Home-made sandwich bread and “tuna melt” sandwiches

Over the years, I've gone through spells of ambition during which I've baked my own bread. Some of it was just experimenting, but at other times it was because I couldn't find ready-made bread that I considered good enough. Now we're in crisis mode and can't just jump in the car drive to the boulangerie or supermarché to buy fresh bread. The good French bread we have stored in the freezer won't last forever.

We have several bags of flour, though, in the cold pantry, and yeast stored in the freezer. It's fresh levure de boulanger in the form of a little square cake that we can buy at Intermarché, cut into small cubes, and freeze so we'll have it when we want or need it. Looking around for something useful to do, I decided to bake bread yesterday morning. We also had a one-kilogram bag of whole wheat flour down in the cold pantry. I was tempted to make brioche, but we only have 6 or 8 eggs left in the fridge, and I thought better of using half of them in what is basically a fancy treat.

So I made two loaves of whole-wheat pain de mie, or sandwich bread. Here's a recipe that I found on a site called An Oregon Cottage. It is very similar to the Julia Child recipe for white-bread sandwich loaves that I made last month  — same proportions and similar methods — and yesterday I decided to use a 50-50 mixture of white all-purpose flour (type 55 en France) and whole-wheat flour (farine complète, type 110) to make the loaves pictured here. I substituted fresh yeast for dried, and vegetable oil for the butter in Julia Child's recipe.

Sandwiches are quick and easy lunches to make, so this bread won't go to waste. I have a package of 6 slices of ham in the fridge, as well as both Cheddar and Comté cheese, so we can make croque-monsieur sandwiches. Or hot spinach and cheese sandwiches because I have frozen spinach and frozen kale. We're looking at this period of involuntary confinement as a time to work on cooking and eating as much food from our chest and upright freezers as we can.

Anyway, yesterday I realized I also had a big can of tuna down in the cellier, and plenty of onions. I also had some celery seeds and some cornichons aigres-doux, which are similar to American dill pickles. All that, with some mayonnaise and mustard, can go into a good tuna salad (rillettes de thon in French). So we made the old-fashioned toasted, open-face sandwiches called "tuna melts" for lunch. I can't remember the last time I ate a tuna melt. The whole idea of tuna salad on a slice of bread with melted cheese on top might seem slightly strange, but it was very good yesterday, and certainly nutritious.

P.S. Yesterday's Coronavirus tally in France: nearly 15,000 cases, nearly 600 deaths