The Murky History Behind The Classic Grilled Cheese Sandwich

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The grilled cheese, it seems, doesn't have a single birthplace, but it does have a long trail of crumbs across centuries and continents. The concept of warm cheese on bread goes back as far as Rome, but those ancient cheese sandwiches were more akin to a spelt and ricotta cheesecake. Much later, we get to a recipe for Welsh rarebit, a toast with cheese sauce dating back to the 18th century, and John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, who slapped together the first sandwich (but no cheese) in the same century. In 1861, Victorian recipe books like "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management" referenced toasted cheese meals, and the French, with their classic croque monsieur, were putting ham and melted cheese on bread by 1891. History, like the illustrious grilled cheese, is never cut and dried.

In 1916, American James L. Kraft patented processed cheese, allowing ooey, gooey, pullable sandwiches to become a thing. The invention of pre-sliced bread in the 1920s led to many sandwich creations, possibly even the cheese dream, an open-faced cheese sandwich that became quite popular during the Great Depression. It may have even inspired a hungry American named Charles Champion, who in 1924 patented the first electric sandwich maker called the Toastwich. No wonder that folks began placing processed cheese in between slices of pre-sliced bread, eating several Toastwiches at a time. During World War II, navy cooks even had a government-approved recipe called "American cheese filling sandwiches." But none of these are the grilled cheese as we call it today.

Right before 1950, Australian Dr. Earnest Smithers invented the jaffle iron, hence why an Australian grilled cheese is called a jaffle. By the mid 1970s, the Australian company Breville introduced an electric version, selling almost half a million in its first year. But before that, waffle irons were already all the rage in America. By the time processed cheese came along, the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City had an idea for a collaboration. They had an account called Phenix Cheese that merged with Kraft in 1929. In the 1930s, a popular cast-iron company called Griswold started manufacturing waffle irons and sandwich makers. According to Digiday, J. Walter Thompson came up with the idea to pair Griswold with Kraft, even giving out free packages of Kraft cheese with their sandwich makers and urging customers to make "grilled sandwiches" in newspaper advertisements. While not quite our familiar term "grilled cheese", we're quite close.

Sometime during the 1960s, General Mills featured the words grilled cheese on print ads when they introduced a Betty Crocker line of frozen toaster goodies called Toastwiches, so the name grilled cheese was griddled into our lexicon for sure. We can all agree that our collective love for melty cheese and toasty bread has quite a history. No matter if we air fry them or toast them, broil them or burn them (it's charred, okay?) grilled cheeses, or whatever we decide to call them in the year 3786, are here to stay.