RECIPE BOX ROULETTE: Lois' Baked Cheese Sandwiches

A recipe that launched a journey into the gooey world of the grilled cheese

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This article is part of the Recipe Box Roulette series, an innovative "card game" crafted to pay homage to the curators of long-forgotten or overlooked recipe boxes and to breathe new life into their treasured dishes.

The rules are simple, grab a recipe box, draw a card, and embark on a culinary journey that transcends time and generations.

This recipe from Ruth Haerr’s Recipe Box is attributed to Lois Scott. A bit moreMore a casserole than a sandwich, this recipe would make a great addition to a Sunday brunch.

Slice by Slice, The Evolution of Grilled Cheese Sandwiches 

Though John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich claims to have invented the sandwich in 1762, ancient Roman cookbooks feature a similar preparation of a cooked bread and cheese dish. Though we do salute you for your ingenuity, Earl Mantagu, it’s likely that our modern day grilled cheese sandwiches descend from this ancient Roman delight.  

So let’s look at the modern day influences of this much loved melty, soul-southing delicacy. We may take the fact that we can run to the corner grocery to grab a sliced bag a bread for granted, but this convenience hasn’t always been the case. Shocking, I know! 

Baked loaves of bread didn’t appear on grocery shelves until around the turn of the 20^th century. Long story, short this was likely due to the convergence of health food advocates, home economists, and pure food legal advocates (maybe more on this later. It really is a long story.) With the food and ingredient shortages created by the the Great War, the American public was willing to try the new fangled idea of purchasing bread from the grocery shelf.

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

It wasn’t until the late 1920s that sliced bread hit the American market. Touted as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped,” it was actually met with much pushback. The slices were sloppy and dried out more quickly than the whole loves. 

It was Otto Rohwedder, the inventor of the bread slicer who, with improvements to the slicer and another invention would keep those sliced loaves on the grocery shelves. Remember how sloppy the slices looked, well Otto made improvements to his slicer to reduce the crushing and he created a U-shaped pin that when pushed through the slice and kept the loaf together giving the appearance that it was whole.

The invention that would help keep sliced bread on grocery shelves. Retainer for Sliced Bread patent document US1759592A

Patented Brilliance

Another pre-packaged innovation sitting on the grocery shelf was pasteurized cheese. Now, don’t go rolling your eyes. The patent awarded to James L. Kraft was huge! The process allowed cheese to be transported across the US - we’re a big country - without spoilage. 

If you remember your US history, the Industrial Revolution resulted in folks moving from rural areas to the more industrialized locales for work. This meant that a significant portion of the country’s population was not out milking cows, separating cream, and making cheese, a highly nutritious food, for their families. They were relying on the agricultural centers to load their grocery shelves with these foods. And these agricultural centers were, well, generally centered in the country - a long distance from the industrialized cities. And with refrigeration not being what it is today, developing a process to eliminate spoilage was immense.

War and Cheese

We have sliced bread, pasteurized cheese, and a country that had recently come out of a World War and was in the middle of a Great Depression. Convenient, relatively inexpensive, and nutritious homemakers turned to these two ingredients to create melted cheese sandwiches to feed their families.

Although this toasted sandwich gained popularity during the 1930s, it was another war that firmly established it as an American favorite. With WWII came more food scarcity through rationing, women entering the work force, a newly developed school lunch program, and government-issued cookbooks featuring “American Cheese Filling Sandwiches. In their own way, each of these factors contributed to the popularity of the sandwich. 

Women understood the nutritional benefits of the sandwich and it was quick and easy to put together after a long day in the factories. The National School Lunch program used government cheese to feed the nation’s children the toasty sandwiches. And that same government cheese was used to make American Cheese Filling Sandwiches to nourish our troops bellies and souls. And so, our palates grew quite fond of this melted cheese delicacy. 

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Lois’ Rendition of America’s Favorite Sandwich

So now that we have the backstory on the famous grilled cheese sandwich, let’s talk about Lois’ Baked Cheese Sandwich Recipe. If you’re looking at the image of the dish, I’m sure you have some questions. I’ll grant you it doesn’t look like the cheese sandwich you might serve with tomato soup but I’d argue that the slices of bread with a filling in the middle make the title of the dish appropriate. 

But what about the egg custard you ask? Well, I would make the argument that it bears a similarity to the egg mixture used to make the Monte Cristo Sandwich which gained popularity in the 1950s (I believe that the recipes from Ruth’s recipe box were collected during that time) but rather than frying the sandwiches they are baked.

Yes, I will concede that it looks a lot like a breakfast casserole, but Lois made this dish way before those savory bread pudding dishes started, to use current vernacular, trending in the 80s and 90s. I can only image that when she placed this dish in the center of the table, flanked by an ambrosia salad and ginger punch, the ladies who were lunching with her were very impressed.

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