Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where Present Jon must pay for the flawed decisions of Past Jon. Today’s topic, which probably is NOT long enough to sustain an entire post, is the linguistic shit-show that is the grilled cheese sandwich.

So, if you’re not from the United States, a primer: A “grilled cheese sandwich” is a sandwich consisting of melted cheese inside “toasted” (technically lightly fried) bread. The standard way to make the dish in America is in a skillet or pan. You can add some ingredients, but the focus and primary filling by like volume/weight, should be the cheese. If you’re from the UK (and maybe a commonwealth nation, I’m not 100% sure on the distribution of the terminology), you may be surprised, as what I have just described is, to you guys, “a cheese toastie”. For my American readers…I just explained that it’s the same thing as a grilled cheese sandwich, I don’t know what you want from me.

Do you need a sandwich? Also, and this is not your problem, but holy shit our kitchen floor used to have far fewer things on it. Like, I’m pretty sure the stuff surrounding our island extends 8” further out than this picture.

Where the UK tends to get tripped up/irritated with America is actually the second detail about American grilled cheese sandwiches. Namely, they are not grilled. Which is confusing to the UK, because the UK does sometimes grill their cheese toasties…just not by American standards.

I told you this was going to be a mess.

Don’t worry, this is easier than it sounds, and happily for both America and England, it’s technically France’s fault.

Grilling The Suspect

So, in culinary terms, the word “grill” means “to cook by high, dry heat applied to the surface of the food” or “food cooked on/with a grill”. That last bit may sound a little tautological, but I assure you, it made more sense 200-300 years ago. Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that, if you wanted cooked food, you needed actual fire involved. You could cook it directly over/in the fire (roasting), you could cook it in water or a pot over the fire (boiling/braising, etc) or you needed something to hold it over the fire while it cooked. That thing was named a grate or grille, coming convolutedly from the Latin ‘cratis”, meaning, and this is going to sound dumb: “hurdle”. But that’s super important, because of the TYPE of hurdle it refers to. The original Latin doesn’t refer to the sporting equipment, but rather the thing the equipment is built to mimic: a wicker hurdle.

In retrospect, it DOES seem unlikely we would invent a word for “that thing that only exists for jumping over in track events.” Or, you know, a sport of “jumping over a dumb thing we invented only for this purpose”

That is a ‘hurdle’, a small moveable section of wall/fencing, made of woven branches. Indeed, the other definitions of cratis are “wickerwork”, “a fascine” (a bundle of sticks used in construction, kind of a productive version of a fasces, where “fascist” comes from), or “bundle of brush”. So you have “cratis”, which basically means “woven plate or shape of wood.”. That’s where the words crate, and grate come from.

I wasn’t expecting to validate my childhood argument that the backs of our wicker chairs were like cheese graters today, but that’s one of the little treats you sometimes get when stumbling through centuries of linguistic drift.

So, you’ve got these cratis, or, if they’re small, craticula (“little hurdles”). Craticula become notably popular in Latin kitchen terminology, to refer to small metal meshes or grates that keep food above the fire, or that hold sections of coals from the food: Little hurdles that keep the food and coals from touching each other. That word becomes ‘gradilie’ in Old French, then “graille”, then “greille”, then “grille”. Bing bang boom, the “grill”.

So we have this word that refers to the mesh/bars of metal that keep the food and fire from touching, and that’s fine until we hit the modern era, the advent of electricity, American girth, and, to some degree, probably the after effects of the World Wars.

Let’s address the girth factor first: I refer not to the large size of the American PEOPLE with that comment, but the size of the LAND. The USA is a HUGE country, with a relatively low population density, and relatively temperate climate. That means that we’re often able to have bigger yards (or yards at all) and are more likely to spend time in said yards. At the same time, Barbecue (technically invented in the Americas/Caribbean) means we have a mildly deeper cultural connection to outdoor, smoke-fueled cooking. So we tend to have more “grills” as Americans call them, and Barbecues as they’re called in the UK.

Fancy Fire Buckets. Mini Bonfire Bins. Hot Cans with Legs.

