It goes down like the devil in leather trousers. Soft, oozy, all butter and cheese held in the warming embrace of toast the colour of David Dickinson’s tan. It has probably taken about a week off my life expectancy but it’s worth it – for there is no finer food in Christendom than the cheese toastie. And it is not just me who thinks so. Ask the good people at Greggs, traditionally purveyors of pasty and pork. The star of the new menu is the cheese and honey mustard toastie.
The toastie is a familiar friend. It can be posh, it can be cheap. You can pay £12.50 at the Wigmore in central London – if you are crackers – or make it at home for about 20p. You are a saviour when I still need something warm. You can be béchamelled and truffled, you can be made of gruyère and, at Borough Market’s Kappacasein, you might be Ogleshield, the West Country’s answer to raclette. You can be American cheese, flimsy, plastic and with all the depth of a penny. You can be adorned with gherkins and pickles and scattered with alliums of every variety. You can cuddle shallots and take on leeks. You can be married to Marmite and have an affair with stilton.
In these straitened times you give joy but cost little. You can be made in a toaster, turned on its side, the cheese first placed in a well in the bread so that it doesn’t spill over the edges – I know this because at university I became a past-master at it. Mercifully, I was not electrocuted, nor did I burn the house down. But on safety grounds I wouldn’t recommend it. Not least because I don’t want to be sued when a row of terrace houses goes up in smoke in Clapham. Not least because you can eliminate the risk with a bespoke toastie bag.
Today I have settled for the simple joys of the toastie machine. It is something of a family heirloom and has a certain medieval aspect to it – it weighs about half a ton and has the bready detritus of about three generations in its jaws. It probably came from the 1978 Ideal Home exhibition. I worry that one day soon Mr Toastie, as it is known, will slip off his mortal coil or just blow up. It will be a day of mourning in my house.
When I lived in Florence four years ago, I took it with us. In our flat on Borgo San Frediano, I made a toastie for my Italian friend, Marko. Marko was built by the same firm that did Hadrian’s Wall, he seemed to exist on a diet consisting of bistecca and brunello wine. He had that overly developed Italian trait of looking down on any food that wasn’t created nearby the Apennine mountains. And yet, when he took a bite of the cheddar toastie I had so negligently prepared for his dinner, he eulogised my “British panino”.
And it very much is British down to its fingertips. One theory – and it is but a theory – is that the toastie was born literally in the bowels of the earth. So the story goes: miners carried their sandwiches in their metal lunch pails. More often than not there was a bit of cheese in those sandwiches. Come lunchtime, the cheese would have melted by the heat of the mines and the bread slightly toasted. Another theory is that it was invented in New York in the 1920s, but we’ll gloss over that one.
To me the toastie is the fundamental emblem of comfort. It is unhealthy-ish; it has a certain whiff of the excessive, not least if I’m the one grating the cheese. They remind me of post-school snacks eaten before dinnertime. (A certain madness that may have been specific to my family.) It reminds me of a million hangovers, especially when drowned in a mugful of Heinz tomato soup. It reminds me of post-coital snacking. They do, after all, make for an easy thing to split between two people who are all shagged out. Often, I have found the toastie better than the sex. Perhaps I ought to marry it.
• Max Wallis is a writer and poet
