April is Grilled Cheese Month around the globe. So grab a hunk of Havarti and enjoy as I take a few words to pay homage to this wonderful, meltable, God-given gift of gooeyness.
As most of you know, there are many different types of cheeses: there’s the comfort food fixture we call cheddar, the audacious desirability of brie, the brisk wintery welcome of warmed-up camembert, and the hard-packing punch of a fastidious feta. There’s also gouda, edam, cottage, toe, and “wearing Crocs to a wedding,” to name a few. (All of these but one are edible.)
Although there are many endearing qualities of cheese, the most incredible aspect is, of course, its meltability. Meltability is a rare quality in food (ice cream, chocolate, and butter making up the other meltable foods) and allows us to easily introduce cheese to meals as a way of making them edible and delicious. (If only I could melt a steak or a baked potato!)
For example, let’s say someone has played a cruel joke on you and served you a salad as a meal. Your first reaction may be to hurl the salad back in their face as a response to the disrespect such an act represents. But this could get you in trouble — or worse, a second salad. But if you were to take some cheese slices and melt them over that salad, all of a sudden your salad is edible! Add a little ranch dressing and you can barely taste that celery!
But cheese can also be very useful in more serious situations.
Example: suppose you’re on a flight going on vacation to some exotic location. You’re high above the Pacific, cruising at 30,000 feet, when all of a sudden the pilot’s voice comes over the intercom and informs you that both engines have lost power and you’re about to crash into the ocean. Without cheese, most people would panic and scramble to send their loved ones final messages expressing their love and telling them to cherish every second of their lives, because we never know when our time will come. But not you, because you have a very moldy lump of blue cheese in your carry-on that you quickly fashion into a parachute, which you use to float to safety — landing on a deserted island that has lots of natural, sweet fruit and cabin-building materials — and you live there happily ever after. You see! Cheese to the rescue!
It is perhaps because of its life-saving and salad-masking qualities that an entire month has been devoted to its international celebration — but we may never know. The Chesterfield Cheese Museum, located in Chesterfield, Nicaragua, has dedicated an entire wing to the mysterious origins of International Grilled Cheese Month. Under protective glass, an ancient parchment resides there, describing a culture of humans that existed long before recorded history, depicting what seems to be a cheese fondue ceremony where residents are dipped in melted cheese and offered to their god, Cheesimo. But this document’s validity has been debated by many cheese scholars, and a particularly acute cheddar stain across the bottom of the document suggests its authenticity may be questionable.
Regardless, cheese is certainly worthy of this level of adulation, and — in this household anyway — cheese will continue to be celebrated not just once a year, but at least once a week or anytime I melt some cheese across any piece of food I deem to be inedible. Like gazpacho.