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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.
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. 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
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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.