Short Stuff: Salute the Grilled Cheese

Today we pay tribute to the comfiest of comfort food, the grilled cheese sandwich.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and there's Jerry standing in for Dave. I like,
huge weal, but that's cool, and this is short stuff
that's right. And this comes from our old friends and
colleagues at how stuff works dot com about the grilled cheese,
and I double and triple checked and corroborated, corroborated. I

(00:25):
hate that word, do you because you can't say it.
I can never say it right, corrobo righted you have.
But I went to all sorts of food websites and
about grilled cheese and they kind of all said the
same thing. So it's either one of those internet things
where everyone's lying in unison or or how stuff Works
got it right. Well, yeah, I like to presume that

(00:46):
house stuff Works got it right. Um, But I before
we start, I just want to throw out to everybody
a little tip. If this makes you want a grilled cheese,
which is a pretty good likelihood it would it did
for me. Mm hmmm. Um. You could do a lot
worse than buying yourself a nice little wedge of Fontina cheese.

(01:07):
Oh that's not where I thought you were headed. Where
did you think I was headed. I thought you were
gonna go with mayo instead of butter. No, no, no,
I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah, that's a legitimate
grilled cheese technique is to use mayonnaise as your fat
instead of butter, and it provides a It's crispier than

(01:28):
butter in the end, it doesn't quite have the aunctiousness
of a butter. But I also heard j Kenji Lopez,
alt food scientists and extraordinary chef and book writer say
that if you're gonna do that, then at least don't
use CuPy mayonnaise, because he said that creates a bit
of a funk because of some ingredient in the cup. Yeah,

(01:49):
I could see that. Yeah, try it with mayo. It's interesting.
It makes sense that it would be a little crispier
because there's egg whites in there, so I could see
them cooking up crispier than just butter. Yeah, it's it's good.
I'll like it. I mean, I'm still gonna go with
butter overall, and I'm a mayonnaise freak, but I still
will take the butter. So um with fontina, it melts
really well. It's got a neat taste. I would recommend

(02:11):
maybe mixing it with another cheese, whatever you normally use,
just also add fontina and you're gonna be like, oh wow,
now I know what ouey, gooey grilled cheese is. And
hat tipped to our friends at Blue Apron who introduced
me to using fontina blue cheese or grilled cheese and
some of their one of their recipes works really well. Yeah,

(02:31):
one of the most comforting of comfort foods is the
grilled cheese. And we're going to talk a little bit about,
you know, some kind of weird facts and things. But
the history of the grilled cheese is interesting in that,
you know, it's been around for a long time. It's
been mentioned in Roman, ancient Roman texts, but certainly beginning
in about nineteen ten. The French we're making and it's

(02:55):
one of my favorite breakfast sandwiches, the croak monsieur, which
is it's like a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in
I think pancake batter and then grilled something like that
like heat is applied to it to cook the outside. Basically,
I don't think you have to have pancake better, though,

(03:15):
do you. That's what I've always seen. It sounds like
you're talking about a Monte Cristo, not virtually the same thing. Well,
monte Cristo I think has jam in it, but it
is definitely dipped and grittled. But I didn't know what
crooke man sure was. And then you can also have
the egg and I believe is that a croak? My damn,

(03:37):
I don't know. Chuck, you're really putting me on the
spot here. Can we talk about earth science instead? No? No, no, no,
we're talking about the grilled cheese. And then this is
all off the dome as me ordering in a restaurant.
Maybe we should just stick to the facts. Okay, alright,
so fact number one, The grilled cheese really started to
take off thanks to something that you wouldn't think would
be related until you stopped and thought about it, and

(03:59):
that would be sliced bread. And the next time you
hear somebody say it's the greatest thing since sliced bread,
you should mutter thank you, otto Frederick row Wetter and
see what they what they do, what their response is,
if they step away, they're not that cool. If they
say I know exactly what you mean, or they say
what do you mean? Then they're a friend. Yeah, I

(04:20):
think maybe, Uh, this that deserves a short stuff on
its own. Slice bread, so we should we should get
into that. He's the he's the father of it. Like
he he uh engaged in coitus with bread, and baby
loaf of bread that was sliced came out, and he's
the father of sliced bread in the world. It's just

(04:40):
the facts. You So we're sticking to Oh goodness me um,
all right. So you've got your bread, uh, and this
is in the nineteen twenties and grilled cheese. Because of this,
slice bread became uh sort of a staple menu item
during the Great Depression when it was fairly inexpensive, fairly filling.

