A Sandwich By Any Other Name...

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When I was in preschool, my favorite after-school snack was something that I believed only my family’s housekeeper, who was from Colombia, could prepare properly: toast.  “Tosta,” as Alcira called it–presumably an abbreviation of the Spanish word for toast, “tostada”–was actually what most of us call “grilled cheese”: a slice of American cheese sandwiched by two slices of white bread, pan-fried in butter until crunchy and golden brown.  Although I eventually learned that “toast” referred to bread hardened in the toaster oven, I continued to use “tosta” as a synonym for grilled cheese.  However, when I read Adrienne Lehrer’s article, “Cooking Vocabularies and the Culinary Triangle of Lévi-Strauss,” it occurred to me that perhaps both Alcira’s and my terminologies were correct, leading me to do a little research on the verbs we use for the process of heating bread.  

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According to Adrienne Lehrer’s article, when it comes to cooking, lexical overlap is common: for example, “grill” can be a hyponym of both “broil and fry, depending to some extent on dialect variation and collocation (grilled cheese sandwich rather than fried cheese sandwich)”  (157).  However, I would argue that, in the case of the grilled cheese sandwich, “to grill” overlaps with “to toast,” as well.  

So Alcira and I were both wrong, and yet both correct, in our sandwich-naming: the sandwich is neither grilled (heated directly, without fat or water) nor toasted, since it is pan-fried; however, because of the collocation of “grilled” and “cheese sandwich,” it is not wrong to say that a cheese sandwich is grilled–nor would it be wrong to call it toasted, due to the various ways of making the sandwich, which includes, particularly in England, toasting.  

A sandwich toaster
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