April, you may be fascinated to learn, is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month. Now, this raises all sorts of questions, not the least of which is who the heck designated it National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month? Who has that authority? And what is it about April that makes it more conducive to a grilled cheese sandwich than, say, March or May? I'm guessing there's some sort of National Cheesemakers Council that looked at their month to month sales and noticed that people weren't making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches in April. So someone there said to someone else there, "What can we do to promote the making of grilled cheese sandwiches in April?" And then the other person said, "Well, how about if we designate April as National Grilled Cheese Sandwich month?"
But never mind that. What bothers me is that in the interest of celebrating National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month, some people are polluting the whole concept of the grilled cheese sandwich. As part of a promotion on this site, the DuPont Corporation has gathered close to 6,000 different recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches and they've posted a sampling of them.
This is very wrong. There aren't 6,000 recipes for a grilled cheese sandwich. There is one. You take two slices of bread, put a couple of slices of cheese between them and grill the thing. That's a grilled cheese sandwich. Even I can make them.
Flipping through the recipes there, I see concoctions involving all kinds of bread (including baguettes, bagels and crullers) and all kinds of cheese (including cream cheese and Brie) and all sorts of additives like walnuts and apples and sauerkraut and peppers and cinammon and molasses and pumpkin and pretty much the entire contents of a Whole Foods Market. On that site, they're all cooked in pans coated with Teflon® because DuPont makes Teflon®…and they may be great sandwiches but they're not grilled cheese sandwiches. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. And always will be.
According to this site, Americans make 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches at home every year and the average American eats 8.4 grilled cheese sandwiches a year. If they're counting these creations that include sausage and maple syrup and peach chutney on a muffin, they're cheating. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. If these people had any brains, they'd know that.