Cheese Spread

A table knife goes into a cold tub, comes out with a pale yellow curl, and drags across a slice of soft white bread in two or three strokes without tearing the crumb. That is the whole making of a cheese spread sandwich, and the minute it takes is the point. The spread is processed cheese blended with emulsifying salts and a little water, so the fat stays worked through the paste and it lays down edge to edge with butter left in the fridge. The top slice goes on, a flat palm presses it once, and the sandwich is cut into triangles or fingers. The tub smells milky and faintly sour, and the first bite is salty, mild and a little sweet, with a tackiness that clings to the roof of the mouth.

The sandwich is built for the gap between seven in the morning and half past twelve. Processed spread holds its emulsion, so the fat does not leak out and the paste does not split or sharpen as it warms in a school bag. By lunchtime the bread has taken up a cool, slightly damp softness from the cheese and gone pliable, and the cling film comes away with a small crackle and a trace of yellow on the inside. Children get the crusts trimmed and the cut made small. Adults eat the same thing standing at the worktop, because it asks for one knife, one tub and no plate.

Most of what can go wrong happens at the edges and in the bag. A spread laid only down the middle leaves dry white corners that curl and harden by noon, so the knife has to run right out to the crust line. Too thick a layer squeezes out the moment the top slice goes on and glues itself to the wrapper. A sandwich left in a hot rucksack turns slack and glossy as the spread softens against the bread. Crisp bread with a real crust fights the paste, and the soft white slice stays the default for that reason.

Cucumber is the usual extra: thin rounds laid in a single layer, cool and wet, snapping once against the smooth paste before the bread closes over them. Cress and grated carrot do the same job with a finer, drier crunch. A slice of ham turns the sandwich into a heavier lunch, and tomato makes it wet quickly, so it is eaten soon after it is made. The same spread goes under the grill on bread as well, where it bubbles and browns at the edges and smells of hot milk and toast, and a toasted version shifts it from the lunchbox to the kitchen after school.

In a British house the tub lives in the fridge door and the sandwich is often a child's first cheese sandwich, since the paste is mild and sits easily in small hands. It turns up on tea-table plates beside egg and cress and on picnic rugs in a plastic box. A cheese sandwich made from block cheese needs a knife, a grater or a careful slice. This one needs only a scrape, which explains its place on school-morning counters and in the hands of anyone making lunch for someone else with five minutes to spare.

Origin and history

The cheese comes first. Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler in Thun, Switzerland, are credited with melting Emmental with sodium citrate in 1911 (some sources say 1913) to make a cheese that kept and stayed smooth, and James L. Kraft patented a Cheddar-based process in the United States in 1916. Kraft's British story starts with a Liverpool sales office in 1924 and a factory on Silverdale Road in Hayes, Middlesex, bought in 1926.

The Hayes plant was profitable from the start and made processed cheese through the Second World War, and by 1943 its whole output went to the armed forces. No record names who first scraped a tub of spread onto sliced white bread; the sandwich arrived in home kitchens alongside the product as it reached shops.

Kraft launched Dairylea in England in 1950 as foil-wrapped triangles in a round box. A foil-wrapped block followed in the early 1960s and sliced cheese in 1965. The plastic tub that now sits in the fridge door beside the milk came last: Dairylea Cheese Spread, the brand's first official spreadable cheese, joined the range in the 1980s, three decades after the triangle.