The melting magic of the perfect cheese toastie — and how to make one
Joseph Campbell was a bloke with interesting ideas. An American writer and professor of literature, he specialised in comparative mythology. Among his many ideas about character archetypes, heroes’ journeys and a bunch of other stuff that’s left us with Star Wars and screenwriting courses, was The Monomyth, the notion that myths from different cultures share many elements from which one can extrapolate a single root influence deep in the collective psyche. This is very much how I feel about cheese toasties.
There are thought to be about eight billion people on the planet. As we are all mammals, we all start out drinking milk. Roughly two billion don’t continue to do so beyond infancy for cultural or genetic reasons. So let’s say six billion — three-quarters of the people on the globe — consume dairy products. Anywhere that uses milk preserves it as cheese, which, along with bread, is among the first manufactured food products we developed once we’d worked out agriculture and the domestication of animals. So, while we don’t have evidence that the average brickie on the pyramids had a cheese-and-pickle sarnie in his knapsack, it’s a racing certainty he had something like halloumi and flatbread.
Bread and cheese is so commonplace that it sounds like some kind of anti-food. At best an expedient assemblage; at worst the definition of bad, slack, rushed and careless snacking. But if that’s so, why is some combination of hot cheese and grilled bread the go-to snack for more than half the planet? The toastie deserves — no, demands — serious attention.
Toasted cheese has a long history in England as a quick and filling small dish. It was an economical thing to do with leftover cheese ends and required little complicated preparation in a house, pub or gentleman’s club with an open fire. The cheese bits were held to the flames until they got interesting and brought to table with bread for dipping. There are references to cheese-toasting apparatus in…
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