Melted Borders: Eight Regional Toasties Worth Crossing a County For

Ask someone from Wisconsin or the Basque Country to describe their local cheese sandwich and they will do so with the gravity of a person defending a family name. Ask a Brit and we mumble something about a Breville and change the subject. This is a national shame, because we have been running a regional toastie championship for decades without telling anybody.

A toastie is not a compromise

We treat the cheese toastie as what you eat when you cannot be bothered, standing up, over the sink, at 9.40pm. Meanwhile the Sunday roast gets a linen napkin and a whole afternoon of our attention. I would like to point out that the toastie does everything the roast does and asks for a fraction of the effort. It is a complete hot meal made from bread and cheese in under ten minutes. It is the only dish in Britain that is equally at home in a greasy spoon, a service station, a National Trust cafe and a Michelin kitchen.

And crucially, it has terroir. Real regional variation, born of whatever cheese the county happened to make well and whatever bread it happened to bake. Here are eight.

Wales: rarebit, obviously

The original. Cheese, butter, a spoon of flour, mustard powder, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a splash of ale, melted together in a pan until it is a thick, glossy, slightly dangerous sauce, then poured over thick toast and blasted under the grill until it blisters and browns in patches. Not technically a sandwich. Entirely correct anyway. If you cannot be doing with the pan, a spread of mustard and a pile of mature cheddar under a hot grill will get you eighty per cent of the way there, and nobody examining the paperwork.

Lancashire: cream and crunch

Creamy Lancashire, crumbled or sliced thin, with thinly sliced raw onion and a little grain mustard, pressed between white bloomer. The onion should be gossamer, not chunky — you are after a whisper of sharpness, not a fight. Swap the raw onion for a spoon of onion marmalade if you want it sweeter and slightly more grown-up. Deli counters do the hard work for you here: ask for the creamy one and get them to slice it.

Scotland: the flattened morning roll

This is the one that converts people. A soft, floury Scottish morning roll, split, buttered on the cut sides, filled with a link or square sausage and a slice of cheddar, then wrapped in foil and pressed under a heavy pan, a full kettle or a large cookbook until it has been squashed to about two-thirds of its original height. The roll compresses into something dense and slightly chewy, the cheese melts into the sausage fat, and a stripe of brown sauce finishes it. Do not toast the roll first. It should be soft.

Cornwall: brie, cranberry, no apologies

Brie and cranberry sauce in something crusty — a split baguette or a slice of sourdough — with a rasher of bacon if there is one going. It sounds like a Christmas leftovers situation and it is, which is precisely why it is brilliant in November, and why it should really be available year round. Buy brie that is properly ripe at the edges. Use the cheapest cranberry sauce in the shop. That is not a compromise, it is a technique.

Yorkshire: Wensleydale and a bit of fruit

Wensleydale was made for this. Take the cranberry-studded version and layer it in a granary or fruit loaf with a slice of apple, or go further and use the ginger-spiked one. The cheese stays squeaky and slightly tart, the bread is malty and sweet, and the whole thing tastes like a farm shop on a wet Saturday in the Dales. Low heat, lid on, patience — Wensleydale needs to melt gently rather than be blasted.

Somerset: cheddar and pickle, the benchmark

Extra mature cheddar, thick-cut white bread, Branston. That is it. That is the whole thing. The national standard against which the others should be judged, and the reason a good cheese and pickle sandwich is on every pub menu in the country. Grate the cheddar rather than slicing it — it melts more evenly and you avoid the classic bite where all the filling slides out in one piece.

Northern Ireland: wheaten bread and scallion

Wheaten bread, which is soft and nutty and slightly sweet, with mature cheddar and a generous handful of chopped scallions. The wheaten flattens beautifully in a sandwich toaster, taking on a crisp shell, and the onion cuts through the richness. Some people add a fried egg. Those people are right. Soda farls work too, if you can get them, and a bit of Dromona makes a difference.

London: the beigel shop classic

Straight from the counter: a warm, dense cheese and onion beigel, split and pressed, bought at five in the afternoon from a shop that has been doing the same thing since the 1970s. It is not technically a toastie. It is entirely the point. The best version costs less than a coffee and is eaten standing on a pavement, which is the correct way to eat eighty per cent of British food.

Five rules of a proper toastie

• Grate or slice thin. Thick sliced cheese melts in patches. Grated cheese melts as a whole.
• Butter the outside, not the inside, or use a smear of mayonnaise on the outer face for good, even browning.
• Low and slow in a dry pan, with a lid or a weighted plate on top. A screaming hot pan gives you burnt bread and cold cheese in the middle.
• Sturdy bread. Sourdough, bloomer, wheaten, farl. White sliced is for the nostalgia toastie, not the main event.
• Rest it for a minute before cutting. This is not fussiness, it is to stop the molten cheese relocating itself to your wrist.

Shortcuts for a wet Wednesday

Pre-grated cheese is coated in potato starch and melts a touch less generously, but on a Tuesday night it is fine and nobody is marking you. Jarred onion marmalade, a tub of ready-made Welsh rarebit mix from the supermarket cheese aisle, and a sandwich toaster you last used in 2019 are all legitimate equipment. An air fryer at 180C for five minutes, turning once, will do a decent job of a flat toastie with far less faff than the hob.

The respect bit

Here is the thing. The Sunday roast gets our respect because it is slow, expensive and planned a week in advance. The toastie is none of those things, and yet in a wet November it does more for a person. It is the most democratic hot food in Britain: it costs pennies, it rescues the inside of your fridge, and every county has its own proud and slightly defensive version.

So put the kettle on and get the pan out. Eight regions are waiting.