(05:01):
But this was of the open faced variety with a
grated cheese. Correct. Yeah, what's what's next? Okay, I'll continue then. Uh.
James L. Craft comes along, the entrepreneur who revolutionized pasteurization
of cheese and process cheese, and in nineteen fourteen, the

(05:24):
jail Craft and Brothers Company, they opened their first plant
in Illinois and started selling what the English would call
rat cheese or rat trap cheese because the English are
very snooty about their cheeses. Yeah, and James Craft is like,
I'm not trying to be fancy to stop. I know
it's crud cheese, but it's really shelf stable. You can

(05:45):
transport it very long distances, and the guys in the
Navy love it. Yeah, I mean it was in a
a Navy cookbook that was something called American that cheese
filling sandwiches on the Navy chef menu and government cookbooks
and what's better than an American cheese filling sandwich. Yeah.

(06:05):
And so my impression, Chuck is that initially Craft processed
cheese came in huge blocks akin to probably like Velveta today,
but I'm guessing even bigger, and it wasn't until the fifties.
I believe that maybe even nineteen fifty that Craft is like,
we're gonna slice that for you, like like um otto
Frederick roe Weather's invention, but with cheese instead of bread.

(06:28):
But they said, we're just gonna slice the cheese. That's all.
We're not going to get in any of the other
row wetter weirdness. That's right. So now you've got sliced bread,
you've got pre sliced package cheese. And even though grilled
cheeses have been around and I did see things that
suggested that people were adding a second slice of bread
during the Great Depression, for like, you know, the men

(06:49):
who went to work that need a little extra. But
it really started to come on the scene in the
nineteen fifties and sixties in America, once you had all
the bread and all the cheese that you could ever
dream of, right, and so from that point on it
was like, Okay, now we've got grilled cheese sandwiches. They're
going to take off like a rocket. But like you said,

(07:09):
there's a lot of recipes around that um kind of
predate the grilled cheese as we know it, which apparently
just dates to the nineteen sixties. And a lot of
them are open face. Most of them are open face,
if not all of them. And one of the one
things they have in common is that they have all
sorts of different ways to to um um. I guess

(07:30):
apply heat to this because if you just put a
slice of cheese on a piece of bread, you have
a cheese sandwich. Oh you mean without cooking it. Yes,
you have to apply heat for it to be a
grilled cheese, which is indicative of the name. But they
have all different all different names and all different ways
of applying heat from the starting about nineteen o two,

(07:51):
I think is as far back as it went. Yeah,
and so why don't we take a break. We'll talk
about some of these recipes and some other grilled cheese
effects right after this. All right, you mentioned nineteen o two.

(08:19):
You're talking about the recipe for a melted cheese and
Sarah Tyson Rohor's book, Mrs Roarer's New cookbook. Yeah, and
she said, cook it in a hot oven. Why don't
you that's a cheese toast. Though I hate I beg
to differ the same thing um with Florence A. Coles Um.
She had a cookbook called seven hundred Sandwiches. I'd like

(08:42):
to see that. That's an amazing title. And she said
that you broil the ingredients. Still, what you do is
take a piece of bread and put some cheese on
it and cook it open face Again. Cheese toast is
what you're talking about. Or Azumi would call it cheese pond.
She used to make that when she was a kid. Okay, Finally, finally,
in the late thirties, people come to their senses and

(09:05):
they start to to just kind of nip at the
outlines of what is a real grilled cheese. That's right.
That is the toasted sandwich recipe. In the Boston Cooking
School cookbook, they talked about broiling, which is still cheese touse.
But then someone finally says, why don't you put some
butter on it and throw it in a pan? Yeah?

(09:27):
And then Erma Rombauer, who wrote The Joy of Cooking
all the way back in nineteen three, said I got
one even better. You're gonna need a second slice of
bread for this, but we've already established that's abundant and
you can do that. But get yourself a nice waffle
iron and just put put it in there, and you've
got yourself a grilled cheese. How that is? Yeah, that's

(09:49):
the beginning of panini. And she wasn't even Italian. Okay,
I love it. And then from about that point on
people are just like, you know, I'm just gonna put
some butter or mayo on the bread and put it
in a pan and heat it on the stove and
call it a grilled cheese. Yeah. I mean, I guess
we can talk personal stuff. I mean, you talked about
your Fontana fontina. Um. I'm a big fan of mixing

(10:15):
up just a couple of kinds of cheese. Is maybe
a slice or two and then some grated, something grated
that's different on top, maybe a Colby jack or something.
But uh, what you don't want to do, or at
least what I don't think you want to do, is
put too much cheese. Like you want it a little thick,
you want it more than like a slice, but you
can't go too far overboard. Or it's it's it's a