It’s rather obvious why we called them grills, since, you know, it’s just a container for holding/producing fire, and a series of bars to hold food above said fire. Meanwhile, in England, the relatively compact nature of the British Isles (at least compared to America) means there were a lot more rowhouses built: homes with no yards, stacked wall-to-wall. So their etymological journey for “grill” is based in old coal-powered cast-iron stoves/ovens, where you can sometimes find “grill boxes” at the top or sides, where the idea was you would take extra coals, and add them to these boxes, where they would apply additional heat to the sides or top of the food. As those technologies advanced, those grill boxes became simply, “gas grills”, where a series of gas vents was separated from the food by a metal mesh, and could be cranked up to heat from above. However, America couldn’t call those systems by that name, since we thought of grills as outdoor cooking appliances, so we called that element “the broiler”, hilariously using a DIFFERENT French-based cooking term to cover the different phrasing for “part of oven that make very hot”.

Why was all of that relevant? Because one of the common ways that the British toast their toasties is under their “grill”, while Americans almost never broil their grilled cheese, or, as the Brits have sometimes asked in amazement: “Wait, so it’s called a grilled cheese, but you don’t grill it?” To which America, imagining an outdoor grill, responds “for one sandwich? Hell no.” Britain: “That doesn’t make any sense.” America: “Oh, I’m sorry, did your oven recently become a toaster, or is your name ALSO stupid?” Since we’re now no longer talking because we hurt each other’s feelings, like any tempestuous relationship, we have to ask: How did we get here?

A Toast, to Cheese

The answer to that is...not precisely known. What is roughly known is the timeline: Grilled Cheese sandwiches became popular in America during the Great Depression and World War 2. Interestingly, during the Great Depression, they were called “toasted cheese sandwiches” or “melted cheese sandwiches”. It’s not until the 1960’s that America starts calling them “Grilled Cheese”, for not entirely well-established reasons, but I think presumably as kids and sailors who ate it during the war came back and began ordering it at restaurants and diners, where they were likely cooked on griddles, also known as “flat-top grills”.

I honestly thought it was going to be a lot easier to find a rapper who had both a flat-top or hi-top fade AND a grill, but after a good 35 seconds of searching, I had to admit defeat and go with the GOAT.

Meanwhile, a lot of sources suggest that the prevalence of Toaster-irons (also called, and bear with me here: pie irons, toastie iron, pudgy pie iron, sandwich toasters, or “Jaffle Irons”) in the UK may have shaped there phrasing. What the hell are those? Well, broadly, they’re typically electric versions of a device that already existed.

Back during the “all fire” days, toasting bread was a little trickier: you either had to toss it on the grill, and hope it came off, place it on a rack over the fire, or hold it out over the fire in a metal frame. These frames, made slightly wider, were actually pretty easy to turn into SANDWICH toasting-frames: instead of slowly rotating one slice of bread to toast both sides, you had the bread, the cheese, and more bread, held with a clam-shell mechanism pinning the frame shut, so you could safely turn the frame, toasting the outside/melting the cheese within.

From that idea came the modern “toaster irons”, which are basically waffle-irons, but instead of having you know, a waffle pattern, they serve as something like a huge dumpling press: pushing the edges of the bread placed inside together to seal in whatever’s being cooked. This is where the name “pie iron” also comes from, because while savory toasties like cheese and onion or ham and cheese were popular, you could also just dump in chocolate custard or cherry pie filling, and boom, mini-toasted hand pie. The technique wasn’t even unique to England: one of the early editions of “Joy of Cooking” directly recommends USING a Waffle-Iron to make a melted-cheese sandwich, and the first patented electric toaster iron was filed in America. But as British rationing kept more people eating at home in the 50’s and 60’s, as they recovered from the devastation of World War 2, they relied more on their home toaster irons, while America was out ordering sandwiches at a diner.

Can you imagine a like, 1950’s husband ,all Don Draper’ed up, trying to order a “cheese toastie” . Dude would be arrested as a communist in like, FIVE minutes.

So both started with “toasted cheese sandwiches”, and both changed it in their own ways: Britain made the name more cutesy, representing their home-based cooking efforts, while America tried to sound a little more sophisticated and asked for their cheese “grilled” rather than toasted. Maybe. Like I said, there’s no definitive answers that most people can find. It’s not like every year America holds the Linguistic Shift council, and decides how they’re going to alter their existing language. But it certainly seems reasonable. Which is surprising, given the mess we started in. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make myself a toasted sandwich, because I have made myself hungry.

MONDAY: IT’S EITHER GOING TO BE A SPREE OF BREADS, A SIMPLE SEASONED FISH, OR SOMETHING ELSE. I DON’T KNOW. OH SHIT, THIS IS ACTUALLY NATIONAL GRILLED CHEESE MONTH. CAN I SCREW AROUND AND DO A UNEXPECTED QUASI-THEME??? WHY AM I ASKING YOU?