GoKawiilWelcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where David and I travel the world on wings made of bread, chronicling Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a look back at an old favorite: the grilled cheese.
"I for one never expected an essay about grilled cheese to make me cry," writes Padma Lakshmi, internationally famous chef, in her introduction to this year's Best American Food and Travel Writing, which came out yesterday. "But Talia Lavin's 'Notable Sandwiches #75: Grilled Cheese,' written with the religious fervor of an initiate, impossibly sincere even as it winks at you, is both a blessing—of the ‘small and perfect thing’—and a kind of benediction, as is each piece here."
Her declaration that my work made her cry made ME cry, in a salty and delicious chain of events. Because being a writer is, perhaps above all things, lonely. And selling yourself, all day, every day, is wearing and hard. (As is undertaking a multi-city book tour while suffering from agoraphobia.) This kind of praise—the idea that your work touches people to the quick, and draws out tears—makes it worth it.
So here we present the Grilled Cheese Essay in fullness, in the hopes that it will inspire you to joy.
And if you need yet more inspiration—today is October 25, St. Crispin's Day, subject of one of Shakespeare's most famous and rousing speeches. Go out and face your problems like Henry V did some Frenchmen. Allons-y!
Notable Sandwiches #75: Grilled Cheese
In writing about the grilled cheese sandwich, I find myself with little to offer but praise. It is difficult to encounter such a thing and not overrun the page with the fervency of my gladness.
This is not a column where I will carp and complain—about air-fryer grilled cheeses, or fancy gourmet grilled cheeses, or Kraft-single grilled cheeses, or the proper application of butter, or the appropriate pan, or the degree and nature of the condiments. To me, each grilled cheese is enough, and more than enough. In this world so full of slaughter and fire, where doubt and monstrosity abound, this much is clear to me: the grilled cheese is a small and perfect thing. And how many of those are there?
So my position on the grilled cheese is unabashedly boosterish, and moreover, it is agnostic towards ingredients and provenance. To your grilled cheese you may add caramelized onions or avocado; bacon, turkey or ham; chutney or cornichons. Make it with Wonderbread or a freshly-baked eighteen-grain country loaf sourced from fields you cultivated yourself in a cantilevered sky-farm with the finest hydroponics. Add goat cheese or smoked gouda or aged cheddar or unidentified plasticine processed cheese product; heat it in a pan or over a flame, under a broiler, in a dutch oven, or with an acetylene torch. I do not care. You have composed something perfect with your own hands. You have made something that will warm and satisfy you. You have, for a small moment, partaken of the act of creation that grants the human animal its sliver of divinity. You have done so by means of the grilled cheese sandwich.
From two perfect things—bread and cheese—arises a more perfect union. In contemplating it and its lessons I think of this fragment from Fernando Pessoa’s “Odes”:
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