(10:36):
lot of cheese. You know what I'm saying. Yes, it
is a lot of cheese. And if you're speaking about
your arteries, then no, you don't want to go too
far overboard. If you're talking about overwhelming the bread, then
that's just uh comes down to a ratio of bread
to cheese. So if you have a thicker bread, if
you have a loaf of bread, um that like like
row Wetter's wife was unsliced. You can sli say yourself

(11:00):
to whatever thickness you want, and you can pile on
as much cheese as you like, but cannot be overwhelmed
by the cheese in the same way that you can't
just do one slice of cheese and expect it not
to be overwhelmed by the bread. Yeah, And it also
depends on what you're going for. If you're going for
a real, like gour mate type of thing, you're gonna
have different kinds of cheeses. You may want a little thicker,

(11:20):
but you know, you know, you're probably not gonna be
dipping it into tomato soup like you want that sandwich
to hold up in the tomato soup. Oh yeah, yeah, no,
you definitely do. For sure. I was gonna say, I don't.
I don't think there's a grilled cheese that couldn't be
put into tomato soup. And if so, you've you've exceeded
a grilled cheese to some disappointing degree. Yeah, I guess so,
because even if some of the bread chunks off in

(11:41):
the soup, that's a pretty good bite for sure. In
the spoon. You know what else? It's good for dipping
his French onion. Oh, never dipped in a French onion.
Oh it's good. It's almost like a meatless ohs you saying, well,
I mean there's already bread and cheese in there. What
are you dipping? Um? That's more bread and cheese. I
like to double up. Okay, you know, oh man, I

(12:04):
love a good crop of French onion soup so good
I made some um from scratch. As a matter of fact,
it was so good that I actually went back and
made my own beef stock. So I made French onion
soup from scratch, all of it from scratch. And the
stuff that I made with using store bought chicken stock
was way better than the second time when I tried

(12:26):
to make my own beef stock. Really so yeah, so
just stick and it sounds really weird, you think, well,
it's gotta be beef dope. Use chicken stock um instead,
And it's really good and it's not very hard to make.
It just takes a little time to to get the
onions to caramelize. Yeah. I've been making romin at home
and I used as my starter. Uh MoMA Fuco. You

(12:47):
know Momafuca. They sell they sell their noodles online, but
they also sell their stock that you can get delivered frozen,
and boy that stuff is good. Um. You can get
stock also from White Oak Past. We talked about them
in the Future of Farming episode. They're like the ones
who they're farming techniques actually sequester carbon rather than releasing it. Right,

(13:09):
right right. It's pretty neat, but they sell stock online too.
Got it's so good, I'm so hungry. I guess we
should mention a few of these cheese facts here before
we go right fast, chuck fast. Uh This one seemed
remarkable to me, but apparently in two thousand seven, Craft
Foods thought people aren't eating enough grilled cheese. And I
double checked this. They spent one point for billion dollars

(13:32):
marketing dollars to get people to eat more grilled cheese,
which is and have it unlike restaurant menus, which a
lot of like comfort like hipster comfort food restaurants that
you know you can get like a fourteen dollar grilled cheese,
uh in in a lot of these places. Now. I
don't know if it was due to that marketing campaign,
but that is a lot of marketing cheese to be
throwing at cheese. Yeah. And in a deeply two thousand

(13:55):
seven move, they held an online contest on my Space
to get people to make videos that are like odes
to grilled cheese. And Chris gia MALONEI I believe who
Um went on to become a game designer. He designed Reincarnation.
The Reincarnation game series. He made a video about um,

(14:16):
a grilled cheese going into attaining bed and that's how
it gets grilled. And he won fifties fifty thousand Samoleans
from that. Wow, that's what I said too. I'll bet
that's what Chris g and alone he said when they
called him, I don't and another rest of these are
that interesting? I don't think. No. I think it's great
to end on Christie and Maloney. I hope he's a
good guy. Yeah, and hey, sit in your special. Everyone

(14:38):
has their own take on a grilled cheese. Sometimes I'll
because I love that everything bagel spice. Sometimes I'll butter
it up and then sprinkle some of that and griddle
that into the bread. That's really good. That is good.
Oh wait, one more thing, Chuck, because it's an opportunity
to plug our book in all the way back in
two thousand and four, online casino Golden Palace dot Com

(14:58):
paid twenty thousand dollars for a grilled cheese sandwich that
had been made a decade before. Remember that because it
had the likeness of the Virgin Mary in it, And
we mentioned that in the chapter on back masking in
our book. This stuff you should know incomplete compendium. That's right,
and this actually kind of did look like the Virgin Mary. Yeah,

(15:19):
intd well way to fact check how stuff works? Sure,
um if you want to know, oh yeah, I don't
do that in this in this series, do we nope?
You to say short stuff out? Short stuff out? Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.

(15:40):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.