You smell it before you see it, and in the Nord everyone agrees this is by design. The maroilles — the washed-rind cow cheese of the Avesnois, brick-shaped, orange-skinned and famously loud — announces the room before the room is ready for it. Then the tart arrives: tarte au maroilles, or flamiche au maroilles, a thick bread-dough base buried under slabs of the cheese that melt into cream lakes, and the smell in the doorway turns out to have been a toll, paid once, for a flavor that is nutty, meaty, almost sweet. The joke of the region is that the tart cooks itself twice — once in the oven, once in the conversation about the smell.
The cheese is protected — Maroilles has carried an AOP since the mid-1950s — and made within a small area around the town that named it, from cow’s milk pressed into its five-sided brick and washed in brine as it ages. That washing is what builds the rind: a family of surface bacteria, Brevibacterium, paints the crust orange and produces the pungent aroma the cheese is adored and feared for. Aging runs from a few weeks — maroilles nouveau, mild and elastic — to four months and beyond, where the paste turns assertive enough to be sold in paper with warnings attached. For the tart, the middle is the answer: a ripe-but-not-ancient maroilles has enough voice to announce itself and enough moisture to melt clean instead of seizing.
There are two schools and the border between them is generational. The Avesnois original is the flamiche: a raised dough — bread dough, with yeast, kneaded and left to rise — topped only with thick slices of cheese, baked until the crust is hollow-sounding and the cheese has gone molten over it. The quiche school pours eggs and cream over the cheese, turning the tart custard beneath the surface. Both are honest; the first is more ancient and more demanding, because the dough must genuinely rise. We write the flamiche, with the cream option noted where it belongs. What neither school allows is thin cheese: the tart’s pleasure lives in the lakes between the crust and the rind.
Ingredients
Serves 6- Flour 300 g 11 oz
- Fresh yeast 12 g ½ oz
- Salt 6 g 0 oz
- Lukewarm water 180 ml ¾ cup
- Olive oil 1 tbsp
- Maroilles, sliced 5 mm thick, rind on 350 g 12 oz
- Crème fraîche — optional, the quiche school 100 ml ⅜ cup
- Eggs — optional, with the cream 2
- Black pepper, cracked to taste
Equipment
4 items- Large bowl, for the rise
- Baking tray or tart pan
- Oven, hot
- Sharp knife, for the cheese
The recipe
- Make the dough. Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water. Mix flour and salt, add the water and oil, and knead 8–10 minutes to a smooth, springy dough. Cover and let rise 1 to 1.5 hours, until doubled. This is bread, not pastry — treat the rise as an ingredient.
- Slice the cheese. Cut the maroilles 5 mm thick, rind on: the rind melts into the lakes that make the tart. A middle-aged cheese melts clean; an extra-fort will fight you and perfume the whole building.
- Shape and rest. Knock the dough back, stretch or roll it to about 1.5 cm thick, and lay it on the tray. Let it rest 30 minutes, uncovered — a second rise, and the difference between crumb and brick.
- Top it. Dock the dough lightly with your fingertips, lay the cheese slices in shingled rows with small gaps between them — those gaps become the lakes — and crack pepper over everything. Quiche school: whisk the eggs and cream and pour them around the cheese now.
- Bake hot. 210 °C400 °F for 20–25 minutes — 200 °C400 °F for 30 with the cream version — until the dough sounds hollow when knocked and the cheese has melted into a bubbling, brown-pooled surface.
- Wait ten minutes. Rest the tart before cutting: the cheese passes from lava to stretch, and the slices hold. Serve warm, with a sharp salad of raw endives — chicons, as the North says — cut fine and dressed hard.
How to serve it
Beer, not wine — this is one of the cases where the cheese and the tart both vote for it. A Bière de Garde, the amber bottle-conditioned style brewed in the Nord for exactly this table, has the malt to meet the cheese and the carbonation to cut it. In Paris, Chez Michel in the 10th is the address: Thierry Breton cooks the food of his native Nord with the loyalty of a man who will not apologize for the smell, and the flamiche appears when the cheese is right. Chez Casimir, around the corner and from the same family of tables, keeps the same region warm. Both will bring the beer list; both will watch your face when the tart lands.
The cliché
It tastes the way it smells — socks, obviously. Nobody who smells it eats it.
Reality
The smell is the rind's volatile compounds doing their loud work; the taste is the paste's — salt, cream, toasted-nut depth, especially when the cheese has melted into hot bread dough. Smell is not flavor, and nowhere in France is the gap wider than at this tart. The people who refuse it on aroma alone have paid the toll without collecting the treasure.