About National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day
National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day is observed on April 12th.
While bread and cheese have been culinary companions for centuries, grilled cheese sandwiches are much more recent and are considered to have been developed in the 1920s, since when they have gone to become a staple of the American diet.
Grilled cheese sandwiches were originally called melted cheese sandwiches.
In 1902, a recipe for ‘melted cheese’, designed to be baked in a hot oven, appeared in ‘Mrs. Rorer’s New Cookbook”. A recipe published in 1929 in Florence A. Cowles’ “Seven Hundred Sandwiches” called for toasting the ingredients to make “Toasted Cheese”. “Toasted Sandwich” was published in 1939 in “The Boston Cooking School Cookbook”. It encouraged preparers to toast the ingredients or even sauté them in a frying pan covered with butter, which takes the maker dangerously close to French Toast territory.
In “The Joy of Cooking” (1953), Irma S. Rombauer wrote that bread and cheese should be heated in a commercial waffle iron – an easy meal to prepare even for “the host without a maid.
In 2004 an online casino, GoldenPalace.com, paid $28,000 for a half-eaten grilled cheese that looked like the Virgin Mary.
In 2006, American competitive eater Joey Chestnut won a championship by eating 34 grilled cheese sandwiches in one sitting.
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