With the 2024 Summer Olympics recently in Paris, many of us are thinking about French food — specifically, how to cook some of the iconic bistro dishes those lucky enough to score tickets to one of the events might have been enjoying in the City of Light. The one that looms largest for me is the first dish I sampled on my first-ever trip to Paris this past March, at Buvette in the heart of the city’s Pigalle neighborhood: the saucy, obscenely decadent toasted cheese sandwich known as croque monsieur. I was nursing a badly torn hamstring and feeling pretty sorry my sisters had booked a hotel so far from the train station when I hobbled into the small and charming cafe in the 9th arrondissement in search of comfort food.
Paired with a lovely glass of vin rouge du moment (red wine of the moment), the iconic sandwich that arrived at my bar seat aside a pile of crunchy cornichons not only hit the spot after a grueling red-eye flight, but made me feel incredibly welcome in a city that is sometimes characterized — unfairly, I discovered — as unfriendly to American tourists. I don’t know if you believe food is the culinary equivalent of a hug, but that toasty sandwich and glass of local red wine sure felt like a warm embrace. Traditionally made with baked or boiled ham and a salty Alpine-style cheese such as Gruyère, Comté or Emmental, this humble knife-and-fork sandwich was popularized in the early 1900s as a simple but tasty snack for Parisians.
(Many croque monsieur .
