Researching the history of grilled cheese is like researching the history of air. I mean, did humans ever exist without it?
Amazing fact: They did. Several factors had to coalesce—just as the key ingredients of the delicious sandwich do in the sizzling pan in which it is made with proper TLC—to introduce this perfectly prosaic yet never pedestrian luxury into our lives.
First, there had to be cheese. We’d have to reach way back into the dustiest, darkest corners of human history, an era that predates recorded time. All archaeologists can agree on is that cheese originated via the transportation of milk in vessels made from ruminants’ stomachs.
The rennet that naturally occurred in these prehistoric containers curdled the milk, and presto-cheese-o. It may have happened in modern-day Mongolia as the most popular story goes, or it may have occurred in the Saharan desert, the Middle East, even Europe.
The first evidence of anything resembling a grilled cheese dates back to ancient Rome, and the French have been making their croques monsieurs since the early 20th century. However, what we think of as a grilled cheese is typically traced to the 1920s and the “invention” of manufactured, cheap white bread, and the mainstreaming of processed cheese, which James L. Kraft patented around that time.
At Edible, we like our grilled cheese in many forms, from simple fried loaf ends stuck together with whatever cheese we have rolling around, to couture versions, put out by two of our favorite curd-melters, The Cheese Traveler and Restaurant Navona.
The Cheese Traveler | @thecheesetraveler
Restaurant Navona | @restaurant_navona
Smokey Mountain Grilled Cheese
Five-Cheese Jam Grilled Cheese
