8. The grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup
Although toasted cheese in various forms was a popular dining alternative during antiquity and continuously since, the modern version as we know it now is considerably younger. Evidence exists that it evolved in the 1920s and expanded greatly in popularity during the early years of the Great Depression. To save money and expand available stocks of bread, soup kitchens often created an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich during the Depression, which became known as a cheese dream. They were usually served with the cup or bowl of soup offered by charitable organizations to those who waited in long lines during the darkest days of the depression. The soup served with the grilled cheese sandwich was most often tomato soup, made from concentrate, an inexpensive but warming meal.
Joseph Campbell’s Campbell Soup Company employed a chemist named John Dorrance, who in 1897 developed a means of condensing soup by reducing the amount of water content by about half before canning the resulting concentrate. To prepare the soup – which was fully cooked – for serving one merely had to add water and reheat. Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a grilled cheese sandwich became the ultimate comfort food for hungry men and their families unable to afford another meal, and the combination retains its reputation as a comfort food today, especially during the chill days of late fall and winter. The linking of the two was fortuitous and perhaps economically inevitable, but ever since they have remained inseparable, with hundreds of modifications to sophisticate the simple combination of flavors which go together so well.