian grace—as if we didn’t want to waste too much time on eating, and risk someone else snatching up the rare piece for which we were dreaming. Metaphorically, the smaller the lunch, the more space we had to fill the house with new finds.
You’ll never know what you’ll find at a French flea market!
